Financial Infidelity: A Sink Hole on the Road to Personal Finance Mastery

Last updated on July 5th, 2022 at 11:16 am

Just as I was pondering this week’s installment about my Dream of Personal Finance Mastery, word of a recent Harris Interactive Poll hit my morning news. You can see whole the story on Reuters: Three in 10 Americans commit financial infidelity, but let’s cut to the chase.

Three in ten Americans are committing financial infidelity

That means: lying to a spouse or significant other about how much money they earn, have socked away somewhere, or spend.

The seeds sown by financial infidelity, according to the Harris poll, bear some ugly fruit – up to and including divorce.

The majority of the unfaithful are lying about a stash of cash. But that would not be me. My infidelity is about where our money goes, how much we owe, and how close to the edge we skate at any given point.

Picture yourself in this position.

Your partner and you have a peculiar co-dependency about money – meaning, you help each other not communicate about it. He has a tough commute and an extremely demanding job, you’re always running behind on your task list and haven’t gathered all the information you need, and blah blah blah.

In other words, you each avoid The Conversation with equal passive/aggressive fervor.

The real problem is that you have starkly different attitudes about money. He believes that it’s always easier to cut expenses than to earn more money, therefore thrift and conservation are his priorities. You prefer to believe that you can always work harder and earn more money, so you aren’t motivated by cutting back, and you spend whatever’s on hand, and make a vague plan to get more money by working harder.

Simply put: He is cheap. You are profligate. Kind of a big difference.

When you have managed to converse about the state of your finances, these conversations, while never mean or rude, have always come down to that fundamental difference.

“What did you spend on this organic chicken?” he asks if he wanders into the kitchen before you’ve managed to throw out the packaging.

“It was on sale for $3.29,” you say.

“For CHICKEN?” he gasps.

“Yes, and no one injected it with salt water or fed it hormones,” you might retort.

He feels like you are insulting his thrift, and you feel like he is questioning your priorities. Ow, that hurts.

If you do manage to have a real talk about money, by the time you finally slog to the end of the interminable cash flow review, you are so sunk in nursing your individual wounds that it takes the rest of the evening to get back to your usual comfortable, warm relationship.

Makes you want to sign up to do that every week, doesn’t it? No. Not really.

So you avoid it, and he lets you. You lie (by omission, which makes you feel better about it than if you actually uttered lying words). You skip paying a bill and sweat catching it up before he realizes it. You worry alone while he is just there, in the dark.

It’s not good and guess what. By lying to your partner, you’re lying to me. You don’t want to look at it! You want to put your fingers in your ears and sing really loudly so you don’t have to hear about it. You get to avoid being accountable, and you actually prevent him from taking any accountability. This does not accomplish anything productive at all.

You would like to change this behavior this very day, except for the fact that you just spent $49 on a bottle of Grey Goose Citron for your friend’s 50th birthday. Take a minute to picture THAT conversation. Hint: substitute the word “vodka” for “chicken” in the above snippet.

Do you know what I just discovered? Changing all the pronouns in this post from “I” to “you” made it so much easier to look at the behavior! So here is what I would advise you – um, myself.

Start today

• Make a simple list of everything you spent today.
• Leave all the judgment out of it, just write it down, then stick it up on the refrigerator where you’ll see it on a regular basis.
• Ask yourself calmly and objectively if it was worth it to work this hard today to buy that organic chicken/fancy vodka.
• If the answer is yes, be happy with your choice.
• If the answer is no, think of a different way to do it. Feel good about your money choices whenever you can.
• Recognize there’s no crime in having a different perspective from your partner’s, or in him having a different perspective from yours.

I know. It’s not quite there, is it? There’s still some financial infidelity going on if you’re not talking to your partner yet. But one step at a time. Learn to look at it, yourself, and THEN work on showing it to your partner.

Jayne Speich

Jayne Speich is a small business coach/consultant who writes, thinks, and coaches extensively on customer service, business finance, and ways to thrive in the new economy.