Boston Gal's Open Wallet

The boutique garage shops are banking on growth in two areas -- super-sized garages and clutter. According to the National Association of Home Builders, 19% of single-family homes constructed in 2004 had room for three or more cars, up from 11% in 1992. Because a third of two-car garages have so much stuff in them that there's room for only one car, according to a 1994 survey by the Department of Energy, garage shops are betting that, with more space, homeowners will stockpile more stuff -- and need more organized storage. "I look at people's garages and most are disasters," says Steve Shorten, owner of The Garage Makeover Group.

In the winter of 2004, Susan Chamberlain lost her part-time job as an IRS tax examiner. She recently was rehired, full time, but that earlier layoff precipitated a November foreclosure filing. She and her husband, Kevin, initially purchased their Lawrence home for $158,000 in the spring of 2001 with US Veterans Affairs financing.

In December 2002, they refinanced and withdrew some money to pay off a car and some bills, bringing their mortgage debt to $206,000.

The interest rate on the new mortgage was variable, initially averaging 9 percent but rising since then.

With the Veterans Affairs loan, the Chamberlains paid $1,200 a month on their mortgage; their current monthly payment is $1,900.

In the Boston area, house prices are so high, Klein said, that mortgages consume a growing share of monthly take-home pay. ''It used to be, if you lost a job you'd be at risk of losing the house," he said. ''Now, if you lose overtime, many families are so close to the brink, and that can create problems."

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One immediate sign of Lasseter's influence is that plans for Disney to make the long rumored sequel "Toy Story 3" on its own have been scrapped. If the film is made, it will be done by Lasseter and the other creators of the original film, the companies said.

And banks will play tougher on deposits than loans to maintain interest-rate margins because they have alternatives to depositors if they need funds. The Federal Reserve, Federal Home Loan Bank, and commercial-paper markets are all available to banks and thrifts if their deposit costs get too expensive.

Labels: Taxes

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

"They work harder, they advance further in their job, they save more money, and maybe invest more wisely," Popenoe said. "That's because, one can speculate, they are now working for something larger than themselves. They are working for a family."

Zagorsky showed that single people slowly accumulated wealth during the study, going from a median of $1,500 at the start to $10,900 in the 15th year.

V. CONCLUSION

Despite the legal, social, and economic gains that women in the United States have made in recent decades, a statistically and qualitatively significant wealth gap persists between households based on both gender and marital status. Our analysis of data from the 2001 PSID reveals households headed by married couples have more than twice the mean wealth as households headed by single females and that these large differences are present across the wealth distributions. Using OLS and quantile regressions, we find that these wealth gaps are reduced but not eliminated by the addition of controls for life-cycle factors, education, and family earnings. In fact, differences in observable characteristics between family types are associated with no more than half of the family type wealth gap. In addition, our quantile regression results imply very different magnitudes of the wealth gap than do our OLS regressions, illustrating the importance of using quantile regression when examining a variable with a skewed distribution, like wealth. The wealth holdings of single females and single males appear quite similar throughout the wealth distribution, but inclusion of control variables leads to large and significant gaps in wealth among singles by gender.

In contrast with these results for the entire sample, an analysis of young households whose heads are between 25 and 39 years of age indicates that observed wealth gaps disappear for this cohort when controlling for observable characteristics correlated with gender, family type, and wealth. This suggests that these younger households may be systematically different than their older counterparts. Perhaps they are saving more or investing more aggressively. Increases in female educational attainment, increases in the age at marriage, and delays in childbearing, are other possible explanations for why we do not observe wealth gaps for this younger cohort. In this case, other countries which are currently making gains in female educational attainment and experiencing similar demographic shifts may find convergence in wealth patterns by gender and marital status over time as well.

However, it could instead indicate that these wealth gaps do not emerge until later in life. Our data do not allow us to adequately distinguish between these two possibilities, but determining which is the case has important policy implications for the financial well-being of women. Cross-country comparisons might help shed further light on this important question.

Labels: Taxes

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