How to Marry a Sugar Momma or Sugar Daddy

In one of the universe’s great ironies, people that marry for money usually get beat out financially by those that marry for love. Huh? Say what? People looking to marry a sugar momma or sugar daddy look like paupers compared to couples that walk down the aisle and stay married for the next 40-70 years. I’ve seen this not only in my own life through friends and family, but through statistics. If you read The Millionaire Next Door, one of the best personal finance books ever written, you’ll find that one of the most common traits among America’s millionaires is being married to the same person for decades. How is this possible? I’ll go through different scenarios to show you that the real sugar daddy or sugar momma for you could be right under your nose.

How Rich Men and Women Avoid Making Their Spouses Rich in the Event of Divorce

While there are notable exceptions, including the infamous case of Anna Nicole Smith marrying 89 year old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, most rich men and women protect their money ruthlessly in marriage. If you are self made, you had to take chances, manage risk, and make aggressive business decisions. Not to say that wealthy people aren’t creatures of emotion and might make bad financial decisions if love gets the better of them, but they are far more likely to enlist the aid of a lawyer to help them protect what they have.

That’s right, rich people get expensive help to write detailed nuptial agreements that protect their business interests and assets in the event that their arm candy gets bored and wants a more fulfilling relationship. A prenup is an insurance policy that trophy wives or husbands probably don’t fully understand that acts as an escape hatch allowing the wealthy person to keep what they have if things go south.

Sometimes this hurts really good-hearted, devoted partners. One sad case is when SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk convinced his wife to sign a post nuptial agreement that limited her share of any business value he had created. She signed it because she loved him and didn’t think after having several children together there was a real risk of divorce. A short time later he left her for an actress and she got a small fraction of the 50% she would have gotten if she had never signed that agreement. Children of wealthy families often have a condition imposed on their marriages that their partner signs a prenuptial agreement to protect the family’s assets.

So someone looking for a rich spouse to take care of them might get lots of gifts, but they should not be looking to be made wealthy from marrying a rich guy or girl.

Can I Get Rich If I Marry a Sugar Momma or Sugar Daddy Doctor, Lawyer, or Corporate Manager with a Nice House and Nice Cars?

The sad truth about the most obvious high income professions in America is their members suck at building wealth. If you look at the expected net worth relative to income, medicine , law, and public company managers are near the bottom of the list. Educators and engineers are near the top. Hence, the flashy careers that a financially unsophisticated person would find attractive if he or she was looking to marry money are the worst for this very purpose. So what you’ll find is a good looking professional with a seemingly great head on his or her shoulders will spend lots of money to look attractive to the opposite sex. This means expensive clothing, cars, apartments, and accessories all to communicate “I am desirable; I am economically successful.” People that live this way usually have lots of debt. Imagine if the US government required everyone that had credit card or consumer debt to put a giant sign on every luxury item they bought saying “I don’t own this.” Whenever you see nice consumer goods, it’s a safe bet to imagine this sign unless you know otherwise. Unfortunately for him or her, a gold digger is not going to differentiate between someone that is W2 rich and someone who is money in the bank rich.

So now that we’ve established that this type of person sought after by the male and female  gold diggers of the world is broke, what happens when they split up? Well, when I say that they have no money, I mean that they have no assets, so there isn’t anything to transfer to the partner when they divorce. What will often happen instead is mandated alimony payments to the poorer spouse to maintain his or her living standard. If you are a doctor, lawyer, or manager with high income but low assets, you will likely be contributing a portion of your salary to your ex-spouse, which will further retard the already behind the eight ball net worth you might have.

High income professionals have notoriously volatile income streams. Unless your job is to repair medical problems for old people on Medicare, you will likely have big ups and downs in your income. If you owe alimony the courts might not understand this reality, and you can even have trouble with the law if you can’t pay. If you get locked up for falling behind on required payments your ex-spouse has no means to get money from you. So the high income professionals out there actually represent one of the most hazardous bets for folks looking to get rich in marriage.

The Answer: Marry the Girl or Guy Next Door

I’m going to shock and awe you for a second. A study out of Ohio State found that a married person has twice the net worth of a single or divorced person. The same study concluded that divorce wipes out 75% of an individual’s wealth. So the best way to get rich is to get married and stay married. Furthermore, the living expenses of two people living together are not 2x those of one person living alone. The number is actually closer to 1.2 times. The reasons include economies of scale (cooking for two costs only a little more than cooking for one) and specialization (if one partner doesn’t mind doing certain chores the other can do something else they are better at, which might include working longer hours for better pay).

I’ll give you one anecdotal example. When my parents married, my dad was not very good at managing his own money. He never went into debt or spent more than he should, but he didn’t have a ton of savings and didn’t really have a retirement plan either. He is a very smart guy and has multiple graduate degrees, but money management is something that he doesn’t really gravitate to. My mom was a former accounting major in college that loved doing taxes and figuring out ways to save. The impact that she had on their combined incomes led to them keeping more and seeing their net worth grow much faster than when they were single.

Clearly marriage is great for your pocketbook, but only if it’s with the right person. Arguments about money are one of the top if not THE top reason couples split up. Seeing as to how divorce destroys so much of your net worth, you would do well to marry well, not marry rich. People with lots of money are good at keeping it away from gold diggers, and people with high incomes often don’t have money, so there’s not much point to the traditional stalk a spouse game for the vast majority of people.

When you are ready to look for marriage, look for love and someone that shares your views on money. That book The Millionaire Next Door that I mentioned earlier speaks to “a spouse that was more frugal than me” being a top reason for achieving a seven figure net worth. So don’t go looking for a sugar momma or sugar daddy at your local luxury car dealership or black tie gala. Look for the “guy or girl next door” at church, Goodwill, community organizations, or camping trips and hold onto that person forever. If you do your chances at becoming wealthy one day will skyrocket.

Get married, stay married, and get rich!