Healing From Infidelity

Helping women heal from the betrayal of infidelity is the focus of Andrea Giles. She knows all too well how infidelity destroys a marriage, shakes your confidence in yourself, and leaves you wondering whether you'll ever be able to trust a romantic partner again. Andrea became a certified life coach to help women deal with the fallout after discovering a spouse's infidelity.

We had a chance to to talk on her podcast, Heal From Infidelity, about the intersection of financial and romantic infidelity. When there is romantic infidelity, financial infidelity often comes into play too because your spouse will need access to money that you won't miss.

What is Financial Infidelity?

If your husband is lying to you about money, that's financial infidelity. It could include making secret purchases, having secret accounts, hiding your financial situation from you, not letting you see account statements, or violating agreements that you have with each other about saving and spending money.

Whether your spouse is hiding assets, lying about money, or a combination of both, you may be the victim of financial infidelity.

How to Find the Money

Andrea and I talked about the Divorce Money Guide and how it is the perfect divorce companion to help you find the money, understand your finances, find any financial infidelity, and more.  The financial issues in divorce are the most worrisome for women, and often it can feel like you will never get your "financial justice" in the process. But I want to change that for women and give them tools to have more financial control in the process.

When Financial Infidelity Is Combined With Romantic Infidelity

The financial price of infidelity is high. One of the big things I see is money spent on an affair partner. This most commonly includes hotels, meals, travel, and gifts. But it could also include paying the affair partner's rent, car payment, or credit card bill.

Any money spent on the affair partner belongs to your family! That money was half yours and you can get that money back if you can prove the money was spent on an affair. How do you get it back after it has already been spent? Most of the time the money is recovered when dividing the assets that you and your husband own jointly. Instead of getting the typical "half" of an account, you might get a higher percentage to reimburse you for the money spent on the affair partner.

Setting Aside Money to Survive

If you are a stay at home parent and not earning income of your own, it is vital to have some financial security during your divorce. You must plan to have money available to you  during your divorce.

If you have a joint account, be prepared to take money out of the joint account and move it to an account in your own name. This may feel shady. IT IS NOT. You have rights to that money just as much as your spouse does. And remember... your spouse is working and has money coming in on a regular basis. Once you split, you won't have any money coming in, so this money that you move will be your safety money.

Be prepared to account for how you use the money you move. And when the divorce is settled, you may owe some of that money back to your husband. BUT... that's far better than filing for divorce and having him clean out the bank account, leaving you with nothing.

Accepting a Settlement too Soon

You may feel exhausted by your divorce and just want peace. Andrea and I talked about how we both encourage women to slow down if they find themselves in this place to make sure they are not harming their financial futures by agreeing too soon to a settlement that just isn't fair.

You have to be strategic about your divorce settlement. You need to know enough about the money. Your ex may be trying to outspend you through the divorce process to make sure you don't get the settlement you deserve. You need to evaluate the cost and benefit of settling at this time. 

Here is my go-to when your husband is pushing you to settle but hasn't given you all the information you need:

I will be happy to make a swift decision once I have ALL the information. Once I have the missing documents, I can look everything over and make a quick decision. 

Listen to the Full Podcast Now

It was such a great conversation with Andrea, you don't want to miss the full episode. Check out this episode and all the other podcasts I have been a guest on.