People say money complicates things. Relationships are no exception. Couples can and do run into financial problems all the time. And it can take tremendous determination and effort to solve them. But what happens if one partner comes from a well-off family, and the couple is seemingly set for life? Does that make everything easier?
People on the Internet were curious to know what being married or dating a wealthy person is like. So the netizens who have been or still are in a relationship with 'a rich person' told their stories. And every person's experience was different: some described wealthy families as surprisingly down-to-earth and hard-working, others – not so much.
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If you're a romantic, you might see no issue here. Two people love each other, so nothing else should matter, right? Not their social standing and not their financial situation. However, the reality is quite different. In real life, financial disparities matter to couples. According to a 2017 study by Ramsey Solutions, money is the number one issue couples fight about.
A German survey in 2020 found that 35% of couples say that money is a major source of conflict in their relationship. So, as much as we'd like to think that love conquers all, it's likely that even Cinderella and Prince Charming would have trouble overcoming that huge wealth gap.
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Rick Kahler of Kahler Financial Group writes that in cases where the wealth gap is extremely large, like when one partner is, say, a millionaire or a billionaire, it's more about the outside pressures. He calls this the WWPT – "What Will Other People Think?" syndrome. It's mostly the disapproval from the wealthy partner's friends and family.
"It can get very sticky and uncomfortable when one person is coming into the relationship with a lot of family money and the other person has limited resources, especially if the people don't know each others' families very well," Heather Flanagan, PNC's wealth management director, told Delaware Business Times.
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A huge wealth gap between partners can create an imbalanced power dynamic in the relationship. The wealthier person might feel like they have more authority over the family's finances. In some cases, maybe even regarding the household, solely because they're the breadwinner.
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Conflicts may arise between the couple if there are financial secrets, especially when the relationship is getting more serious and treading on marriage. Tim Melia, CFP, MBA, founder of Embolden Financial Planning in Seattle, told Yahoo Finance that it's important for spouses to know each other's financial situation. "Starting with a net worth statement that shows assets and liabilities allows for both spouses to understand where they are starting from on a factual basis," he said.
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Millionaires have to talk about their finances with their partners. Even they are not immune from fighting about money. A 2016 PNC study showed that 1 in 4 millionaire couples argue about money. And those who didn't have honest conversations about their finances before marriage have it the worst.
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My family had rough times. We lived in housing projects; my parents always (to this day) worked two jobs each and truly pushed the value of working hard for your money. We gave up a lot of luxuries, took out multiple loans, and saved every penny so we kids could afford private schools (they were much better than the public system) and then college. My husband is nowhere near the same. He grew up in Europe with old money. Both of his parents have their own businesses, and he had a great childhood where they struggled for very little. The shock came from just visiting his hometown. It was gorgeous! I had never been to Europe before that and was in complete awe. His parents owned multiple homes in the best districts and in other countries for vacations. They were so sweet and gave me 500 euros the day they met me because I was so nice! I got another couple of grand for my student loans purely because they heard how much of a burden that is in America and didn't want me to struggle. They also bought us a house as our wedding gift. That didn't sit well with me and my family since we've always worked, but that's another story. Problem? My husband never had to work for anything. Any time he needed money they, especially his mom, would just hand it off without an issue, no matter the amount. He never bothered with college and basically just did what he wanted until meeting me. Upon learning this, I stated that I refused to accept an engagement ring with money he didn't rightfully earn. That's when, at age 24, he realized that working for your money is hard. He thought he'd easily just start a business like his parents and failed because he had no idea how complicated it truly was. His parents realized what they had done and cut him off so he could learn the value of a dollar. I fully supported the decision. He had to learn how to struggle for the first time since things were not easy soon afterward. Now things are rougher, but we've come together, built savings, run a small business, and became a stronger couple in the endI am married into rich family but I don’t want to take anything in inheritance from both sides of the family. Will let then donate to others who need.
This keep me motivated to work hard.My best friend from childhood married a billionaires daughter. He's still depressed and still himself. He lives a nice life but it's not his money. His kids are set for life, he is still miserable and complains a lot...
But what can you do he's a mate.Grew up with a heavily indebted and poor family who got crushed in 2008. I married into a significantly more stable and upper middle family with a NW that’s recently grown significantly.
That growth has been shared with us and it’s awesome. Makes life so much easier it’s ridiculous.Broke up with someone set to inherit over a billion from her father. Nice girl, no major issues but just didn’t feel like we clicked.
Some days I can’t help but think it was dumb when I’m looking at my very very average bank account and salary. It would have been a more extravagant life but I’m with someone who makes me happy so I tend not to regret it.I dated a man who didn't work — he lived off of a trust fund. Oddly, since he could afford nearly anything, nothing had any value. He'd buy a $400 KitchenAid mixer and burn it up making Christmas candy the first week. If he decided to make more candy, he'd just go buy another $400 mixer. Nothing meant particularly ANYTHING to himI came from a low-class family. My biggest value was being kind — it mattered that we passed school but not that we had to be doctors. My family immigrated here, so it was really hard. My S.O. comes from the top 1%, is very intelligent, and has lots of money. They were the top at everything, and as a result, they were a little snobby. My family and my S.O. didn't care about the relationship, but my S.O.'s parents and siblings were very upset over it. It took years for just the mother to like me.
They didn't think I was good enough and constantly acted cold. It was very hard on me before, but I learned not to care about others, and it improved me. I couldn't care less because I'm happy. It would be nice if they liked me, but I only need my S.O. and my familyI married into a hugely wealthy family. My father-in-law was president of an international medical staffing firm. He retired three times from the company, and each time, he had a bigger retirement package. My wife is cultured beyond belief, fluent in at least four languages, and has seen the world that most of us could only dream of seeing in our lifetimes. My wife is also one of the hardest working people I have ever met, and even with all the wealth, she actually practices charity to the point that I have to stop her. I never realized how influential the name was until visiting New York and staying at the Four Seasons, and a manager came over and called my FIL by name and pushed us to the front of the line. We were treated like royalty that week.
There was also my wedding to his daughter. Not only did he foot the bill for everything (the wedding reception consumed 12.5 gallons of Patrón), but he flew my wife and me for a three-week honeymoon anywhere in the world on his dime. He gave us his Amex Black and said have fun. Six countries, well over $100k in a honeymoon, and never said a wordI know a man who did this. Married the daughter in a wealthy family. She was a huge pain in everyone's a*s. Spent money like it was water and had no idea of it's value or use. Unpleasant to everyone as none of them were important other than her parents I guess - the source of the funds.
Spoiled the kids, caused them to develop unearned attitudes. It was hard to watch.
Ended in divorce. He got a payout from the family, but I don't think it was worth it.I married someone without any debt. No student loans, no credit card debt, no mortgage, no car payment, nothing. Compared to some of the other women I dated, who were swamped in tens of thousands of dollars of student loans, I feel that I married into wealth by marrying someone without debt!I'm pretty sure my husband married me for my money. I was 29 and feeling lonely. We were both science nerds. He was a doctor's son, but he was really not financially supported. I was a bar owner's daughter and far wealthier than he, although the money was parceled out to me in fairly small amounts but it supported us. Although I appeared to be the stay at home do nothing housewife to many I am sure, it was really my money supporting us and our three children. He did work but he had a serious debt creation problem with credit cards so his salary was never enough. When we turned 50 he met another woman, told me "She's rich!" And abandoned me to basically poverty and food stamps. Lovely right?
Fast forward two years, I tookmy half of his retirement account which was about 70k, and invested it and now I have close to a million. I'm shooting for 5 million. Oh yeah and now I don't have to "discover" yet another maxed out credit card in my name ever again.I did not like the men I met who were wealthy. I have a JD/MBA so I was not looking to marry into money in the gold digger sense, I'm fine. The ones I met would shower me with material goods and expect me to be okay with whatever they did (often involving other women) because of the material gifts, which I didn't want. Other people were obsessed with money and that was all they talked about and focused on. And, they felt you should show off and look like you had money. One of them insisted I should buy a Mercedes, etc. It was weird. I married my husband who did not come from a wealthy family but he had a masters and a six figure job (teaching in NY is a low six figure job). I've been with him for most my adult life and it's been wonderful. He could care less about money, but he isn't wasteful and he isn't extravagant. Growing up, my parents told me "it's just as easy to fall in love with a wealthy man as it is to fall in love with a poor man." I fell in love with my best friend and have no regrets.Her parents were feeding her money to begin with (she was a social worker who drove a $100K Land Rover). I visited her family's lake house with speedboats and jet skis. She had a good attitude in life and just wanted to help underprivileged children. She just wasn't for me. I'm now married, and we are doing just fine financially now; we bring in good money and are in a pretty high percentile for our net worth per age bracket. But it's a far cry from the millions I believe she already had and millions more she was set to inherit one day.I honestly think that certain investments would be easier than finding a rich person that also wants to marry me.Kinda... my wife was not rich, her Dad was, she/we inherited a substantial amount.
First 15 years of our relationship I didn’t believe her Dad had money. He never showed it. Pleasant surprise to say the least.
I grew up pretty poor and to be honest I never realized just how different life was with money. It’s a different existence.This one hits me deep. I dated a girl for 6 years. I was days away from proposing when a friend of mine who know of my plan, told me he saw her cheat on me more than once. With one of our other friends. When the truth came out, there was obviously a lot of turmoil but she begged for forgiveness, promised it would never ever happen again, and part of me believed her because we really were in love. I just couldn't shake it though. Couldn't sleep. It was like a rock in my shoe. "once a cheater always a cheater" never left my brain. I ended up dumping her and moving on. I married a middle-class girl from a farm, blue-collar dad. I was also raised in a lower-middle blue-collar family.
The girl I dumped was the heiress of a large company, which she sold after we broke up and netted ~$100M. She married a guy and they now have three homes, range rovers, a ferrari, you name it. Still friends with her on FB. I think about it a lot.
I have no doubt I am much happier now with a faithful wife and four beautiful children. But god damn that ferrari looks like fun.
I managed to get myself in a $250k+ job by age 30 and have given my stay-at-home-mom wife and 4 children a wonderful little life, but a far cry from the 1%.
The end.Not exactly wealth, but my SO never spent his college fund and it has grown to $500k. Assuming I don't marry him and stay single forever, I predict I would retire with ~$2 million. But with him, we get into Fatfire territory. Its a nice thought, but definitely a small bonus compared to marrying the love of my life.My side of the family didn't have two nickels to rub together for a long time. I was the first one in my family to go to college, and move out of the state — let alone the county, let alone the town. I didn't know of anything outside a Super 8, Motel 6, or Holiday Inn. My clothes were from factory outlets, Kmart, Walmart, etc. My first car was a 20-year-old piece of junk that burned oil. I had to take out loans and work full-time to make my way through college. My spouse's side of the family was 100% polar opposite. But they are so nice. They are charitable, they are kind, and they are earnest. Do I feel I've changed a bit? Probably. I now feel a bit out of place with my extended family at events, but that was bound to probably happen anywayThe men I dated when I was younger, whose parents were incredibly wealthy, were a******s. I can’t think of one of them who was a decent person. Yet they will succeed in life, where an average person who was that much of an a*****e would never be able to keep a job or have real friends. Everyone puts up with them because of their parents.I dated a woman whose family was rather well-off. I also worked with wealthy people for a while. She talked about visiting exotic parts of the world like it was nothing. They are knowledgeable about rich people's stuff, like Rolexes and yachts. They all play golf, tennis, or both. They know international airports inside and out. They don't talk about money unless it's business or gossip. They are generally very opinionated about how people should do stuff.
Unless it involves their business, money is no object to them. They mostly aren't frugal and never ask the price. (Some stealth wealth people are the complete opposite.) They make a lot of time for their hobbies and to be with their kidsI went on a first date with the daughter of a family worth over $10 billion. Still kicking myself for not landing a second date.I was surprised about how real the 'network' or 'bubble' of it is — it's like the other side from the 'it's expensive being poor' concept. It's this weird internal community of people with money, and thus power, who are willing to make things happen as long as you're 'in.' I mean, I would meet people at a fundraiser or something, and five minutes later, they're happy to make a call that will get me a job at some huge firm. Or, like, my then-boyfriend would say, 'Let's go to this concert. Tickets are $180, but it's okay; a friend's parents have a box, so we'll just join them. One time, the dishwasher in our flat broke, but we didn't have to pay a dime for repairs because his friend from high school's parents owned the building, so they fixed it for free as a favor.This post really makes me cringe. Marrying for money sounds like a sucky marriage. My wife rocks. She's fun, bomb in bed, hard working, smart, faithful, sexy af, you name it. I can't imagine if the only thing I gained from marrying her was money.
Anyways, I unknowingly married into wealthy family. My wife's parents are millionaire next door types. There primary house is worth maybe 230k, but I had a feeling that something was going on because one time, when I was 23-24, they had found this lightly used Toyota Land Cruiser for sale in GA for some ridiculous amount of money, like 70k. I was going to GA for work the next week and they asked me to buy it and they'd pay me back when I got back with it. It literally did not register with them that a 23-24 year old probably doesn't have 70k in the bank. So, they sent me with a pre-signed check and told me to fill it out with the final price. I had been dating their daughter maybe 3 months at that time. About a year later, my father in law casually mentioned wanting a log cabin in the woods somewhere, preferably on the lake. I took it as if he were dreaming and said yeah, that would be really nice. That coming weekend, he and my mother in law put an offer in on a lake cabin with one of the best views I've ever seen in my life. I'd hate to know what they paid for that. I still didn't really understand what they did or didn't have until they made me executor of their estate. The vast majority of what they die with is going to charity and their church. Just wild.
Moral of the story. Looks can be deceiving and just because they have it, doesn't mean that you'll inherit it.They don't really have a concept of how rich they are. My ex-boyfriend was WEALTHY but had a complex about how he was super poor. It was because all of his friends were also wealthy, and he was maybe marginally less rich than some of them, so he considered himself on the lower end of the scale. They don't really have a point of reference for how poor some people are. When we were together, I was living on a food budget of £50 a month, and he absolutely could not wrap his head around how a person could spend that little. I lived with a horrendously rich friend; his family is aristocracy in his home country. One thing I've noticed about him is that he's completely incapable of grasping that if I stop working, I just stop being able to eat. He was confused about why I was worried about taking a week off work and didn't understand that I was worried I'd lose money. He seemed to think that most people work because they choose to because he's never had to workWe've been together for years, and we're getting married in a few months. I grew up in a pretty standard middle to upper-middle-class family. I got a car when I got my license, but it was a 15-year-old Jeep, and my parents made me pay for half. When I shopped, it was at the mall, but we weren't buying a designer or anything. That type of thing. I wasn't spoiled, but I was privileged. My S.O.'s family is old-school money — the kind where if we're in the city where his dad's originally from, his last name holds clout, and people know who he belongs to. When you turn 16, a standard gift from his family is a $50K car, and everyone gets $1 million at 18 from their trust fund to pay for college, and then, you get your remaining millions when you graduate. He invested his pretty wisely, and now has a good amount of money in the bank along with his own investments and such. The weirdest thing is how it's so easy for him to just do things and write them off as no big deal. Like, once we got engaged and started consolidating our finances, he paid off my student loans and credit cards without thinking about it and just shrugged it off when I asked him about it — money is just something that exists to him, and he's smart with it. I don't feel like it's changed me or him much since we got together, as I always knew he had money. He's still just the way he always was. He was raised in a different state from his dad's family, which is where the family money comes from, so he's a fairly normal, well-adjusted adult, unlike some of his cousins. I would say I'm a bit more relaxed when it comes to accepting him paying for things. When we started dating, it was hard for me to be okay with it. It felt like pity or charity because I was so clearly broke compared to him. There has been some weird resentment from some of my friends and family, though. I can't talk about things we do or like because I get some snide comment about how nice it must be to be spoiled, which is annoying because he doesn't really pay for anything in my day-to-day life. It's definitely put a wedge between some of my friends/family because of itTruly wealthy families have most of their wealth protected in a variety of ways. They may have their wealth in the form of trust that cannot be reached without trustee approval. Honestly, some children in wealthy families experience something similar, ie. the Trumps. The Trump kids may be dedicated to him, but they could not choose the alternative. He controls their income in every way possible.My daughter married someone with a ton of cash in his pocket. She has earned a decent living herself, but together, she's gonna live a lot nicer than she ever did with me growing up. Maybe it's because of the cultural differences, but he and I have never seen eye to eye and don't get along that well. I grew up very poor in a rough neighborhood in Boston, and according to everyone I know, I have an extremely crass and blunt personality. He grew up in an extremely wealthy family in the suburbs. We have next to nothing in common. As for my daughter, I think she's definitely changed. I always sensed growing up that she resented the lack of money our family had. Both my son and other daughter seemed to embrace growing up in a blue-collar family and took pride in where they were from, but she always seemed unable to cope with the fact we couldn't always do the things her friends could. When I talk to my daughter and her husband, I just kind of feel strange when they talk so casually about going out all the time — like, the idea of having enough money to go to these upscale bars and restaurants all the time seems wild. Also, there's the value they seem to place on 'going out' and buying expensive gifts; everything fun is based around money. All my life, some of the best memories I have is just hanging out with my friends, scrapping some stupid game together with the little that we had. ... With them, it seems like they go brain-dead if they can't buy something. It all seems artificial to me.I did get together with someone who's wealthy. I was shocked at how down-to-earth, caring, and giving very wealthy people are in real life. On the internet, they are vilified to the 10th degree, but I have never met anyone from that world who wasn't charitable and generally nice to people around themMy first girlfriend in high school went to a private Catholic school in town. Her grandparents own some company they sold in the '90s, made millions, and then opened a 'family insurance' company now worth billions. She and all her siblings are in the trust to get more than 10% each. We didn’t last more than a year. Right after high school, my second girlfriend's father was a tech guy who was in the Navy when he was younger and then sold code to big companies to this day. Would never have known he had this much, and he was constantly worried that 'people were after him and his wealth.' We didn’t last two years. My current girlfriend and future wife has a father who owns a small construction company; her grandfather was a top 1% salesperson for a $100 billion company, and her great-grandfather was the first salesperson in the Midwest for a famous coffee brand. Me? I grew up dirt-floor poor with seven siblings on a farmI’m sort of in this boat but definitely not planned. I’ve dated people with significantly wealthier families than my wife’s that I could have held onto far more if I cared about that stuff.
Frankly speaking I make a ton of money. Not the most here but 5-600k a year with pretty low expenses. My wife is a postdoc making 50k a year. Eventually she might go into industry and make 150k or maybe she’ll stay in academia and make 100k until she is more famous.
In any case it doesn’t matter - I mostly support our life for now and it’s fine. I bought our first place for us in a high COL city using only my salary. She kicks $1k a month toward random things because I barely carry my wallet around nowadays.
However her family is fairly wealthy. Parents just worked typical white collar jobs but did everything right for 30-35 years, invested in the market, saved, etc. Most importantly they bought several homes in the Bay Area in the 90s and the most expensive one is now worth about 3.2M fully paid off.
I will admit that when work gets particularly stressful or I feel burnt out, it’s not a bad feeling to know that if I work 5-10 more years (I’m 28 with 1.5M NW) and we are given that 3.2M house fully paid off then we are basically set for FATFire regardless of what job my wife ends up taking. But this by no means entered the calculus for why we’re building our life together.
