Yesterday Be This Way issued a challenge to confess our financial sins, and I have a big one. It involves huge stupidity, vast hypocrisy, and unfathomable mystery. It goes like this:
All the time I was married-25 years, give or take a few months-I earnestly advised women friends whose marriages were stressed that they must establish their own credit, have credit cards and bank accounts in their own names, understand where their money came from and where it went, know how it was invested and why, and keep property that they had when they came in to the union sole and separate.
Meanwhile, during the entire time I was dispensing these edifying lectures, I had no clue about my own marriage’s finances. Not one single clue.
We did not have a budget, because my husband felt that was for poor people. He took charge of the finances and kept charge of them. Credit card in my own name? Not a chance! I carried a fistful of joint cards in my purse. Bank account of my own? N/A. I had no idea what was in our joint checking account, no idea if we even had a savings account or if we did, what it contained. I knew he had a pension fund through his firm, only because the law required employers that offered pension funds for some employees to provide them for all employees, and I knew he borrowed against it with some frequency. But I did not know how much he was contributing to the fund or how much it had accrued.
Nor did I have any idea that we were up to our hairlines in debt. I charged up a $200 silk shirt (in 1991, that was a lot to spend on one piece of clothing), never realizing that my husband couldn’t pay the credit card bills and was making only minimum payments on the $30,000 we had racked up on the plastic. Operating as though it was his job to earn the money (he made something over 10 grand a month) and mine to spend it, I insisted that we buy a new Toyota Land Cruiser, little knowing we were sinking into a million dollars worth of debt.
When I inherited $40,000 from an aunt, a nagging feeling that one day I might want to fly the coop pushed me to keep the money separate from the community property. When I asked what I should do with such a large chunk of cash, he had me talk with his personal banker, who advised me to put it in one-week CDs!
Think of that. It sat in those things for a good year, rolling over once a week and earning nothing, because I didn’t know any better.
By the time I decided to leave, he had paid the million dollars of debt down to three-quarters of a million. That was when I learned he had two bank accounts and a credit card in his name only, about which I knew nothing. I had no credit in my own name-after the divorce, my favorite department store would do business with me on a cash basis only (which may have been for the best). I hadn’t handled a checking or savings account in 25 years, not since we were married. I imagined I could make a living as a freelance writer (!), and that the modest investments I’d cobbled together from the inheritance and my half of the pension fund would support me in this folly. Accordingly, the spousal support I accepted was a fraction of what my lawyer and my more knowledgeable friends thought was enough
Why? I was not a child-I married at 23 and was 46 when I left. Evidently I knew better, since I was advising my friends to think clearly about money and protect their own interests. Why did I behave like a child?
Beats me. Maybe it had to do with the way I was raised, but I doubt it. My father went to sea most of his life, and my mother handled their affairs, finances included, during his lengthy absences. I was on autopilot throughout most of the marriage, not fully conscious of anything that was going on around me. Once my ex- mentioned a trip we had taken, one that apparently was pretty interesting; I can’t remember a thing about it. I don’t even remember having made the trip at all. Strange.
Whatever. Do as I say, not as I do.