[danieltillett]

Does it help a relationship if you have two non-savers together? As you rightly point out, money problems are major cause of relationship conflict and breakdown, but are these less common if you have two reckless spenders in a relationship rather than just one? I would have thought that having two reckless spenders would just accelerate the process of hitting money problems.

[sksk]

That's a good question and I was thinking about the same when I read the paper. I have never investigated this aspect of credit scores in my career so don't really know the answer. My guess is people who have similar score, even if it is bad, probably tolerate each other more than when they have very different styles. I am not sure if the paper looks at this deeply (they seem to only compare differentials and stdev at formation).

[danieltillett]

The study could have answered this question, but they don’t seem to have looked at it. All their analysis is comparisons of couples with different scores, not what effect absolute scores have on relationship robustness.

My anecdotal experience is spendthrifts have a lot of relationship problems that are not helped by being with another spendthrift.

[sksk]

Agreed. You are probably right about the outcome. It is easy to just add an interaction of nominal score group (high, med, low) vs. mismatch/match and see if there is an effect.

At our startup we get depersonalized credit data but we don't have a nice panel like the Fed :) so cannot really do that analysis on our end. I would be nice if they released this data publicly -- once it is setup for modeling (with just a few variables), it is so hard to re-identify so the risk of privacy invasion is low. I doubt that will happen though.

[danieltillett]

If I were the authors I would be writing the follow up paper explaining exploring this - why write one big paper when you can salami-slice the data up into a couple of papers.