Marrying For Money
Sell Your Soul For $1.5 Million
With the wealth boom creating unprecedented riches and greater opportunities for gold-digging by both genders, price-tag partnerships and checkbook breakups are increasingly making headlines. Even more surprising, according to a new survey, are the going rates for today’s mercenary unions. Yet even among the workaday (or wannabe) wealthy, marrying for money has become a popular pursuit. In an infamous personal ad posted on Craigslist this summer, a twentysomething New Yorker who described herself as “spectacularly beautiful” wrote that she was looking for a man who made at least $500,000 a year. You can read her ad here.
According to a survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based wealth-research firm, the average “price” that men and women demand to marry for money these days is $1.5 million. The survey polled 1,134 people nationwide with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $60,000 (squarely in the median range for nationwide incomes). The survey asked: “How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?”
Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were “very” or “extremely” willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%). Women aren’t the only ones with the gold-digging impulse. In the Prince & Associates study, 61% of men in their 40s said they would marry for money. As men get older, they become more comfortable with women being the bread-winners.
The Matrimonial Price Tag Varies By Gender and Age
Asked how much a potential spouse would need to have to be money-marriage material, women in their 20s said $2.5 million. The going rate fell to $1.1 million for women in their 30s, and rose again to $2.2 million for women in their 40s. Men are cheaper! Their asking price overall was $1.2 million, with men in their 20s asking $1 million and men in their 40s asking $1.4 million. Why so low? Men’s numbers are lower because they would feel threatened by women worth several million dollars. The men aren’t going to say they want $10 million, because they wouldn’t be comfortable with a woman who’s worth so much more than they are.
Whatever the case, the prices for both men and women seem surprisingly low, given the new landscape of wealth. While $1 million or $2 million may sound like a lot to people making $30,000, it’s hardly enough to transform someone’s life or make them “rich” by contemporary billionaire standards. No one in the survey quoted a price of more than $3 million. Of course, when the mercenary marriage proves disappointing, there’s always divorce. Among the women in their twenties who said they would marry for money, 71% said they expected to get divorced — the highest of any demographic. Only 27% of men in their 40s expected to divorce.
