Signs Your Spouse May Be Ripping You Off

Spouses with money secrets Is your spouse cheating on you with money? Maybe. Have you noticed a few dead presidents missing from your wallet or purse lately? A growing number of checks cashed at the grocery store for more than the purchase amount? An unexplained drain on your 401(k) or home equity line of credit? Time to wake up and smell the latte, says Ruth Hayden, a Minnesota-based financial consultant, educator and author of "Your Money Life: The 'Make-It-Work' Workbook." As a financial counselor for many years, she's seen it all. "The major warning sign is when you can't have a reasonable conversation about money," says Hayden. "He or she feels defensive or accusatory, which means he or she has something they're hiding. If it gets a little bigger than that, he or she is able to buy stuff and you can't explain how they can afford it." How do you spot and stop a sneaky spouse? We sorted through Hayden's case book and real-life examples submitted by Bankrate readers to uncover the means and motives of a marital money thief, and then examined effective ways to prevent them from stealing your marriage. Names have been changed to preserve their unions.

The petty thief and the big spender The sneak: Wendy sneaks money from her husband, Rick, by writing checks for more than the purchase amount and buying goods on a credit card, then returning the items for cash. Rick has his own habit of buying big-ticket items he wants, such as outboard motors, without consulting Wendy. The reason: Wendy's behavior fits an ancient tradition in which women pilfered money for security in a male-dominated society. "There's a Yiddish word, 'knipples,' which means little pots of money," says Hayden. "If a person pilfers, usually it's a female and I look into how powerless she feels." Rick's behavior is classically male. "Men do it in larger amounts to show off to their buddies, to be the big man," Hayden says. Wendy considers her knipples a "balancer" for what she views as Rick's excesses. Rick considers most of Wendy's spending wasteful or frivolous. The fix: "If we can rebalance it and make everything transparent, it goes away," Hayden says. Wendy and Rick need to acknowledge their spending, respect each other's needs and work toward a yours-mine-and-ours approach to household finances. Communication without recrimination saved this marriage.

The day-trader who gambled his marriage The sneak: Jim is a loving husband, a great dad and a respected doctor. But unbeknown to his wife, Diane, he's also a closet online trader. When she discovered how much money he'd lost, she showed him a little market volatility of her own. The reason: Successful people often wind up that way by taking risks and overcoming challenges. Little wonder that, once successful, they may search out hobbies that satisfy their thirst for adventure. Jim's major misstep was keeping his a secret from Diane. The fix: Don't change Jim, just constrain him. "The way we solved it was to have him open up a checking account, and he got an amount of money from their monthly cash flow," says Hayden. "He could do anything he wanted with it as long as it wasn't illegal. If he loses it all, the family is still fine. I knew if he didn't do that, he would start trading again on the side." What about Diane? "She got the same amount of money to do whatever she wanted," Hayden says. "And because he had put them on such a roller coaster, I think she's hoarding it."

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