Financial abuse: 'Your whole life story is collapsing on itself'
Divorce expert Kate Anthony explains how spousal financial abuse is like quicksand. Here's how you extract yourself.
Kate Anthony is the author of The D Word, host of The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast, and creator of the Divorce Survival Guide Coaching Method, a trauma-informed framework that helps women navigate divorce with clarity, strategy, and healing. We spoke for this Salon story about spousal financial abuse.
If you or someone you know is affected, The National Domestic Violence Hotline can help begin the journey, and after any initial danger is clear, look at FreeFrom.org and AllstateFoundation.org for information specifically for abuse survivors to build or rebuild their financial independence.
Kate Anthony: Financial abuse occurs in 99% of all domestic abuse cases, because it's the easiest way to control women. It starts off with, “well, you don't have to work, I'll take care of you.” And I'm not saying that all cases in which the decision is made together is necessarily financial abuse. But how is that decision made? It becomes sort of this creeping crud, where it can start off with, “you don't have to work,” and then it moves into women who don’t have access money, or men makes them split things equally, even if the income is not remotely equitable.
Vanessa McGrady: What are some of the hallmarks of financial abuse?
KA: It can take many forms. One is not allowing you access to accounts or statements or other financial information. It can be blocking you from working or having financial independence, depositing your paycheck into an account that you can't access, giving you an allowance for and monitoring all of your spending. Taking out loans and credit cards in your name or taking them out in both of your names without you knowing it.
Any debt that is incurred while married is considered marital debt. I have a client whose husband has taken out something like $50,000 in credit card debt that she didn't know about, but she's responsible for it because they're married. Another thing is [men] spending lavishly on themselves while restricting the woman’s spending or what she drives. I know somebody whose husband drives a brand-new Tesla, and she's driving a minivan with no air conditioning.
[Financial abusers] can also get you fired from jobs by harassing you. And a few other statistics: victims of financial abuse collectively lose a total of 8 million days of paid work per year. 59% of people's credit is negatively impacted by their abuser, and 70% of domestic violence victims are forbidden to work by their abusers.
VMc: There are so many flavors this can take. I spoke with someone yesterday whose husband was in grad school and wanted to be a writer but basically made her do all the work and spent all of her money and just wouldn't go to work.
KA: Oh, one of my favorites is refusing to work in anything but their chosen profession. If they're a writer, they can't get a job because they're a writer, they're an artist. So he puts all the financial burden on her.
VMc: Let's say you have basically had enough, and you realize that you are at your bottom point in a marriage and you are ready to stop this. I would imagine the first step is to confront your financial abuser or go to counseling. But let's say that doesn't work and nothing changes.
KA: No. First of all, never go to therapy with an abuser. They know what they're doing. This is not confronting it. There's no one in the history of abusers who has ever been told, “actually, what you're doing is considered abuse,” and said, “oh, I didn't realize!” Nobody changes their ways by having this called out.
I think one of the things you can do is say, “Hey, by the way, we're married, so it's actually illegal for me not to have access to these accounts. If my name is on the account, I need access, so give me the login.” And if they resist, you go into the bank and you say, “My name is on this account, I don't have a login. Can you help me get that set up?”
You can ask—subtly— “Hey, where are all of our accounts? I'm foggy about our money. We're married, and I think it's important for me to have an idea.” And if your spouse resists, then you know that you've got a bigger problem. And so then, before you confront them with “this is abuse and I want a divorce,” you’ve got to start sleuthing. You need to figure out where you have accounts. If you know that you have a Chase card, then you know that there's an account at Chase. If statements come in from Fidelity but they don't have your name on them, you can't open them legally. But you then you have proof of a [secret or separate] account.
VMc: What about a 1099 that shows up on taxes from a source you don’t recognize?
KA: Some of my clients, when their husbands leave the house, hit the hit the filing cabinets and photograph statements. It’s a little harder now with things being digital and going paperless. You have to become your own private investigator to get as much information as possible. The bottom line is that if you do divorce, your spouse will have to disclose all of these accounts anyway. If they don't, you may have to hire a forensic accountant, which is extremely expensive, and a last resort.
If you've ever signed a tax return but you've never seen it, you can call the IRS, and they will send you your tax returns because your name is on it.
VMc: What if doing starting to do this work puts you at more danger by angering your abuser and letting them know you're on you know you're on to them?
KA: That's why you have got to do it really, really carefully and surreptitiously, on the down-low. If you're going to anger them, if you're going to put yourself in any danger, then you should be working with a domestic violence victim’s advocate. There are so many professionals out there that help with this thing. My friend Tracy Coenen is a forensic accountant and teaches women how to be their own forensic accountants in these kinds of cases. But really, the first step in all of this is to recognize that this is what's happening. It's really hard to wrap your head around the fact that this isn't normal, and it's not okay. The hardest is to realize that this person who says they love you, claims to love you, pretends to love you, is actually abusing you. And the fantasy and your whole life story is collapsing in on itself. That’s a really hard pill to swallow, but once you have swallowed it, things start to snowball for you in terms of finding help and finding answers and gaining clarity.
VMc: Is there one place people should start for this, like a website or number they can call?
KA: The National Domestic Violence at the hotline is always a great place to start. The Allstate Foundation has a curriculum to help domestic violence survivors achieve financial independence and rebuild their lives. There's also something called Free From, a national organization whose mission is to dismantle the nexus between intimate partner violence and financial insecurity. This helps financial literacy, because the thing that women come up against, if they've been isolated from their finances in this way, is that they feel like they don't understand anything.
The financial world is very patriarchal. All you have to do is talk to some tech bro about crypto, and what are they talking about? It's like a word salad. And women are like, “Oh, I guess I don't understand these things.” It's a lot simpler than they will make it out to be. But it has patriarchal arms all over it.
VMc: What are the steps people typically make once they recognize financial abuse and start the ball rolling?
KA: The first thing is to become financially literate. The second is to become financially independent, and so you want to open your own bank account and get access to your own money.
VMc: How does, how does that happen if you're not bringing in any money?
KA: If you have access to the marital funds and you're planning on leaving, you can move half of that money out of the account into your own personal account. Some states are equitable distribution, states versus community property. (There’s “equal division” or “equitable division,” but all of that will get sorted out in the divorce.) It is absolutely legal for you to take half of the marital assets.
If you’ve got a savings account, and let's say there's $10,000 in there, you can take $5,000 of that and move it into an account in your name. You can't take all $10,000. You're not hiding that. You are going to disclose it during the divorce, but you're simply giving yourself access to your own money.
If the abuse is severe, and you really have no access to anything, you will, you're going to hopefully start a secret cash stash in your glove compartment, or somewhere really safe, and you're going to get $10 or $20 back every time you go to the grocery store. You can buy gift cards at the grocery store so that you can charge things if necessary, without your spouse seeing it. Maybe you're going to get a small part time job and you're going to start depositing your paychecks into an account that only you have access to. You're going to change passwords, make sure that you go incognito on your computer, all of those things so that you can protect yourself financially.
VMc: How long does it typically take people to get out?
KA: The average divorce takes probably two years. One year is probably the minimum, but you've got people that are in litigation for 10 years, and that's ridiculous.
VMc: And I'm assuming that during all this time, the person who's making the money has to be paying you something like child support or alimony.
KA: At that point, you're going to have to hire a divorce attorney and file for a temporary order. So, you have to file a temporary order. [Men] love to say things like, “I don't make the amount of money that that she's saying I do,” or they decide that they want full custody because they don't want to pay child support, even though they've never been an active parent in their lives.
It doesn't end; the gig is not up. They will find all sorts of ways to engage in post-separation abuse, in which they use the court and the legal system to abuse you instead. Once they don't have access to you, because you set up really healthy boundaries, they will try and use other means to get to you.
My advice to people is not to move too quickly. Having a really clear strategy and guidance along the way is going to be really, really important. You're not steamrolling through this. You've got to be patient so that you can be strategic,
VMc: Is there anything else people should know about financial abuse and how to get out of it? It's difficult on so many levels.
KA: It is. This is such a powerful way to control. People go back. It takes an average of seven times before a victim can leave for good, and mostly it's because of money. People don't go back because they someone has changed their ways. It's usually they go back because they can't afford not to.
[Having no financial agency] is one of the bigger predictors of abuse and divorce, because we're putting all of our all of our safety in the hands of somebody else. And the statistics are pretty shitty for this.
I'm trying to think of anything else where the statistics are 50/50—should you put all of your eggs in that basket? You would never take that bet if it were anything else, but we do it because we have been spoon-fed since birth. That's the dream.
VMc: If you know somebody in this situation, how do you help them?
KA: If you see someone who's being financially abused, help to name it. You may not want to go guns blazing because nobody receives that news, but gently point out that it’s not okay that you don't have access to money. All marital assets are yours too. Lay the seed, a little plant. I think also raising our girls to not quit their jobs, not quit their dreams, not put all of their financial power in someone else's hands.