Wealth and Poverty in Close Personal Relationships

Money Matters

Susan Millns, Simone Wong, Susan Millns, Simone Wong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317000068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtstheorie & -praxis

At a time of global and domestic economic crisis, the financial aspects of domestic and familial relationships are more important and more strained than ever before. The focus of this book is on the distribution of wealth and poverty in traditional and non-traditional familial relationships. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the way in which money matters are structured and governed within close personal relationships and the extent to which they have an impact on the nature and economic dynamics of relationships. As such, the key areas of investigation are the extent to which participation in the labour market, unpaid caregiving, inheritance, pensions and welfare reform have an impact on familial relationships. The authors also explore governmental and legal responses by investigating the privileging of certain types of domestic relationships, through fiscal and non-fiscal measures, and the differential provision on relationship breakdown. The impact of budget and welfare cuts is also examined for their effect on equality in domestic relationships.

1 Credit and debt in close personal relationships

Jackie Goode

Introduction

At the beginning of 2012, when average incomes in the United Kingdom (UK) had fallen by nearly 3.5 per cent in real terms over the previous year, and consumers were still facing soaring bills, a survey¹ showed that UK households remained among the most indebted in the world, with British families averaging nearly £8,000 in debts from loans, overdrafts and credit cards. The research presented here explored experiences of using credit and acquiring problematic personal debt in low-income families in the UK, many of whom were reliant on welfare benefits. It draws on two projects, referred to as ‘Credit and Debt’ and ‘Money Advice’. Those who are over-indebted and those reliant on benefits alike have traditionally attracted public disapprobation, in relation to the former in particular, through negative moral discourses of ‘dependency’. This chapter examines the notion of ‘interdependency’, in two senses: in relation to intimate personal relationships between heterosexual partners, in which each is to some extent dependent on the other to varying degrees of complementarity; and in relation to the interdependent nature of contributory factors to over-indebtedness, as individuals try to manage the domains of home, work and family in which they are trying to maintain ‘tenure’.

Security is a basic human need. And beyond a necessary level of ontological security, this includes social security – we live in relationships; in a series of social worlds. ‘Close personal relationships’ are defined in this chapter in terms of various forms of couple/family organisation. When it comes to money matters, however, there is a paradox. Despite the powerful discourse of ‘sharing’ in couple relationships, a growing body of research testifies to different degrees of ‘separateness’ and ‘togetherness’, influenced by factors such as: patterns of management and control;²³⁴⁵ sources of income;⁶⁷ identities and ideologies of family and parenting;⁸ and the status of the partnership (for example, whether heterosexual or same-sex partners;⁹ whether married or cohabiting;¹⁰¹¹¹² and whether it is a first or subsequent partnership).¹³¹⁴

We also live ‘in time’. Our lives change over time. As the above references to the stage of the relationship and to serial relationships suggest, the temporal aspects of close personal relationships are important for the distribution of income within the household. Is this true in relation to credit and debt too? How do credit and debt figure in the dynamics of partner interactions, in changes that occur across the life course, and in institutional changes at societal level? At the day-to-day interactional level, Kirchler and others highlight the temporal aspects of couples’ decision-making around expenditure in which a kind of mental book-keeping takes place:

When one partner resists the other’s opinion and tries to win the argument … they may need not only to realise the personal goal represented by the decision, such as a desire to purchase, but to clarify the starting situation, that is, settle demands and commitments arising from the past, or to fulfil an overarching aim such as the maintenance or improvement of harmony in the relationship.¹⁵

In terms of the life course, Wilson¹⁶ showed that money carries subjective meanings often acquired in childhood that partners then bring into couple relationships. Finney¹⁷ also makes an important observation about the life course in relation to the established connections between financial difficulties and relationship breakdown. It is an over-simplification, she suggests, to view this connection in isolation from other factors. Rather, ‘it should be seen in the wider context of relationship formation and duration, taking into account associated life events such as setting up home, becoming a parent and raising a family’.¹⁸

In terms of societal/institutional change, proponents of the individualisation thesis posit the idea that we now ‘create our own biographies’ as individuals rather than being ‘relationally’ or socially oriented:

According to leading sociological theorists like Ulrich Beck¹⁹ and Tony Giddens²⁰ we have now entered a ‘late modern’ epoch of ‘de-traditionalisation’ and ‘individualisation’. Economic prosperity, education and the welfare state have freed us from externally imposed constraints, moral codes and traditional customs. The social structures of class, gender, religion and family are withering away, so that people no longer have pre-given life trajectories. Instead, individuals are compelled to reflexively make their own choices and hence create their own biographies. At the same time, the ‘project of the self’, with an emphasis on self-fulfilment and personal development, comes to replace relational, social aims.²¹

Meanwhile, politicians talk about, and valorise, ‘hard-working families’. When they do this, they are conjuring up a picture of an ideal type of family comprising an (implicitly) heterosexual couple, one or both of whom is in paid employment and who live in their own or a rented house together, raising their children. And although this is also a model reproduced until very recently in the law,²² it is very evidently no longer the only model of family to be found.

There have also been changes in relation to our financial institutions that impact on families. Pahl²³ showed, for example, how the advent of new forms of ‘invisible’ money such as credit cards and store cards, ushered in by the electronic economy, can act as an additional tool to facilitate individualised forms of spending within an ostensibly ‘joint’ model of household finances. Less than a decade later, the ‘credit crunch’ demonstrated only too well how decisions and actions taken at an earlier period in life, whether individually or jointly, can have long-lasting consequences for individuals, couples, families and whole economies, further down the line.

I would like to show therefore the ways in which the use of credit and the acquisition of problematic personal debt are embedded in the dynamics of the close personal relationships through which many of our lives are socially organised, how these relationships themselves are subject to development and change over time, and how they are being conducted in a changing ‘structural’ environment. What models of coupledom/family did the practices of these research participants constitute? Were they over-indebted individually or together? How did individualised forms of spending on credit at different stages in the life course figure in and impact upon couples’ relationships now? Even for those who do match or aspire to the model of the family beloved of politicians in which children are brought up in a stable environment provided by married heterosexual parents in paid employment, it is not one that, for many, proves maintainable for any length of time. What was striking about the lives of those interviewed for this research was that they were characterised by fragility, insecurity, uncertainty and change, rather than by stability. In the aftermath of the credit crunch, they were frequently in transition in one way or another between one partnership, housing, or labour market status and another, and accompanied by a constant struggle to reduce rather than increase their debts.

Methods

Credit and debt

This study, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,²⁴ used a qualitative longitudinal approach, with repeated telephone and in-depth interviews, conducted between May 2008 and July 2009. Six groups were recruited – those with and those without children in each of three categories: the long-term low-waged; those in long-term receipt of benefits; and those who ‘churn’ between the two categories. These categories are not static, and the longitudinal nature of the methodology meant that movement between them during the course of the study could be mapped. Initial in-depth interviews were undertaken with 58 participants. On the basis of preliminary analysis of these, 12 were selected as in-depth case studies. Case study participants were re-interviewed every two months, over a period of a year, while the remaining 46 were interviewed by telephone every two months over the same period, to maintain briefer running updates of changing circumstances. This enabled mapping of the dynamics of change over time, but also allowed identification of critical moments/events. The time span of a year also allowed the capturing of seasonal and other time-specific demands on household income, such as birthdays, holidays, religious festivals and higher fuel consumption; emergencies such as washing machine or refrigerator breakdown; and the impact of price increases on food and consumer goods. At the end of the 12-month period of data collection, all participants were interviewed in depth once more, in order to clarify unresolved issues and expand on observations. Finally, participants were invited to a half-day workshop to solicit feedback on findings, and discuss and develop the policy implications of the study.

Money advice

A focus on targeting limited resources on women has been an important outcome, in policy terms, of research on the allocation of money within the household, due to revealed patterns of distribution in which men tend to have greater access to personal spending money and women tend to ‘go without’ in order to meet children’s needs. Men, however, have traditionally been under-represented as participants ‘in their own right’ in such studies. They also tend to use advice services less frequently than women. In more recent research on assets (such as home ownership, pensions and savings) and debts,²⁵ men’s voices are more prominent, but an overall imbalance remains. In 2010, this research, funded by the Money Advice Trust,²⁶ involved individual in-depth interviews with 20 men in low- to average-income households, about their experiences of household mo...