Is there a penalty for being single?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why does being on your own seem so expensive?
The number of unmarried, divorced, widowed or unattached people is growing worldwide. But figures suggest it is more financial costly to be single, while couples and families benefit from paying less per person.
Whether it is the packaging supermarkets use, streaming service tariffs, hotel rooms - you often get a much better deal being coupled-up than not. Governments are in on the act too: offering tax breaks to couples.
In this programme, we take apart the personal finances of singles; hearing from World Service listeners and financial analysts.
Is it just economies of scale or are we really living in a world that penalises people on their own? And are there any financial advantages to being solo?
(Picture: Senior woman looking concerned, paying bills at home on her laptop. Credit: Getty Images)
Presented and produced by David Reid
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm just looking for a hotel on a well-known platform for booking rooms. |
| 0:05.8 | It shouldn't be too expensive. |
| 0:07.3 | It's just a little old me after all. |
| 0:10.6 | Okay, number of guests, one. |
| 0:14.0 | Knights, one. |
| 0:15.6 | Friday hope, that's all in order. |
| 0:17.3 | Submit. |
| 0:19.2 | Some relaxing hotel elevator music while I trip through the results. |
| 0:28.6 | Okie dokey, so I've had a look. For single occupancy of a twin room, the price is |
| 0:34.6 | $128, that's $160. But scanning down the page, and if a couple is booking the same room, it's just £144, that's £180. |
| 0:45.3 | That's what, $20 more? |
| 0:47.4 | I don't know, but that doesn't seem fair somehow. |
| 0:54.1 | Hotels are an extreme example, but the truth is almost everywhere you look, goods and services, |
| 0:59.7 | are more expensive for single people. Recent research in the UK found life for members of |
| 1:05.3 | this growing demographic is not just marginally dearer than for their coupled up counterparts, but much more expensive. |
| 1:14.1 | If you take an example of someone who's been divorced, they've got to start to rebuild. |
| 1:18.8 | So at that point, what they could really do with is all their sort of living costs to be much lower. |
| 1:23.8 | And of course, it's exactly at that moment that their living costs personally will go out. |
| 1:28.2 | Companies are slow to react and are not efficient enough to react in contrast to what we |
| 1:33.7 | think about. And they are efficient and they adjust things very fast. They don't. |
| 1:38.8 | From the 1950s, from the 1960s, you start seeing this enormous rise, the modern rise in single person living. |
| 1:46.8 | The 1960s does seem to trigger it. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.