Did Covid make your boring, married friends richer?

Sealing the deal, deleting Bumble (BMBL), Tinder, Hinge (MTCH) and HUD from devices, and getting married might have made your loved-up friends more boring, but it probably helped to make them richer. Even after they dropped $35K on an Insta-worthy wedding! 🥂

According to the St Louis Federal Reserve, there’s a close link between swapping rings and net worth. Hate to add salt to singles’ wounds, but some things are just more efficient in a relationship. Like having someone to split the cost of Ubers and Netflix subscriptions. That leaves extra money to save, invest, or pay down debt, giving married couples more of a cushion to grow their wealth. Singles meanwhile effectively get stung with a ‘singles tax’ by having to cover all the costs by themselves all the time. 😟

According to The Wall St Journal, the median net worth of married couples aged 25–34 was nearly 9x more than their single peers in 2019. 😲 That gap has only been increasing since Covid. Rising inflation has taken an extra toll on singles, while booming house prices aided many married couples, who are more likely to own their own home.

Warren Buffett has gone as far as saying that none of his success would have happened without his wife Susie. The oil baron of Omaha has said that the most important decision for your wealth is not about money, but about who you marry. Of course, that’s if you stay married. The average marriage in the US only lasts about eight years, and at around US$13,000 a pop, divorce isn’t cheap. Just ask Jeff and Makenzie Bezos. 💔

But married couples might need that extra wealth if they want to go halves on a baby. Thanks to inflation the cost to raise a child in the US has rocketed to at least US$300,000 per kid today. No wonder millennials prefer their pampered pets to having kidlets. 🐶