金钱与婚姻：夫妻共存钱婚姻更幸福

Marriage and money: Couples who pool their income may end up happier

中国日报网 2013-10-21 16:06

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金钱与婚姻：夫妻共存钱婚姻更幸福

In Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle discusses new research that shows that the more couples pool their money, the happier their marriage is.

These effects seem to peter out at some very high level—if you keep 5 percent of your income to yourself in order to have a little bit of discretionary spending, it won’t make you any less happy than you’d be if you pool 100 percent. But people who pool 80 percent are happier than those who pool 70 percent, and so on. People who keep it all to themselves are the least happy.

McArdle cops to possible selection bias (if you don’t trust your spouse, you’re not going to be pooling money), but also notes that couples that don’t pool their earnings fight more about money. That’s not exactly what I found when I surveyed almost 6,000 Slate readers for my Home Economics project. I didn’t ask about happiness specifically, but I did ask about how often couples fought about money. There were negligible differences in the amount of fighting among couples that pooled all their money, some of their money, and none of their money.

But I did find that the longer couples were together, the more likely they were to pool their money, and I do think, based on my quantitative and qualitative look at these couples, that if you have children, keeping money entirely separate will lead to a lot of unnecessary stress. A child is the ultimate shared responsibility, and if you have to hash it out every time your kid needs new shoes, that’s going to create stress.

It’s also bad for women in heterosexual unions, because they end up paying for the lion’s share of kid expenses when couples keep their money separate. British sociologist Jan Pahl found that mothers were paying for 85 percent of their children's clothes and 78 percent of their child care and school expenses, while fathers paid for 73 percent of the family’s alcohol and 69 percent of their car expenses. Pahl writes:

We do not actually know whether payments for childcare come from joint accounts or individual accounts, but it is clear that typically women pay the costs of children, in the sense that they hand over the money or pay the bill. This does not matter if all the money coming into the household is pooled in a joint account to which both partners have access. However, it may be a very different story if the partners keep their ﬁnances separately and there is no expectation of sharing, either in income or spending.

That makes sense. As does the overall notion that couples that don’t pool any money are less happy than couples that do. But that blanket statement doesn’t account for the intricate nuances of how different kinds of couples manage their money and their relationships. I buy that pooling money is the best for a 40-year-old couple on their first marriage with two kids. But a couple of retirees on their second marriage, with no shared children? I’m not so sure.

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据《彭博观点》报道，梅甘·麦卡德尔在他的新研究中发现：夫妻共同为家庭账户存的钱越多，他们的婚姻越幸福。

这一影响似乎在把高于一定程度的收入存入家庭账户的家庭中是不存在的——每个月只留5%的钱给自己任意支配的人和每个月把所有钱都存入家庭账户的人是一样快乐的。但是每个月把80%的钱拿来用作家庭共同储备的人要比那些每个月把70%的钱拿来用作家庭储备的人要快乐得多，以此类推。而把每个月的薪水都放在自己包里的人是最不快乐的。

麦卡德尔承认他的研究可能存在一些选择性偏见（如果你不信任你的配偶，那么你不会和他一起存钱），但同时他也指出，那些不愿意共同存钱的夫妻更经常为钱的事情发生矛盾。这个结果并不是我在做我的家政学项目时对6000名Slate的读者进行调查时得出的直接结果。我并没有特别寻问他们关于幸福的话题，但是我确实问了他们在钱的问题上会多久发生一次矛盾。无论夫妻双方是把所有的钱都投入家庭账户，或是把一部分钱投进去或是分文不投，他们之间因为钱的问题发生分歧的次数差异是很小的。

而我确实发现，夫妻结婚的时间越长，他们共同存钱的几率就越大，而且基于我对这些夫妻进行的定性和定量的研究，我也确实相信，如果夫妻育有孩子，他们一起存钱就能避免很多不必要的压力。孩子是婚姻中最首要的共同责任，如果夫妻之间对是否要给孩子添双新鞋子都要商讨，那么压力也会随之产生。

夫妻双方若不共同储蓄，在异性的婚姻关系上，会对女性不利。因为如果他们各自花各自的钱，那么孩子的大部分的费用总是由女性承担。英国社会学家简·帕尔发现，孩子购置衣物的85%，以及照料孩子和学校的费用的78%都是由女性支付的，而男性则负责家庭用酒的73%和69%的车子费用。帕尔这样写道：

用以支付孩子的照料的费用是从夫妻共同账户来的还是从个人账户来的我们并不知道，但是很明显的是女性在付账，因为是她们把钱或支票递到我们手上。这对于那些共同存钱，夫妻都可支取的家庭来说这没什么。可是对那些各自经济独立且在收支上又不懂得分享的家庭来说，情况就完全不同了。

这个调查结果是能说明问题的。从调查的总体来看共同存钱的夫妻的确比不共同存钱的夫妻过得幸福，但是这个总括性的说明并没有详细说明夫妻之间处理金钱问题的方式和他们之间关系的具体情况。我相信夫妻共同存钱对于那些四十来岁育有两个孩子的原配夫妻来说的确很好，但是对于那些退了休或是再婚，而且又没有再生的孩子的家庭呢？对此，我不能确认。