Here’s some personal relationship advice from the most unlikeliest of places: the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. This article from The Atlantic highlights a fascinating link between our credit scores and the longevity of our relationships.
Those pondering the longevity of their relationships can rely on something other than the opinions of friends – they can look at their credit scores.
A new working paper published by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board finds that the higher someone’s credit score is, the higher his or her chances of a lasting relationship will be.
A trio of economists parsed data from the Fed’s consumer-credit panel to identify the credit scores of couples in committed relationships. People tend to form committed relationships with people whose credit scores are in the same range, the study found. And couples with high credit scores tend to stay together longer.
For every additional 100 points or so in a couple’s average credit score at the beginning of their relationship, their odds of separating during the second year of the relationship drop by 30 percent, the researchers found. Also, if the difference between a couple’s individual credit scores is greater than 66 points at the start of the relationship, the couple is 24 percent more likely to split up within the second, third, or fourth year of the relationship. The study also noted that a pair’s credit scores are likely to converge slightly over the course of a relationship.
The link between credit scores and relationship longevity probably has to do with creditworthiness being a proxy for “an individual’s general trustworthiness and commitment to non-debt obligations,” the study notes. Those characteristics affect all sorts of things involved in sharing a household – who takes out the trash, for example, and who’s more likely to forget a birthday or anniversary.
