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Looking to marry for money? Be careful what you wish for.
One of our most enduring fantasies finds us walking down the aisle with a partner who is so laden with dough that the two of us will never run through it in a dozen lifetimes. Rags to riches, baby. The Cinderella story.
But nobody ever mentions Cinderella's happiness quotient a few months or years down the road.
Mary Valentis, a humanities professor at the State University
of New York at Albany and co-author with her psychologist husband,
John, of "Romantic
Intelligence," married for money the first time around
and lived to regret it.
"I was marrying for security and it was totally
for the wrong reasons," she says. "He turned out to be
a sociopath and his values were totally different than mine."
Being a kept woman wasn't all it was cracked up to be
either.
"Basically, he controlled everything, and I allowed it. Anything I made, I gave to him. And I'm not a stupid person; it's just that when it comes to relationships, we dumb down -- especially about money."
Valentis finally wised up, got a good lawyer and ended
her 15-year marriage with a handsome settlement, as well as a lucrative
contract for her dark-side-of-Cinderella self-help book, "Female
Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power."
Based on her experience, would Valentis advise against marrying a millionaire?
"It just depends on who the millionaire is," she says.
Catching a whopper
OK, so who are these prize fish, male or female, we hope to catch? Where do they school? What are their habits? And what's it like when you land one?
For fishing tips, we turn to an unlikely source: the Internal Revenue Service. Every three years, the IRS publishes a study called "Personal Wealth" featuring all sorts of insights on living rich folks, derived, interestingly enough, from recently departed rich folks. Using sort of a reverse of the actuarial methodology of life insurance companies, the IRS can extrapolate quite a bit about the current pool of big fish based on the distribution and details of recently settled estates.
Based on the most recent IRS Personal Wealth study, published in late 2005 using 2001 data, there are roughly 7.4 million big fish out there, about 3.5 percent of the population, whose combined net worth is in the neighborhood of $13.8 trillion, or 33 percent of all net worth.
More than half (4 million) of these whoppers are males
whose average net worth is $2 million; less than half (3.4 million)
are women whose average net worth is $1.7 million. But your chances
of catching a wealthy woman are slightly better than landing a sugar
daddy; only 49 percent of the women are married, while 66 percent
of the men are taken, at least by IRS calculations.
The prime fishing holes? According to the IRS, Connecticut, Washington,
D.C., and New Jersey are the top three, with a millionaire density
of between 2.4 percent and 3.2 percent. |
