I want to talk about singlehood and finances. As a single person and a parent, I think about money often. Like many other topics, I wanted to address money in this newsletter.
I was reminded of money and singlehood when I wrote this post last week. If you recall that post included an interview on CBC’s BC Today with a 40-something man named “Tommy” who has always been single. He spoke about the “single supplement” in the cruise line industry. That is, the extra free singletons pay when booking a cruise for themselves. Tommy said that supplement means many singles pay more for a cruise booking than couples do.
This, of course, is bullshit, but it’s not the only way in which singles pay more to live than couples do.
I wrote about this topic before in the Halifax Examiner. There’s a name for this phenomenon. It’s called the “singles tax” and it’s defined as “the cost a single person pays for rent in an apartment compared to what that apartment would cost per person if it were shared by a couple.”
From that story:
According to that same rental report [from rentals.ca], the average one-bedroom apartment in Toronto was $2,458 as of February. At that rate, over the course of the year, a single person will pay nearly $30,000 to live there, instead of around $15,000 if they were sharing that space with a partner. Therefore the “singles tax” is almost $15,000.
In Vancouver, the average one-bedroom is $2,730, so the extra cost borne by a single person is $16,380. In Halifax, rents are a little more reasonable, but the singles tax still adds up to around $10,300.
We’re also living in a housing crisis, so the singles tax continues to go up. It’s not just on housing costs, though. Think of those deals in groceries stores in which you get a deal if you buy more than one item. Singles may not need or have the space for more than one of those items, so they don’t get a deal if they only purchase one item.
And singles pay cable bills, internet bills, phone bills, power bills, car bills, and many other bills on their own that couples split. It all adds up.
There is also the issue of employment. If a single person loses their job, there is no backup salary in the house. Yes, I know that couples experience a salary drop, too, if one of the partners loses a job. But the panic is different when you’re single. I experienced this in 2017 when I was laid off from a job. Despite getting a decent severance, I panicked about finding work. Everything turned out okay, but it took time, it wasn’t fun and cutting back on everything hurt.
There are other employment penalties for singles, too. From this article by Bella DePaulo in Psychology Today, according to a Swiss study, married men get paid 2.6% to 3.5% more compared to single men.
From the article:
One explanation of why the men who married got paid more is because they became more productive. But that can’t be the explanation, or not the only one, if the employers “preferred” married men. The results of the other study, which I will describe next, strongly suggest that employers do “prefer” married men.
I think the language of preference is putting a pretty face on what’s really going on. Preference is if you like strawberry ice cream better than chocolate chip. If the men who married did not become more productive, but their employers still paid them more than the men who stayed single, that’s discrimination.
Single people, especially those without children, face more discrimination in the workplace when they are asked to take on more shifts or work holidays because there is an assumption they have nothing else to do (we do).
It’s not that there aren’t plenty of singles out there. As I wrote in the Examiner last year, according to figures from Stats Canada from 2021, there were 4.4 million people living solo that year. That’s a record number. In 1981, the figure was 1.7.
I think the singlehood penalty is harder on older women. They have paid other penalties throughout their lifetimes: the gender pay gap, the “motherhood penalty” in which they earned less because they took time off to raise children, and then ageism and sexism in the workplace.
Older women are now the ones finding themselves being evicted from apartments where they have lived for years. Maybe they don’t have retirement plans because they worked in careers that didn’t offer them.
I think couples are good in their intentions with advice on how to save money and be better with our singleton resources, but still, it’s cold comfort for the reality singles face. As I said in a previous post, I am single and a parent, but I’m not a single parent. I can’t imagine how single parents are getting by these days.
Maybe one way to help would be for the federal government to offer a single person tax credit. Deanne Gage with the Globe and Mail wrote about this in March, but it doesn’t sound too hopeful. From her story:
Singles cannot split or share income the way couples can. For example, a single person earning $150,000 a year will pay around $12,000 more in taxes than spouses earning $75,000 each, says Wilmot George, vice-president and head of tax, retirement and estate planning at CI Global Asset Management in Toronto.
“We have a graduated tax bracket system in which the more you earn, the higher your tax rate becomes,” Mr. George says. “It’s based on individual incomes.”
Some folks will no doubt tell singles to partner up with someone to save some money on the bills. That has its own consequences.
Singles shouldn’t have to pay a penalty for not partnering up. There are more of us now than ever. Let’s do something with that strength in numbers.
Suzanne
Single Saver