Spending by Singles

Meaghan Duetsch is an economist in the Branch of Information and Analysis, Division of Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics. MEAGHAN DUETSCH Do single women spend their money differently than single men do? If so, can their spending differences be attributed to differences in characteristics between the two groups? In addition, have the spending patterns of single men and single women changed over the past decade? These are some of the questions that can be answered with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Given that people are choosing to marry at a later age and that the life expectancy of women continues to be greater than that of men, more people are single now than ever before, so the answers to the preceding questions loom large in the economic life of a significant proportion of the Nation’s population. This article examines the expenditures of single-person consumer units, both men and women. A single-person consumer unit may differ slightly from a single-person, or one-person, household. Financial independence is a criterion used to determine consumer unit status. A one-person household is a single-person consumer unit; but if two people are living together and are financially independent of one another, as in a roommate situation, then the two people are two separate single-person consumer units. Single parents with children present are not single-person consumer units. Using data for 1991– 92 and 2001–02 from the interview and diary portions of this Consumer Expenditure Survey, this article compares expenditures and demographic characteristics between and during those two periods. Two years of data are used for each period, in order to obtain a sufficient sample for examining expenditures by age and gender. Only single men and single women are compared, as opposed to all men and all women, due to the way data are collected. The Consumer Expenditure Survey collects data on expenditures for the consumer unit as a whole, with no distinction as to who made the expenditures. Therefore, in a consumer unit of more than one person, it cannot be determined who made the expenditures, whereas that is not the case in a singleperson consumer unit. Expenditures are examined to determine whether they changed for each gender over the period from 1991–92 through 2001–02 and also to determine whether the expenditure relationship between genders changed during that time. Finally, expenditures are examined for a specific age group, to analyze the role of age in expenditure decisions.