September 03, 2007
Love, marriage, and financial secretiveness
I recently tuned into another Authors @ Google talk: Liz Perle, author of Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash.
Ms. Perle’s talk covers a lot of ground, including contrasting male and female attitudes toward money, and changing financial gender roles. To her credit, the avowed feminist avoids open-ended male-bashing, and mostly focuses on dispensing financial advice.
One of the subjects Perle raises is the fact that many women today squirrel away money without their husband’s knowledge. (Ms. Perle reveals that she got burned by her first marriage to a conniving man---and a secret nest-egg was the only resource that kept her afloat in her immediate post-divorce years.)
Financial secretiveness is apparently a new characteristic of marriage, and women aren’t the only ones who are hoarding cash on the side. According to Freep.com:
A 2005 survey by Money magazine found that 71% of 1,001 women and men with incomes of $50,000 or more admitted keeping money secrets. The survey didn't say how many of those couples kept secret accounts, though three in 10 said they or their partner had a separate account both knew about (and in 30% of those cases, only the owner knew how much was in the account). --- Freep.com
Sonja Haller’s above-quoted article, “Couples agree to love, honor and hide money” reveals that in many marriages, both partners have secret bank accounts:
Paul Schencker doesn't know where his wife's safe-deposit box is, and he doesn't know how much money is in it. Nor does he want to know.
"I believe what I don't know won't hurt me," he says.
His wife, Geri, agrees: "If he knew how much money I had hidden, he'd have a heart attack."
Geri has been squirreling money away for the length of their 10-year marriage
This doesn’t particularly surprise me. Money is one of the most common sources of conflict in marriage. When I talk to my married friends (both men and women), their spouse’s financial management style is the most frequent topic of complaint----much more so than sexual or housekeeping issues. (Somewhat surprisingly, housekeeping issues are No. 2 on the complaint list.)
But marital conflicts about money are nothing new. What is new is the relative financial parity of the average middle-class couple. Most college-educated women work for 3 years or more before getting hitched, and most continue to work after getting married. Moreover, today’s married women are earning real money. A significant percentage of women now earn more than their husbands do. This was a rare condition a mere generation ago.
This means that marriage is increasingly a financial merger as well as a romantic one. And half of all marriages today end in divorce. With the high stakes involved for both partners, it seems that many are opting to hedge their bets with secret cash reserves. Not a very romantic phenomenon---but perhaps an inevitable one.