Matt Reed's List: BA3421 Personal Finance

• Money is the #1 problem couples fight about.

• It is also the case that rising Canadian inequality is not an isolated event. Most developed countries have experienced the same thing. This includes the United States and the U.K., as well as less likely suspects Finland, Norway and Sweden.

• Casting divorce as an "inner journey of the self" reduced "the number of legitimate stakeholders in divorce to one, the individual adult."
• children living with a divorced mother had a poverty rate of 38 percent in 1993 (compared with 11 percent for children in a two-parent family).
• Though the income of a stepfamily is usually equivalent to that of a first marriage, children are "two to three times more likely to suffer emotional and behavior problems and nearly twice as likely to have developmental or learning problems as children in intact families"; stepchildren are also more likely to drop out of school, become unwed teen mothers, and have difficulty holding steady jobs as young adults.
• "the experience of parental divorce damaged many young adults' ability to forge strong attachments of their own, in both their work and their family lives."

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• n summary, women are happier in challenging jobs, their husbands are happier that they are no longer the only source of income for the family in a time of frequent downsizing and economic uncertainty. Unfortunately, while the facts are optimistic when it comes to the improvement in physical, mental, and economic health for the adults in the family, it is extremely alarming for the well-being of young children.
• married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed…
• 1. Two-income families today make 75% more in inflation-adjusted dollars, but have less money to spend than one-income families did 30 years ago.
  2. Two-income families today spend: 21% less on clothing, 22% less on food, and 44% less on appliances compared to one-income families a generation ago.
• 8. The average family spends 69% more in inflation-adjusted dollars on their home mortgage than their parents spent a generation ago.
  

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• They argue that the "collaborative" style--in which spouses share household tasks and responsibilities--common in two-earner households might lead to increased interdependence, not fragmentation.

• "Just as...the market called upon the owner of capital to maximize resources, so the expressive ideology of divorce urged the proprietor of psychological capital to do the same." This line of thought degenerates at various points into a clichéd and unsupported broad-side against contemporary society: "The entire ethos of the American workplace has shifted toward a short-term, performance-based, limited-benefits, ten-career-changes-in-a-lifetime model," she writes. "Increasingly...the workplace rewards individuals who are mobile, unattached, unrestricted by family commitments."

• As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
• The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did.
• "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them."
• So we looked at the data for two-income families today earning an average income. What we found was that, while those families certainly make more money than a one-income family did a generation ago, by the time they pay for the basics -- an average home, a health insurance policy, a second car to get Mom to work, child care, and taxes -- that family actually has less money left over at the end of the month to show for it.
• Average mortgage expenses have gone 70 times faster than the average father's income, and the only way families are keeping up is by bringing in two incomes.
• An average family of four actually spends less on clothing than their parents did a generation ago, adjusted for inflation.
• Today if a parent wants to choose where their kid goes to school, they can either fork over a whole bunch of money in tuition for private school or they can buy a new house near the school of their choice.
• College tuition has been increasing at nearly three times the rate of inflation.

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• According to relationship psychotherapist Paula Hall, the   top five things that couples argue about are (and roughly   in this order):

   
   
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    Money

     
   
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• A study commissioned by Smart Money magazine and Redbook   found that more than 70 percent of couples talked to their   partner about money at least once a week.
• The respondents in the study said they fought most often   about debt, spousal spending and then their own purchases.
• They worried about saving for retirement, taking risks with   investments and loaning money to the kids.
• It's common in   many relationships for one partner to be a "spender"   while the other is a "saver," which is where much   of the conflict arises.
• Although the study found most couples (64 percent) merge   all of their money into joint accounts when they get married
• Says Ruth Hayden, author of "For   Richer, Not Poorer: The Money Book for Couples,"   the best choice to avoid conflict may include keeping some   accounts separate. "You should have some autonomy money,   I should have some autonomy money, and we need to learn how   to practice being a couple together with our money."

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• It looks at how men and women use four coping strategies, "scaling back, "seeking support," "family-role restructuring" and "work-role restructuring," to deal with role overload. Scaling back involves limiting personal time, while seeking support involves hiring outside help. Family-role restructuring includes streamlining family roles to accommodate family members' demands, while work-role restructuring involves restructuring work roles for family demands.
• This suggests women may be more concerned than men about the consequences of doing less at home because it takes them away from their "traditional" role as caregiver.
• "These findings suggest that traditional gender-role socialization still has a powerful influence on the dual-earner employees of today," Higgins said.

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• Layoffs, outsourcing, and other workplace changes have trebled the odds of a significant interruption in a single generation.
• The shift from one income to two doubled the risks again, as both Mom and Dad face the possibility of unemployment.
• Today’s families are spending 51 percent less on major appliances than their predecessors a generation ago.

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