Despite the fact that women tend to earn lower wages than men, they are more likely to pay their mortgages on time and less likely to be delinquent on those mortgages. A new Experian study found that men are more likely to have higher mortgage loan amounts than women and also more likely to be delinquent on those loans by 60 days or more. “We see that women working full time…earn approximately 23 percent less income than men but…are taking steps to manage their finances better than men,” said Michele Raneri, vice president of analytics at Experian[1]. She added that “the most notable difference is that men are taking bigger individual mortgage loans than women…[and] having a slightly more difficult time making those payments on time.”
Men also are more likely (18.3 percent) to own a mortgage independently than women except in Washington, D.C., where women own 33 percent more mortgage loans than men. Of course, there are likely some social conventions influencing these numbers. 72 percent of all mortgages are held jointly, and it seems quite possible that a number of male-held mortgages are higher in value because the home contains a family with a woman who may be working part-time while raising children or who has opted, with her husband, to keep their finances separate or only put one spouse on the mortgage loan[2]. Given that men still tend to earn more than women, it makes sense that the husband’s salary would likely be the one used in order to obtain the mortgage if spouses decided not to hold the mortgage together.
Do these findings surprise you? Why do you think women are less likely to be late on their mortgages than men?
[1] http://www.dsnews.com/articles/study-women-own-less-mortgage-debt-likely-to-be-delinquent-2013-05-22
[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100757775
by Carole VanSickle
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