Luckily I’ve got my handy-dandy 10 years of Money Diaries, mined from over 10 years of Refinery 29 posts. I was surprised by what surprised me. Let’s take a look-see.

The truth is...

Not as ugly as I’d expected! You’ll see what I mean.

In our headline visual today, each dot is a dual-income couple, with the diarist’s salary on the X-axis and their partner’s salary on the Y. The dashed diagonal line is equal pay. Above it, the partner earns more. Below, the diarist does.

See what I mean?

It’s surprisingly balanced around the center. The median couple has two $92k incomes. You can see it in the cloud: couples cluster along the diagonal, not scattered randomly. The shaded band around that diagonal shows where salaries are within 50% of each other, and 53% of couples fall inside it. Only 26% had a greater than 2x difference. Most dual-income couples really are in the same ballpark, and the median couple has two $92k incomes.

That dot way up in the top-right? A 38-year-old real estate business owner in NYC pulling $500K while her partner earns $1.7M. Combined household income of $2.2M. Her idea of a splurge? $45 lipstick purchase.

On the other extreme: a 33-year-old freelance fiction editor in Boston earning $25K while her partner brings in $425K, our biggest difference, at 17x more.

If you squint a bit, you can see that there are more outliers above the band than below the band, but in a self-selected and curated dataset like this, we can’t draw too many conclusions.

Splitting the check

Viewed as a histogram, we see the same pattern. Our 53% “roughly equal” band has each partner earning 40-60% of household income. In 27% of couples, the partner clearly out-earns the diarist. Only 20% of diarists clearly out-earn their partner.

Dead center of that equal zone? A 32-year-old PR account director in Chicago who was on maternity leave when she wrote her diary. She and her partner each earn $105,000. Exactly. Down to the dollar. She spent $44 on a smoke and carbon monoxide detector that week, which might be the most responsible purchase in the entire dataset.

Personal economies of scale

Next to the histogram: every diarist who reported net worth, plotted as a dot. Not just dual-income couples, but single, too.

The median coupled diarist has $114K in net worth. The median single: $52K. Basic math would have us expect a 2x gap, but Money Diaries’ real gap is actually 2.2x. You can see it in the dot density: the coupled strip sits further right, with more mass above $100K.

Here’s the twist: each partner actually spends 30% less per person.

• Single diarists spend $418/week.

• Coupled households spend $586/week total. $293/week/person.

Sharing a kitchen, splitting a rent check, using one Netflix login, Costco membership. These are our personal economies of scale.

When does the gap kick in?

Bottom-left: net worth by age. At 18-24, coupled and single diarists look almost identical ($24K vs $22K). Everyone starts at roughly the same line.

• By 25-29, coupled pulls to $82K vs $45K. That’s 2x.

• By 30-34, it’s $173K vs $81K. Still about 2x but the absolute gap is growing.

• And at 35-39, coupled hits $565K vs $188K. That’s 3x.

Then something odd happens at 40+. The single line surges to $485K and the coupled line drops to $294K. But Money Diaries skew younger, so we only have 57 data points. At that point we’re looking at individual stories, not trends. Maybe it’s a kids-vs-no-kids effect, maybe it’s just noise.

The reliable takeaway: through your 30s, coupling appears to accelerate wealth building. I expect that continues, but the data gets too thin to say for sure.

Paired up

The bottom-right panel tracks how the readership itself changed. In 2016, 51% of diarists were coupled, below the national average for women 25-34 (~60%, per Census 2022). By 2021, that hit 74%. The median age went from 26 to 31 over the same span.

That 2021 spike is interesting. COVID lockdown couples: paused loan repayments, frozen rents, fewer breakups? Hard to say from this data alone, but the timing lines up.

Money Diaries started as a column for 20-somethings figuring things out. These days, the audience had grown up. More couples, older writers, higher stakes.

The splurge angle

One finding that didn’t make the infographic, but I was curious about: coupled diarists tag 1.9% of their transactions as splurges vs 2.2% for single diarists. When they do splurge, coupled diarists spend a median of $32 vs $26 for singles. So single diarists splurge slightly more often, but coupled diarists spend slightly more when they do. Net effect is basically zero. Coupling doesn’t seem to change your relationship with impulse spending much at all.

Next up

I’m still loving this dataset! I’m hitting housing next, and started exploring some geographic spending. What’s on your mind that might be revealed in the crystal ball of the Money Diary? Drop it in the comments.

Subscribe for more. And for the Redditors, come join us at /r/MoneyDiariesActive.

After years of reading about it, but having no direct personal experience, I wanted to know how common this was. So I text-mined roughly 2,000 Money Diaries looking for explicit mentions of family financial support.

A full 39.7% of diarists mention some form of family financial support. Before we go further: this is a floor, not a ceiling. Just a hunch, but I’d guess, if Money Diaries were a random survey, the “real” split was 50:50.

Five categories:

• 26% - Family plans (phone, insurance)

• 12% - Education help (tuition, student loans)

• 7% - Cars (gifted or inherited)

• 6% - Home purchase help (down payments, gifts)

• 6% - The big one: trust funds or inheritance.

I also explored the age curve, which was telling, but not too unexpected. Among 18-24 year olds, 48% report family support. It drops steadily to 25% for 45+. Family help fades with age but I was surprised to see how many 45+ still showed up in the data.

Here’s where it gets interesting. You might expect the “helped” group to be wealthier across the board. They’re not. Helped diarists earn less than their not-helped counterparts ($77K vs $84K median salary). Net worth is nearly identical. And weekly spending? $510 either way. Exactly the same! Seven thousand dollars less in income and not a single dollar of difference in how they spend. Do they need the help, or does the help let them take different career paths? Something to dig into.

Let’s dig into some details to find the differences:

Now we can see the decomposed distribution. The overall median net worth is $88K, but it varies enormously by help type:

• Trust/Inheritance: $193K median net worth. More than double the overall median.

• Home Purchase: $147K. Nearly double.

• Family Plans: $75K. Right around the overall median.

• Car: $45K. Well below.

• Education: $38K. Lowest of all, probably due to the age skew of people in education.

Being on your family plan and having a trust fund are both “family financial help.” They are not the same thing. The diarists with inheritances and home purchase gifts are looking at 2x to 5x higher net worth than those getting help with a car or student loans. The family plan group is basically average.

The education group’s low net worth is worth noting. These are people whose parents helped with school but who still ended up with the lowest median net worth of any help group. I’m guessing there are selection effects (younger diarists are both more likely to get education help and more likely to have lower net worth), but it might be worth looking into.

One more pattern: lower earners are more likely to report family help overall (47% of those earning under $45K vs 39% of those over $110K). But the composition shifts. Lower earners get help with phone plans and education. Higher earners get trust funds and home purchase help. Family help flows down the income ladder in small amounts and up in large ones. A safety net for some, a wealth accelerator for others.

Next time you read a Money Diary and see “my parents helped with the down payment,” now you know where that sits in the distribution.

Next up

Still lots to learn in this dataset. Next week I’m hoping to explore trends through a geographic lens, or pick back up on the single-vs-coupled income gap. What sounds interesting? Drop it in the comments!

I’ll probably include more finer-grained analysis in the newsletter, so be sure to subscribe for more. And for the Redditors here, be sure to join /r/MoneyDiariesActive!

We’re starting the newsletter with a multi-part analysis of Refinery29’s Money Diaries, a long-running series that’s captured my interest for many years, and recently crossed the 10 year mark. Let’s celebrate with some data.

Today we’re looking at the big picture: how have the diarists themselves changed over the years? I pulled every diary from 2016 through today and looked at three things: salary, age, and net worth.

All dollar values are adjusted to 2026 dollars using BLS CPI data. So when I say “the median salary went from $72K to $100K,” that’s real purchasing power, not just inflation doing its thing.

Speaking of which, my biggest takeaway:

Six-Figures, Finally

The median salary nearly doubled from $53k to 100k. BUT half of that was just inflation catching up. I plotted raw salary numbers, which rose steeply, against 2026 inflation-adjusted numbers, and the rise wasn’t quite as inspiring. Real gains, yes. Life-changing gains? The chart says maybe not.

A Diary Keeps You Young?

After inflation, the main driver of change was probably years of experience. Speaking of which, the median diarist only aged five years in a decade. This is probably just Refinery29 was being intentional with their editing, catering to an audience of readers that was growing up, albeit not aging as fast as some of us. Refinery29 tried to keep it relatable, and the median Money Diarist has been holding steady at 31 years. Other than that, there’s a noticeable jump around 2021 that I’m calling “pandemic curiosity” until someone gives me a better theory.

Net Worth It?

Net worth might look a little wild at first, but that’s because in the early years net worth was only reported in a couple of diaries. One wealthy diarist makes a mess of the trend line. By 2023-2025, with hundreds of responses, the picture stabilizes.
The median net worth has actually come down from those early years, but I think that’s a sample size story more than a wealth story.

Future entries

This is barely scratching the surface of this rich dataset. In future posts, I’m thinking about doing something on rent burden or the single-vs-coupled income gap next. What sounds interesting? Drop it in the comments!

I’ll probably include more finer-grained analysis in the newsletter, so be sure to subscribe for more. And for the Redditors here, be sure to join /r/MoneyDiariesActive and maybe give me a follow me on Reddit. See you in the next!