Forget stocks, invest in a spouse

published 22 January 2008

A great many MoneyWeek readers are likely to be pretty liquid at the moment. But if you're holding a lot of cash, what's the best way to make it produce value for you?

If you are single, the answer is a simple one: use it to help you find a partner. This is not as absurd as it sounds. Marriage provides a basic insurance against many of the nasty things in life: get it right and every burden is a burden shared.

Indeed, if you add up all the emotional benefits of marriage, say US economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, you will find that they are worth the equivalent of $100,000 a year in income to the average couple.

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A study from the University of Zurich out a few years ago backed this up: it showed that the unmarried are pretty much always more miserable than their married friends. Only when they hit their 60s do their happiness levels reach the same highs. And as an extra bonus, a variety of studies have shown that the married live longer on average than the unmarried.

Then, of course, there are the actual financial benefits of being married: most couples have two incomes either all or some of the time, but living expenses of less than double those of one single person. Their income is higher, their expenditure per head is lower and, as a result, they get richer faster.

So how much cash do you have to lay out to find a spouse and start reaping the returns of marriage? That depends how you go about it, says Mark Bridge in The Times. There are free dating websites about (Freedating.co.uk and Flirtbox.co.uk, for example), but they aren't particularly "slick" and provide more for those after "casual encounters" than those seeking marriage.

The next cheapest option is to place a lonely hearts advertisement in the press (£2.60 a word in Private Eye), although this can be labour intensive (you have to sift through all the replies), so a better option is probably to go for the paid-for websites. The two best known (Datingdirect.com and Match.com) have millions of members, charge in the region of £60 for six months and come reasonably well recommended. The Times rate them nine and eight out of ten respectively. Also highly rated is Speeddater.com ("good for older people").

However, the well off and time poor might be better all round with a proper matchmaking service. You can find a full list of offerings at abia.co.uk, but The Times points to Caroline Crowther (carolinecrowther.com), a well-established agency with a good record. Asking this lot to help you costs up to £2,500 a year, but given that the returns could be worth $100,000 a year plus, perhaps they offer a better place for your money right now than Britain's ropey stockmarkets.

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.