I Wish I Would Have Known
/So many times, I have heard this phrase over the years. It comes from friends, relatives, and even clients who have been or are going through a divorce. The spouse they once trusted implicitly to handle all the finances has hidden large purchases, made bad investments, or kept them out of the family finances simply because they didn’t want to know or be involved. I want to share with you a couple of extreme examples of things that have happened to people I know.
I have a family friend who went through a very difficult divorce years ago. He was the breadwinner, and his wife was able to stay home with their daughter. She took care of the household and did all the things most stay-at-home parents do, like the weekly grocery shopping. From the outside, it looked like the perfect white-picket-fence scenario that many would imagine. What our friend didn’t know, however, was that his wife had been having an affair and was carefully planning her exit by hiding funds in a very creative way. When she was visiting the grocery store each week, she was buying gift cards to all her favorite places and stashing them away. At the time, neither of them was tracking their spending, so there was no one to notice that the grocery bill had started to skyrocket. Those gift cards weren’t traceable and didn’t end up in the financial discovery process of their divorce.
Another friend was married for a few short years. They both worked, but she felt she didn’t have a good handle on the finances. So, she would sign off on whatever her husband decided they were doing when it came to investments or taking out loans but didn’t really attempt to understand it. She trusted him to make the best decisions for both of them. When their marriage broke down and the financial discovery portion of the divorce process came, she found out he had been taking loans from his 401k at work to keep up with their lifestyle. In addition, they had a second mortgage on their home, loans for both the vehicles in their garage, and had nearly maxed out all their credit cards with very little savings. She always knew they had a lot of bills, but never paid attention to the balances or asked about their investments.
These types of things can happen in any marriage and I’m not telling you these stories to scare you or tell you not to trust your spouse. Instead, I’m telling you about these incidents to emphasize the importance of being involved in your joint finances. I encourage you to stop assuming your spouse knows more about finances than you do. Educate yourself, even if that means getting out of your comfort zone to simply ask questions or review bank and investment statements together. Share information with one another on a regular basis and learn to communicate about your finances. Take it one step at a time and commit to learning a little bit day by day so you don’t become the next person saying to your financial planner, “I wish I would have known.”
- Margaret Gooley, CFP®, CDFA®, Worley Erhart-Graves Financial Advisors
