You May Want to Add This to Your Online Profile
by Dolly Clark
A new paper by the Federal Reserve Board has found that a person’s credit score accurately predicts their success in maintaining relationships. It’s another dimension of assortive mating that reveals a lot about the compatibility between two people, as well as their personality traits. According to Wonkblog at WashPo:
The researchers found that credit scores — or whatever personal qualities credit scores might represent — actually play a pretty big role in whether people form and stay in committed relationships. People with higher credit scores are more likely to form committed relationships and marriages and then stay in them.
And that’s not all:
In addition, how well matched the couple’s credit scores are initially is a good predictor of whether they stay together in the long term.
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Couples’ credit scores tend to converge over time, but even so a large gap in the beginning of the relationship does not bode well for long-term stability. The bigger the initial gap, the greater the chance of a breakup.
For every extra 100 points in the couple’s average credit score when beginning the relationship, their odds of splitting in the second year fell by around 30 percent.
This is true even when other factors are controlled for, e.g. race, education, and income. So it’s not a question of socioeconomic status. Here you can see how credit scores predict both relationship formation and separation:
Source: Authors’ estimation using the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel / Equifax Data
Researchers believe that credit scores reflect personality traits, with good credit correlating to other stable traits like conscientiousness. (Reader J 2.0’s guest post earlier this year on the 12 Key Practices in a Successful Marriage emphasized the importance of conscientiousness.)
“Credit scores are widely used in a variety of contexts as an indicator of reliability and ability to honor and maintain a broad range of commitments, such as rental and employment relationships, not just those involving debt and credit.
Credit scores are highly correlated with the survey-based, subjective, and self-reported measures of trustworthiness.”
How romantic.
Another factor is that gaps in creditworthiness and attitudes about money predict future conflict. From the FRB paper Credit Scores and Committed Relationships:
Initial credit scores and match quality predict subsequent credit usage and financial distress, which in turn are correlated with relationship dissolution.
We know that impulsivity predicts poor relationship skills, and low credit scores may reflect impulsive spending behavior. In fact, one of the primary characteristics of Dark Triad males is impulsivity. (Jonason & Tost, 2010; Jones & Paulhus, 2011).
Another study found that “Individuals who have intercourse in the context of hookups are differentiated by high impulsivity, low concern for personal safety, low dependency, their erotic approach to relationships and an avoidant attachment style.” (Paul, McManus and Hayes, 1999)
Clearly, the inability to defer gratification through saving should be a massive red flag. Maturity requires the clear distinction between wants and needs.
By the way, women are at a slight disadvantage here:
Men have 4.3 percent more debt than women, have 4.9 percent larger mortgages, and have a higher incidence of late mortgage payments by 7 percent.
This in spite of higher earnings by men.
