Saturday, November 23, 2024

Thank you for making last issue's survey such a success!

As usual, you all teach me so much about how families deal with finances. I can always depend on your comments and I do appreciate that!

The main survey response page indicates the statistics of for each question, for example, 81% of the respondents are female. However, there are many other interesting questions that can be answered. (Use this link to read the main survey results page).

To start with, men and women are consistent. Consistent in that if a man is answering the survey he will report that the man is better at handling the finances. The same is true for women.

Of the men that answered the survey, 52% said that the man is better at handling finances, 19% said women are better, and 24% said neither.

Of the women that answered the survey 57% said that the women are better, 4% said men, and 33% said neither.

It seems to me that there is at least some consensus that women may be generally better (from what I'm told). This is because women agree that women are better and 19% of men indicated women as being better compared to only 4% of women saying men are generally better with finances.

I can safely say that DebtSmart® readers are successful with their relationships! Most of you, more that 75% who answered the survey, have been in a relationship for more than 16 years! And nearly a quarter for more that 20 years! Wow, that's fantastic!

Of the married people that responded to the survey, a majority, 79%, of these couples have the women actually pay the bills, write and mail the checks (or pay online). Of the single people who are in relationships it's only 50% of women that pay the bills.

This is certainly explained by the fact that (1) mostly women are the respondents to this survey (2) most of them are married (3) women favor women when it comes to money (as men favor men). Of the women that responded 93% said they're married compared to 76% of men. Therefore, most of the men that do the bill-paying in their relationship are not married. But even so, the majority of men and women that read DebtSmart® are married.

Those who identified themselves as men who said that the man pays the bills and women who say the woman pays the bills in the relationship  is 90%! The obvious conclusion is that overwhelmingly the respondents to the survey are the very people that write the checks and handle the money. That makes sense.

Here's something else that's quite interesting. It's a 50-50 split between people who pay their bills online and those that do not. However, of all the people that do pay their bills online only 58% say they use at least some type of financial software to track transactions.

The good news for people who use software is that they're making backups! Ninety-four percent (94%) say they do backup their data. Backups are a must. I'm backup-crazy! I have eight fresh backups of my financial data at all times.

Whenever I'm done entering even a single transaction I make a backup and check the backup copy using Beyond Compare (http://www.scootersoftware.com). This software allows you to do a binary compare of every file.

I started doing this a few years ago when I discovered that some of my file copies were not done properly. When you do a simple copy there is a chance that it's not exact. And if there's one messed-up bit in the file all the data may be corrupt.

Use this link to see the main survey results page.

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