The people's voice of reason
The people's voice of reason
Paying the bills, cooking for one, and managing your personal finances as a single adult can be challenging and liberating. When you live alone, you’re in charge of your own destiny—and if you get into financial difficulty, your own debt relief, too.
When you get married, you combine your personal finances with another person’s. At its best, marriage can be a financial safety net that helps you navigate everyday life and long-term money moves.
Marriage can, with the help of a supportive life partner, make it easier to manage money and build wealth. Survey data from the University of Chicago shows that married people tend to be happier than unmarried people. Also, people in the top 20% of incomes tend to be happier than lower-income people. Marriage appears to have some big financial benefits. A Pew Research Center study in 2024 found that married people are less likely to be low-income than unmarried people.
So, is marriage actually good for your financial health?
There’s nothing wrong with staying single, and there’s no need to get married solely for financial reasons. But along with the joy of building a life with someone you love, marriage can bring some worthwhile benefits to your bank account, credit score, and more.
Freedom Debt Relief explores a few reasons marriage can be good for your financial health.
After you get married, the way you file your taxes is likely to be different than when you filed as a single person. As a married couple, you may choose to file jointly, instead of filing separate tax returns. This can provide a few helpful tax advantages for married couples.
Mostly, no. A “marriage penalty” happens when the two of you pay more in income tax as a married couple than you would have if you filed individually. That kind of penalty in taxes was reduced for most people after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed. That new tax law widened the tax brackets, making the income limits for “married filing jointly” twice as high as for single filers. So just because you’re married, that doesn’t mean you’ll be in a higher tax bracket.
There are still a few other types of marriage tax penalties. But according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, these are more likely to affect couples with incomes over $693,750 and couples with children (filing jointly) where both spouses earn about the same amount of income. That’s because married couples filing jointly can’t deduct as much of their income as two separate parents could. An unmarried couple with kids could have one partner file as “head of household,” which gets a higher standard deduction than a single filer would.
If one of you earns all or most of the income, you often receive a marriage bonus. That’s because the lower-earning spouse’s income can help put the higher-earning spouse into a lower tax bracket than they’d be in otherwise.
Perhaps the simplest financial advantage of being married is that many married households get the benefit of having two incomes. You get two people helping each other take care of the everyday expenses of life.
Two incomes can provide double financial benefits to your marriage. First, you may be able to afford a better home by doubling your budget for rent or a mortgage payment. Second, you can double down on decreasing debt and reaching other financial goals.
You might even discover that working together as a married couple can help you get energized and focused on reaching your biggest financial goals. What if you want to boost your credit score, move to a new city, take a dream vacation, and more? As a married couple working as a team, with two times (or more) the income that you used to have as a single person, all of these goals are hopefully within reach.
According to previous survey data from the Pew Research Center, married couples tend to have a more positive view of their relationship than couples who just live together. There may be something about being married that makes people a little more connected and hopeful about the future. This more optimistic outlook can jump-start a pattern of open communication about money. Planning together for a debt payoff strategy or starting an emergency fund can help you stick to your financial goals.
Hopefully, you’ll find that it’s exciting, inspiring, and healing to open up about your finances with your partner. You’re building a new life together and sharing your resources. Combining your bank accounts and credit histories builds trust and communication. Together, you can decide how to manage your finances in a way that helps you both get more of what you want out of life.
Here are a few questions to spark a conversation about money as a couple:
Being married could make it easier to handle the costs of health insurance and out-of-pocket medical bills. Marriage could inspire you to take better care of your health and the health of your spouse. If your spouse has better health insurance through their job than your current insurance, find out if you can get added to their plan. You might find that paying for a shared family health insurance plan’s premium is cheaper than paying for two separate premiums as single people.
Managing your money as a married couple can also make it easier to save extra cash in a health savings account (HSA). If you qualify for an HSA through your health insurance plan, you can use this account to save for medical expenses with pre-tax dollars. A wide range of qualified medical expenses and out-of-pocket costs, like hospital bills, contact lenses, or cavity fillings, can be paid for with your HSA debit card. Ask your employer if this is a covered benefit.
What’s better than one retirement nest egg? Two retirement nest eggs. You and your spouse can work together to max out your retirement benefits. You might look at the details of each person’s employer-sponsored retirement plan and figure out which one is the best. For example, make sure each spouse takes advantage of any employer match in a 401(k).
In addition to employer-sponsored retirement plans, look for ways to contribute to an individual retirement account (traditional or Roth) and get tax advantages. Being a married couple with two incomes may mean you can put more money to work and build wealth for your shared future together.
Even though there are many financial advantages to marriage, most everyone gets hitched for reasons beyond the retirement savings and the tax breaks. Getting married is about love, commitment, and trust. It’s about all the everyday moments and the sometimes mundane work of running a home and building a life. Marriage can be hard, but most long-time married people will also tell you that with the right person, marriage is worth the effort.
As you build loving memories, hopefully you’ll also build healthy financial habits and grow your wealth as you grow together.
This story was produced by Freedom Debt Relief and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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