Every time I write about couples and money, I get emails from misogynists taking me to task for suggesting males might overspend. Everybody knows, these gentlemen proclaim, that women are the real spendthrifts.

My email bag begs to differ. I hear from plenty of women who despair about their partners’ inability to control their spending.

A recent paper from the folks at the Wharton School sheds some interesting light on the topic. These researchers constructed a “Tightwad to Spendthrift” continuum and invited people to take a test to see where they landed.

• Overall, 24% landed on the “tightwad” end of the spectrum, which basically means that they find it painful to spend money.  The researchers proposed “that an anticipatory pain of paying drives ‘tightwads’ to spend less than they would ideally like to spend.”
• In contrast, the 15% of respondents who wound up in the “spendthrift” category ”experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they would ideally like to spend.”
• The rest of those polled (60%) wound up in the “unconflicted” category. (That doesn’t mean they don’t have money issues, credit card debt or inadequate savings, by the way; it just means that in the hypothetical situations they spent neither more or less than they considered ideal.)

Interestingly, women in the survey were just as likely to be defined as tightwads (20%) as they were spendthrifts (19%). But men were far more likely to be tightwads (29%) than they were spendthrifts (11%).

Of course, this is just one study of self-selected participants who found their way to the Internet test and spent the time to take it. That falls a bit short of the rigor one would expect of scientific polling.

Still, it’s food for thought. What I found more interesting than the gender differences was the fact that so many more people, men and women, wound up on the tightwad end of the scale than on the spendthrift side. For all the attention given to impulse spending and compulsive shoppers, these results indicate that many folks are–as the researchers put it–”frustratingly unable to indulge themselves.”

The key to successful money management is balance, and many people don’t have it. Whether you spend too much or too little, it’s worth the time and effort to address your financial issues.

TAGS: compulsive spending, differences between women and men, spendthrift, tightwad, Women and Money