Financial Infidelity

Do you spend money you don’t want your spouse to know about behind his or her back? If you do, what you are doing is called financial infidelity because you are cheating on your spouse by spending without their knowledge.


It’s understandable why people do it. They don’t want to have fights over money and they want to keep the peace and maybe they should, considering finances are the number one cause of divorce. Also, many believe, it is “my” or “our” money, so I should be able to spend it how I want. However, if you know your spouse would be displeased if they found out, it’s still financial infidelity.


The kicker is, if you can do an excellent job of hiding it from your spouse, then, good for you, but if they find out, especially when you’ve done it over a long period of time, you are in serious trouble that could lead to major problems which can wreck your marriage and home.


Part of the problem is the action exposes the fact that you can’t be honest with your spouse, which is a symptom of other relationship issues such as unequal power, control issues, shopaholism, financial mismanagement, frivolousness, impulse spending, and lack of communication.


To have marital peace, each spouse needs to have their own money coming in regularly, no matter how small, so they don’t have to explain each purchase they make. Especially women, so they don’t’ have to account for each cent they spend on themselves or their kids and are not left high and dry if a spouse leaves them.


The best way to deal with financial infidelity is prevention by marrying a person who respects you and your judgment as a person. This is an important take away because if a person knows you make good decisions regularly, when you make one or two bad decisions, it won’t be a big deal since we are all fallible human beings and they do the same thing once in a while as well.


The second thing is to not have all your money together. In other words, have three bank accounts. Have one for the wife, one for the husband and the third for the home. This will enable each person to protect their financial independence, instead of one person being at the financial mercy of the other person, which is good for the relationship. Financial independence is vital a good long term marriage.

Also, before you make any major financial decisions, mentally trade places with your spouse and view the situation from their perspective, so you can see the situation differently and honestly evaluate your decision to make the purchase or not.


Ultimately, keep in mind that a penny saved is a penny earned and focus on saving for rainy days or being frugal especially in these financially unstable times, instead of wasting your money away on things you don’t need just to keep up with the Joneses.

Also, you can become someone with an online masters degree in social work to help couples with financial infidelity work out their problems.

A word is enough for the wise...