Half of rich U.S. women are wealthy before marriage

NEW YORK — It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, at least according to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Two centuries later, the women are likely to be just as wealthy, a survey by U.S. Trust shows.

Fifty-two per cent of rich American women came into their marriage or live-in relationship with assets at least equal to those of their spouse or partner, the Bank of America unit said in a study released Friday.

Respondents had at least $3 million US in investable assets.

“Women are both wealth creators and wealth inheritors,” Chris Heilmann, chief fiduciary executive at U.S. Trust, said in an interview. “They are bringing assets to a relationship.”

Women are contributing from their careers, inheritances and divorce settlements, Heilmann said.

Thirty per cent of women said they had entered their relationship with equal fi- nancial assets and 22 per cent said they had more than their spouse or partner, the survey says.

There is still a gap in pay, the study found: Only about a third of female respondents said they are their households’ primary earners or contribute an equal amount. The median earnings of women who worked full-time was 77 per cent of that for men in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Women being on equal footing with men in their finances or financial assets is rather rare,” said Deborah Soon, senior vice-president of strategy and marketing at New York-based Catalyst Inc., which researches women in the workplace.

Women usually get career promotions later than men, which means they lose the value of compounding and fall further behind in building wealth, she said, and they miss opportunities when they leave a job to raise children.

Forty-one per cent of women said they had forfeited income or career advancement to care for children, compared with 29 per cent of men, the U.S. Trust survey showed.