A Stash of Cash
Virginia Woolf would call it an account of one’s own. The part she might object to is that it’s a secret.
When David Ferguson found out that Rita, his wife of 15 years, had been stashing a portion of her earnings as a part-time dance instructor into a secret bank account, he was outraged. Then, he says, he grew suspicious. After all, he figured, hadn’t he pooled all his earnings into their mutual account? Had he ever questioned any purchase she wanted to make? What was she hiding?
“What I was doing,” says Rita, who has $6,000 in mutual funds, “wasn’t hiding as much as trying to be practical. As good as a marriage or partnership is today, that doesn’t make it that way 10 years from now. While I worked, I wanted to be able to save my money and have a nest egg of my own.” She says her mother suggested the practice to each of her daughters when they married. She also believes the concept of a separate, private account is a healthy one.
Experts agree, but only so far.
“In an age when very few things seem private anymore, it’s good to remember that privacy in a marriage is OK,” says Dina McMillan, a social psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles. “However, secrecy is not.
“I always tell clients that secrets, no matter how innocent, are like a small dot on a TV screen that just grows.” She thinks privacy versus prying are areas in which all couples make their own boundaries. “But if you’re partnering up with someone, aren’t they entitled to know the major statistics?”
Claire Albright, director of Relationship Focus in Orange County, agrees: “If marriage is all about honoring your spouse, are secrets a way to honor someone?”
Many women agree with that ideal, but in practice, they say, it leaves them too vulnerable.
When Jean Dickinson, a 38-year-old Honolulu book publisher, moved in with her partner, all was sunny for eight years. But the last four were “horrendous, and I knew I’d never be able to leave unless I had some money of my own.”
While both maintained separate accounts, for all 12 years her boyfriend had demanded to see her statements and then needled her to borrow money. “Every time I’d save $500, he’d have an emergency to borrow it.” She opened a secret account and had the statements sent to her parents’ home in Northern California. It took her 18 months to reach her goal of a separate residence. “It was the best thing I ever did,” she says.
Great, says Ray Forgue, director of Family Studies and Finance at the University of Kentucky. But what about the fact that the relationship might have turned for the better if the situation had been worked out? Avoidance behavior, he postulates, is one of marriage’s major trouble spots.
“Let’s face it, money is very emotionally charged, with a lot of extra baggage tied to it,” he explains. “People don’t discuss the subject before their own marriages, and if they do it’s generalizations: the ‘what if’s’--’what if you inherited a million dollars, what would we do?’ Not the nitty-gritty. Somehow people think the subject is uncouth, unromantic.”
According to a 1995 survey of 1,000 professional women by Working Woman magazine, 13% of those interviewed said they hid money from their husbands. Of those, 43% agreed with the statement: “I think every woman should have money of her own tucked away.”
Of those who hid money, 30% said they used it for purchases they didn’t want to be questioned about and a quarter said they did it in case an emergency came up.
While many people hedge their bets and avoid confrontations, Forgue questions anticipating that the marriage could fail. “Such high divorce rates today means a lot of marriages do fail. But if you’re preparing for something negative to happen you better get ready for something to go wrong.”
Gina Bolton, 39, a Cincinnati school administrator, says she feels guilty about the two secret accounts she’s had since 1987. On the advice of her father, who counseled each of his daughters on her wedding day to open a separate account, she placed her inheritance from her grandmother in a side account. She says she dislikes the way her husband budgets and uses the money on extras for her two children, such as gymnastics and soccer, things she says her husband would argue about.
But she also admits to having $100 a month directly deposited from her credit union into another secret account. “This one I have no idea why I’m keeping, except that it somehow makes me feel good. I hate the idea of this account, but how do I get rid of it without lying?”
Husbands, not surprisingly, have mixed feelings about this. Men have long set up secret accounts to pay for expenses they didn’t want their wives to know about or to hide assets in case of divorce--which may be why they can be suspicious of the motives of women who do the same thing.
“I always tell my two daughters that it’s important they are independent and can earn a living for themselves,” says Peter Bernini, a grocer in the Bronx, N.Y. But he stops short of endorsing private accounts, saying it could undermine a marriage before it starts.
After he leaves the telephone conversation, his wife of 12 years confides: “He’s of the old school. Men want control, so they control the purse strings. At least they need to think they do.”
She admits to having $10,000 in stocks her husband doesn’t know about. “And just about every one of the women I know has something similar,” she says. “Come on, everyone’s seen too many women left too many times with too many children and expenses after a death or bad divorce. What for?”
So what’s the best way to be smart and prudent, sharing and caring?
Experts agree: An account of your own is fine, just let your partner know about it. And if it raises some fur with your partner, work it out. The issue is privacy, not secrecy.
Wendy Tannenbaum, president of Creative Edge, her own marketing firm on the Westside, has bank accounts separate from her husband of seven years. Though the accounts were started for smaller, surprise purchases of vacations and anniversary gifts, the issue of money management is openly discussed.
Her parents, both psychologists, divorced when she was a child and told her money was the leading cause. Even her mother-in-law even told her when she got married that “it’s important for a woman to have her own money.”
Tannenbaum wanted to find “a way to be positive and realistic. The solution for both partners is to realize when they do have financial disagreements, to remember each partner’s heart is in a good place.”
