Is Your Partner A Spender Or A Saver? Your Answer Might Be Key To Your Relationship Satisfaction

Would you describe your partner as a spender or a saver? 

According to new research published in the Journal of Financial Counselling and Planning, your answer could say a lot about your relationship satisfaction level, as well as how you feel about your finances. 

The researchers, who analysed 108 couples, found that how we feel about our partner’s spending habits might matter more for our wellbeing than how we think of our own habits. 

What did the study find? 

Researchers asked members of the couples separately to describe how they felt about their own financial habits as well as their partners’. They were also asked how happy they were with their marriage and finances. 

Overall, partners who saw their partner as a “saver” were both financially and relationally happier. And this perception was more important in terms of how they felt about their love and money than their actual finances.

Additionally, spouses seemed to be a lot less worried about their own finances than they were about their partner’s. 

Wives in particular reported more happiness if they saw their husbands as savers, while wives who called themselves spenders tended to be more secure in their family’s finances.

“Across the board, couples in which partners viewed each other as savers (rather than spenders) reported higher levels of marital happiness and financial well-being,” said Jamie Lynn Byram, lead author of the study and a lecturer in the UGACollege of Family and Consumer Sciences.

“They felt they had enough money for what they wanted and felt they were meeting goals together when their partner was focused on saving for their future.”

Spenders and savers often end up together

About 60% of us are neither extreme spendthrifts nor extravagant spenders. 

But 40% of us say we’re unhappy with our own habits, another study found. 

That might be why spenders and savers end up together, Forbes suggested; we believe our partner’s ways can help us to change ours, at least in the beginning.