“It’s ‘I help you because you’re going to help me later,’” she said. Olson said that couples with separate accounts viewed financial decision-making as more of an exchange. “There’s a ‘we’ perspective, which we theorized would be related to a joint bank account.” “A communal relationship is one where partners respond to each other’s needs because there’s a need. A third group was allowed to make the decision on their own.Ĭouples who were told to open joint bank accounts reported substantially higher relationship quality two years later than those who maintained separate accounts, Olson said, adding that merging promotes greater financial goal alignment and transparency, and a communal understanding of marriage. Some couples were then randomly assigned to keep their separate bank accounts, and others were told to open a joint bank account instead. This was the first marriage for everyone involved in the study.
Everyone began the study with separate accounts and consented to potentially changing their financial arrangements. Olson and her co-authors recruited 230 couples, who were either engaged or newly married at the time, and followed them over two years as they began their married lives together. The findings appear in the article “ Common Cents: Bank Account Structure and Couples’ Relationship Dynamics,” which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research. On average, merging should warrant a conversation with your partner, given the effects that we’re seeing here.” “This is the best evidence that we have to date for a question that shapes couples’ futures and the fact that we observe these meaningful shifts over two years, I think it’s a pretty powerful testament to the benefits of merging. “They frequently told us they felt more like they were ‘in this together.’ “When we surveyed people of varying relationship lengths, those who had merged accounts reported higher levels of communality within their marriage compared to people with separate accounts, or even those who partially merged their finances,” said Jenny Olson, assistant professor of marketing at Kelley. But this is the first research to show a causal relationship - that married couples who have joint bank accounts not only have better relationships, but they fight less over money and feel better about how household finances are handled. Prior research suggests a correlation that couples who merge finances tend to be happier than those who do not. The Beatles famously sang, “Money can’t buy me love,” but married couples who manage their finances together may love each other longer, according to research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business.
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