As if I weren’t stressed out enough about finding a husband, this news has thrown me over the edge and on an express train to Crazy Town.
According to Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell, who run the blog “Onely: Single and Happy,” people who never marry can incur up to $1 million more in costs throughout their lives than married people. Arnold and Campbell, who insist they are “not calloused and repressed man haters,” used multiple formulas and scenarios to draw their conclusion that being single is expensive. The two set up various hypothetical situations, and compared the costs of being single and being married in each. Allegedly, after calculating boring stuff such as income taxes, social security, IRA’s, housing and health spending, Arnold and Campbell concluded being single would COST a woman with a yearly salary of $40,000 an upwards of $484,368 over a 60-year lifetime…and $1,022,096 for a woman with a salary of $80,000.
I’ve always thought the cost:benefit ratio of being single was pretty much equal. I mean, for every drink you don’t have to buy yourself (but let’s face it, I rarely pay for drinks as it is and I’m single), you also have to think about the presents you have to buy your boyfriend for holidays and birthdays, and also the opportunity cost of the time you could be out living your life but you instead spend sitting around watching him play video games and feigning interest in his stories.
To make matters worse, Arnold and Campbell say their calculations were “conservative.” So, in reality, being single is probably even more expensive than they hypothesized.
What these women failed to examine, however, is the varying degree of fun you have when you’re single, and the misery and monotony experienced from boring/committed people.
I used to think I was the one on the better end of the deal by staying single, but now I’m starting to think it might really be time to bite the bullet, grow up, put the bottle down, and find myself a husband to… save money.
[via Yahoo!]
Image via NatsNumbers.com
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