I let my husband control our finances. Then I discovered something shocking
“Why are we in even more debt?” I yelled at my husband. “What kind of interest did you agree to pay?”
Although I was a failed poet turned freelancer who was lousy at math, I knew something wasn’t kosher: He’d been paying off our loan monthly for five years, but what we owed was now $5,000 higher. Borrowing the down payment for our apartment from a relative of his had put us in an endless hole. We were not only house poor, but 60 months later we were even deeper in over our heads. Worse, we had to keep visiting this family member every holiday and birthday out of obligation and guilt. Claustrophobic, it seemed we’d be indebted forever.
I recalled this dilemma reading Belle Burden’s Strangers, a divorce memoir soon to be a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow. As she writes in the book, Burden married an older man in 1999 and regretted giving him control over their finances. Critics expressed shock that a smart, well-educated lawyer would let her husband be the boss of their bank accounts. I could relate.
I also wed an older man in my field in New York in the ’90s. OK, so I wasn’t an heiress with a Harvard degree and socialite grandmother who’d married two high society men and palled around with Truman Capote. (My Grandma Yetta was an old Jewish lady in Florida, wife of Harry, a window shade maker, who spoke mostly Yiddish except to say “Thanks God.”) Yet I believed the same message: A marriage works best when the man controls most of the money.
It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds. It was hard to find a good partner, particularly when you weren’t a slim young easygoing beauty in the big city. (As an amateur matchmaker who has fixed up 30 now-married couples, I know the cyber scene hasn’t made dating and mating easier.) I feared I’d never meet someone I’d want to sleep with every night, let alone a smart, kind guy with a job who my parents liked and who wasn’t threatened by my independence. By 35, I worried that my big mouth, big family and big ambitions would alienate, overshadow or emasculate my mate, as I’d turned off previous boyfriends. After humiliating breakups and therapy to heal from heartache, I was fixed up with a tall, handsome mensch. When he proposed, I didn’t want to screw it up.
As a new wife, I planned to keep working and pay my own way. The housing market changed that. A realtor showed us a great two-bedroom near our jobs —with space for dual makeshift offices—we couldn’t afford. We reconsidered rentals, but my husband’s charming wealthy relation insisted the going rate was too much to waste on rent. He offered to loan us $100,000 for the down payment, lawyer, mortgage broker and closing costs. We accepted. While I’d found the place, kept a small separate bank account from my husband and intended to share bills, his salary was much higher than mine. So when it came to the scariest big-ticket purchase of my life, I was relieved when my husband said, “I got this.”
Asking him details of the loan, he assured me he was handling everything. Having lived alone for 15 years, dealing with everything myself (albeit calling my Michigan folks to freak out over roaches, mice, rats, rent raises and other urban ordeals), I felt lucky to be with someone who could take the lead. My married male therapist—who’d helped me wed, quit addictions and publish books—advised me to let my husband take care of me, which would make me feel grateful, cared for and nurtured. He was right.
Or so I thought. Until five years after we’d signed the deed to our East Coast apartment, when I was shocked to uncover monthly payments from my husband’s checkbook showing that, despite paying his rich kin off regularly, there was such a high interest rate that we now owed him $105,000.
While my husband was honest and brilliant, he was not an MBA. He had a disorganized creative brain and was extremely trusting. I ran to a mentor who knew his way around the ruthless real estate scene, desperate to get us out of debt.
“Double-mortgage your place to pay the loan off,” he advised. “I’ll show you how.”
My husband was outraged by my intervention. Yet he’d had five years overseeing this, I argued; I deserved a turn. With the help of a real estate lawyer friend, I learned the new loan language to pay off what we owed, giving our lender relative a check for the full amount, a present and thank you card.
But our patron didn’t seem thrilled to be fiscally unconnected. He immediately asked if we’d invest in a new fund that he promised would yield 12 percent annual return. Suspicious, I called my father that night.
“What do you call that kind of investment?” I asked.
“Bernie Madoff,” Dad answered.
I’d gathered this relative had grown up poor and his identity revolved around having fingers in his kins’ cash flow, making him feel needed and powerful.
After that bad experience, we slowly paid off our mortgage and stayed out of debt. We went back to the status quo of my husband overseeing most of our expenses. The apartment went up in value along with the maintenance costs, leading my husband to joke, “We’ll be very rich when we’re dead.”
Our good fortune was tested again during the pandemic, when falls caused by my husband’s balance issues led to neurosurgery, thankfully covered by his medical plan. My protective father suggested we sign papers to ensure I was my mate’s health care proxy, beneficiary, power of attorney and co-signer on all accounts. Switching to online banking, we put most of the bills in my name. Mercifully he survived and is still focused on recovery, but if you asked him how much our carrying costs are, he’d shrug as I’d recite the monthly figures. Burden’s wake-up call was betrayal; mine was my husband’s brain disorder.
While I should have become financially literate and taken the reins sooner to protect my own interests, that only happened because of my mate’s mistake, naivety, and then his illness. Had he stayed healthy or if we’d had a bigger fortune and didn’t need the loan, I may have remained ignorant of our financial future.
Burden’s book offers an important cautionary tale, warning women to walk down the aisle with their eyes open and fiscal safeguards in place. That’s smart not only when love goes wrong but in case of death, medical crisis, mental illness, natural disasters and all kinds of sudden unemployment. Yet marriage is a complicated business. My rule, when it comes to writing and love, is “you can do anything as long as it works.” And when it doesn’t, take notes.
Susan Shapiro, a Manhattan writing teacher, is the author of memoirs her family hates including The Forgiveness Tour and Five Men Who Broke My Heart, recently optioned for a movie. Follow her on Instagram @profsue123.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Do you have a personal essay you want to share with Newsweek? Send your story to MyTurn@newsweek.com.
