Lies, money and marriage - what can you do?
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He’s been buying those sunflower seeds again and not telling her*
What would you do if you suddenly found out your spouse was $20,000 dollars in credit card debt and didn’t tell you? Turns out this situation of husbands and wives lying about debt isn’t so unusual. People around the country are accidentally finding out that their spouses have debt they weren’t aware. In many cases, the debt is small. In other’s, the amounts are high…real high.
Lies like these can bring a seemingly healthy relationship to a dead stop, devastating the marriage and frequently leading to divorce. Most of us realize that big lies like this are a huge problem, but how about small ones? Ever lie about how much something cost? How about telling your husband something was on sale when it really wasn’t? Or maybe, buying something costly and just plain on not telling your wife at all (ahem, those golf clubs in your trunk)?
Harris Interactive was commissioned to do a survey by Redbook magazine lawyers.com that provides some very interesting insights:
- 29% of U.S. adults ages 25 to 55 who are in a committed relationship say they have been dishonest with their partner about spending habits
- 24% of all those currently in a relationship say honesty about finances is more important than honesty about fidelity, and 72% say trust is essential to a successful romance.
- 96% said it was both partners’ responsibility to be completely honest about financial issues.
According to the survey, here are the things we lie about:
- 21% Spending on ourselves
- 6% How much we make
- 12% Spending on children
- 4% Our investments
- 9% Household finances
- 2% Our retirement accounts 2%
Going back to the original question, “What would you do?”. Here are just a few suggestions about what you should do if you find out your spouse is lying about debt and/or money:
Confront the Issue
The first thing you must do is confront the situation. There really isn’t any way around this as it has to be dealt with. I’d suggest reading through a book called Difficult Conversations. It deals with how to have conversations like this, but in a positive and productive manner. Excellent read.
Also important in this process is the 5th habit from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and that’s “Seek first to understand, then be understood”. I say this because there is a reason your spouse is lying, and it’s your responsibility to determine why. Dive into the reasons why they felt they had to hide the debt from you and/or lie about it. Make sure you first understand their reasoning before you work to make your feelings understood.
Something I want to mention here: One of the key aspects in this conversation is going to be forgiveness. You need to forgive your spouse for the mistake they’ve made. This doesn’t mean you need to forget it, but it means you need to forgive them. What has been done is done, and that can’t be changed. In order to move forward from a clean slate though requires forgiveness. Don’t continue to bring it up, don’t continue to zing them. Focus on the future and not on the past.
Begin working together
The next step is to begin working together on your finances and communicating on your finances. Be warned though, if one of you is a saver, and the other a spender, this process will require some level of compromise. Develop your financial goals, your financial plan, and budget together! Don’t just do this one time, but work together constantly. My wife and I review our budget weekly.
Keep some things separate
Sometimes in a marriage it becomes easy to forget that each partner is also an individual. My wife and I have found it critical to our financial success and marriage to have separate spending categories just for us, for whatever we want. There is a line item in our budgets for this monthly. We can do whatever we want with this money, blow it, save it, invest it…whatever.
Counseling
The above items work on small issues, but on large issues or repetitive problems, the problem isn’t a money problem, but a marriage problem. If your marriage has issues with large amounts of debt, continuous issues with lying and hiding money, or constant fighting than it’s time for marriage counseling. Marriage counseling will engage a third party that will help your marriage. Being Christian, I would highly recommend a Christian marriage counselor. Your church pastor should be able to recommend someone.
*Photo by: dalvenjah
Have you been (or maybe you currently are) in a situation like this? What did you do? What suggestions do you have for someone in a situation like this? How would you handle your spouse lying about money? Add a comment!
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May 13th, 2008 at 8:18 am
One of the reasons people don’t fess up about their spending is fear of their spouse’s reactions. She’ll never forgive me! He’ll leave me! Well, maybe he or she will act like that. However as a Christian we need to realize that their reactions are not up to us, and our deceit is motivated by a basic instinct: Attempting to controll the ones we love.
Controll of others is sometimes attempted through threats and actions of violence or withholding affection. But withholding information or outright deception is also an attempt to alter the behavior of someone else so they will act in ways more favorable to you. Thus we see that when you lie to your spouse, you are really manipulating them into loving you and treating you better than you assume they would otherwise. Does that sound like a christian thing to do?
God looks on the inside, and judges us on our true heart rather than the face we present to others. We need to confess our deceit to the LORD and also to the ones we have wronged, namely the wife or husband we have lied to. Their response is not your decision. They may not forgive. They may. Either way, you must do right by God and let others find the right way on their own.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:37 am
It’s definitely not easy when one is a saver and the other a spender. I happen to be the saver, and the spender husband I have has very little interest in the day to day management of our money. He also has a distaste for what many in the PF blogging community do — He doesn’t like having set spending amounts called “allowances.” Funny thing is, if I give him a spending limit he’s alright with it, and the money is usually there every paycheck. Same principle, no name, and he’s happy as a clam.
It’s not impossible to have a saver/spender together that works, but one key thing to realize in the situations like this is that you cannot change your partner. A spender will never become a saver and vice versa. You can, however, find the compromise that makes sure both of your needs are met. (I know my husband and I have, finally.)
May 13th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Good post. We separate some categories of spending as well, but full-disclosure is always the rule.
Neither of us have money to “blow” at the moment.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Wow, I can’t imagine ever being less than completely transparent about my spending. And it’s impossible for DH to be dishonest about the spending, as I handle all of the finances. But, I have to admit to sometimes downplaying the amount of available funds to DH so that he doesn’t get the crazy impulse to run out and buy stuff *COUGH*RockBand*COUGH*
May 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am
great post - i was just working on a post very similar - when i saw you had one up already!
I was just reading money confessions on twitter, and this was one of them:
I have four credit cards my husband doesn’t know about. He just ordered both our credit reports - I am so afraid he will find out
People do such silly things when it comes to money, and I know I’ve done this once or twice myself - saying something cost less than it did, or going the old “better to ask forgiveness than permission” route.
My wife and I are doing better about this, and doing a financial class right now is really opening our eyes to how much we really do spend.
The key i think is to be on the same page together in spending and saving decisions. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:56 am
“72% say trust is essential to a successful romance.” That statistic completely blows me away. I wonder what the other 28% think is essential???
I agree with a pp — for the saver in the marriage, it’s essential to let go of the idea that you will turn your spouse into a saver. Power of a Praying Wife helped me *immensely* in this regard. In it, Stormie writes about how she had to let go of the expectations she had of her husband and simply let him become who God intended him to be. I’ve allowed God to teach me how to do that, and to teach me that I’m accountable to God for my actions; he is accountable to God for his.
The amazing part is that, the less I nit-pick about what he spends, the more “responsible” (IMHO) he becomes.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:08 am
My dear fiance is a police officer and applied to be on the Swat Team. He told me if he was accepted he would have to purchase a very expensive weapon. First of all, I hate guns. Second of all, we’re saving for our upcoming wedding, a house, etc. I told him if he was accepted to the team (which is the only reason he would ever need that type of a weapon), he could buy the gun, though I wasn’t crazy about it.
Imagine my surprise when his mother one evening said to me how excited her son (who had not yet been accepted on the team) was about his new gun. He even took it to show off to his parents!
Needless to say, I was waiting at the door when he got home. We did not fight, but we did have a discussion. Hopefully we won’t have anymore situations where a major purchase is kept a secret. And he ended up getting accepted to the team.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Like Rocket, we don’t really have the money to blow. That said, I appreciate it that some days Micah will come home (every once in a while) from campus and say, “I ran into Greg [another teacher] and we got coffee, talked about classes and stuff.” Or that he bought a snack because his bloodsugar was dropping. That’s accounted for in our budget, I just need to know if it’s being spent or not and I’m glad that he’s willing to work with me on that.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
These issues are always difficult to deal with and Dan is right about the types of fears that we place on ourselves and the negative ideas that we often come up with. I also agree with Dan that more often than not these are just fears and our spouse is only too willing to help us deal with the issue without brushing it under the carpet.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Being single doesn’t seem to stop me from having an opinion. Which is that I couldn’t live with complete transparency. I would need to have some amount of money for which I am accountable to no one but myself. Having a ceiling for that would be fine, but I don’t think I could do a completely joint budget like Mrs. Micah (and others) seem to.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I am currently in the situation described above. I have been lying to my significant other for years regarding our finances. I’ve spent the past 3 months trying to figure out how to get on a better path - a laughably short time considering how long this has been going on.
Why did this situation develop in the first place? I never gave it any thought for the longest time, content to sweep it all under the proverbial rug, but recently I have been trying to discover where this behavior came from and the roots of it.
I discovered that my dysfunctional childhood played a HUGE role in my adult life and the ensuing failures I have encountered. I never realized just how big of a self-punisher I was until just recently. It has been painful to be honest with myself and acknowledge that my formative years were rooted in shame, humiliation and violence.
Another factor that I didn’t take into account was my significant other’s childhood. My SO, too, lived in an unforgiving household with an alcoholic father.
So, we had two big strikes against us. Me, with my extremely shaky foundation and the SO with no concept of forgiveness.
The root of my lies regarding money, then, were a fear of not receiving forgiveness from the SO when financial mistakes were made. It was just “better” to forge ahead on a wild ride while keeping the SO in the dark. Less arguments about money and more chance to “make it up” at some point in the future, or so I thought.
Very bad idea! The end result is that our credit is shot and our finances have suffered. We needed to be on the same page and we weren’t. The situation is changing now, slowly. It is so much better to be honest.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:03 am
When my spouse and I went took a marriage preparation course, they spent a lot of time on finances. We both knew exactly what we were getting into, for better or for worse, but did come up with a plan together. We also give each other a certain amount every month, based on our budget, to do with whatever we please, but everything else is discussed.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I found your blog via the Carnival of Debt Reduction #130. No lies between Mr. A and I, but I think your post just revealed something to me. I think that Mr. A is a spender, while I’m a saver! Perhaps this is why I feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall some days. And while he doesn’t spend a lot of money, it just doesn’t seem like we are on the same page when it comes to paying off our debt. I am definitely going to do some more research on this. Thanks for the great post!
May 24th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
“The borrower is a slave to the lender.” Prov 22:7
That said, my wife duped me for the third time in our eight year marriage. She managed to run up ~50K in debt on nine credit cards of which I was unaware. We had this problem two times before much to my shock and horror, each time I cleaned up the mess and sacrificed to pay down the debt. She promised it wouldn’t happen again. She lied! It is wrong!! Period!!!
If I did this to my employer, I would be doing jail time. If I did this to someone off the street whom I have no legal relation to, I would be doing jail time. Somehow, within the sphere of a marriage, this is perfectly legal to do to your spouse. Wrong, traumatizing, but legal.
I am divorcing my wife of nine years after being lied to an manipulated one too many times. It’s amazing the scale of the lies she told. Not just one or two big lies but multiple “maintenance” lies to keep the deception going over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, my daugther will suffer as well for my wifes foolishness. How can you ever dig your way out a hole? What a fool.
If you are a spouse who is engaging in this type of activity take heed. You are hurting those near to you in a way that you cannot even imagine. I would rather that my wife had an adulterous affair. It wouldn’t have cost me ~100K and all of the missed opportunities that go with it.
Debt = owed money. Owed money = time & energy to pay back. Time & energy = your life, your precious time here on earth. Debt = waste.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:14 am
I could not agree more with Rich. My 53 year old husband passed away in April of a sudden heart attack. He did not commit suicide but essentially killed himself with guilt and stress. After he died I found 4 boxes full of unopened mail and bills for 18 credits cards that he had run up with overdue totals of 88,000 dollars. It was in the trunk of his car. I also found out that he had a po box and that is why I never saw any of the bills. He even had credit cards in my name, which I never opened up. I am in total debt and shock from all the lies that I am finding out about. I have to forgive him because I am a Christian, but he has devastated his whole family. He withdrew money (10,000 inheritance to his 2 children) from his kids bank accounts and wiped out my bank account of 8,000 dollars . I cannot describe the sense of betrayal that I feel. My children even though adult (daughter age 20 and son age 24) have also been devastated. Money truly is the root of all evil. Adultery would have been easier to forgive. I begged my husband to share the finances with me, but it always led to fighting and I gave in and trusted him. Those who say they have recieved counseling are truly saving their marriage and on their way to a better life.