Everyone has a neighborhood DINK. You know, the couple who seems to jetset every weekend. The duo dripping in luxury as they sip cocktails worry-free, while you’re obsessively refreshing your phone for an update from the babysitter. At your last baby shower, they arrived fresh off the plane from their South African safari, and before that, a month-long trip to Greece. You can’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy as you plan the week’s carpool schedule. While you wrangle your four little angels, they are deciding where to buy their summer house, and whether Art Basel is worth the trip this year (it is, BTW). These are DINKs — and they *actually* don’t have that much more $$ than you — at least in the long run.
What are DINKs?
First off — we should probably clarify exactly what a “DINK” is. The term DINK — which stands for “double income, no kids” — applies to the couples in your life who go through adulthood without children, whether by choice or not. Funny enough, the term has been around for decades and is recognized by Merriam-Webster as a very-real word.
The DINK lifestyle has become a monster of its own, with TikTok obsessing over the lifestyle as more and more people opt for a life without children. There’s a whole subsect devoted to the lifestyles of the DINK, and people are eating it up. Now, there are DINKWADs (double income, no kids, with a dog) and probably SINKs and SINKWADs for single folks.
There’s data to support this DINK lifestyle, too. Many millennials and Gen Zers believe that they simply can't raise a child in today’s economy (just look at the housing crisis), or believe it’s unethical to do so given the state of the government and climate change. Nearly 1 in 4 Gen Zers expect to be a DINK household someday, and more than 1 in 4 don’t want to have children. Taken to the extreme, this belief is called “antinatalism,” which quite literally means “the belief that it is morally wrong or unjustifiable for people to have children.”
On average, DINK households make over $30k more per year compared to their parental counterparts, and don’t have to shell out nearly $20k a year to raise a single child. In fact, unmarried and childfree women are the happiest subgroup of the population, faring significantly better than those with spouses and children. I mean — if this isn’t encouragement for the DINK lifestyle, we don’t know what is.
But that isn’t all. In the long run, DINKs only have 5% more net wealth than their child-bearing counterparts, which *actually* isn’t that surprising when you think about it. In a conversation with Dr. Jay Zigmont, a childree financial planner, Dinky podcast hosts (and fellow DINKs themselves) Kristen and Erika questioned this.
“Do you two care about how much money you have when you die to pass on to the next generation?” Dr. Zigmont asked, to which both women quickly responded: “No.”
“Cool. Then that changes your entire financial plan,” Dr. Zigmont continued. “So if your goal is not to pass on money…then net worth is not a goal.”
TBH it makes sense — if you have no reason to pass down your wealth, you might as well spend large while you're still kicking!
Of course, it’s important to note that being a DINK (or DINKWAD) is no better (or worse) than choosing to become a parent. It’s completely up to you as to what lifestyle you choose. As society continues to evolve, and different lifestyles enter the forefront of our minds, it will be interesting to see how the DINK way of life changes with it.
Already, families are changing from those advertised on 1950s cereal boxes to ones filled with new dynamics and partnerships. There are people forgoing children in favor of a farm of fur babies, or renouncing marriage altogether and living in a different country every year, or choosing to be a single parent via IVF, or fighting for their aging father’s affection in hopes of becoming the patriarch of their family’s international media conglomerate…oops, that one was the plot of Succession. Regardless, your life is up to you, but maybe channel your inner DINK once in a while (you deserve it).
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Header image courtesy of Canva, Becca Tapert / Unsplash.
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