Financial Abuse: Understanding it and Overcoming it

Financial abuse is domestic abuse. 

It’s hidden and insidious, running the gamut from stealing and gaslighting to complete control of a person’s finances. 

I am not a therapist or social worker. I’m not trained to identify financial abuse or in victim recovery.  I’m just a normal person, like you, who got involved with the wrong man. He became financially abusive, and I’m lucky that what they did only scratched the surface of what financial abuse entails.

Others aren’t so lucky. 

What is Financial Abuse?

Financial abuse comes in many forms, but at its core, it’s a situation where one person regularly and purposefully takes advantage of or controls another person’s financial resources. 

The intent can be to maintain power and control in the relationship or use the other person’s financial resources for personal gain at the victim’s expense. 

Discussions on Financial Abuse Crucial

Financial abuse is not only terrifying but also embarrassing. It flies under the radar because victims are too ashamed to speak up. It leaves no physical scars, so loved ones might not notice it’s happening. 

Despite the hidden nature, financial abuse can wreak havoc on victims’ lives for years to come. 

It’s time to shine a light on this genuine issue that affects millions of people and to show solidarity to people who have experienced financial abuse and can’t speak up. 

It’s not your fault. 

If you’ve never experienced financial abuse, this article can help you see subtle signs that someone you love might be a victim and help you avoid similar situations in the future. 

Examples of Financial Abuse

Financial abuse can play out in thousands of different ways. 

Below are some examples of how abusers try to access their victim’s resources. 

Stealing and Gaslighting

My ex-boyfriend stole cash out of my wallet, and then he’d gaslight me about. He’d have hundreds of reasons why the money was gone, and all were my fault. 

Maybe I never had that twenty dollars in the first place, or maybe I spent it on something else and forgot. It’s also possible that I dropped it somewhere. 

Even though I’m generally good with money and had never regularly lost cash like this before, I started questioning myself. Maybe I did lose it.

Using Your Cards Without Permission

He would also use my credit card to purchase subscriptions to game services like Xbox Online. I couldn’t understand why my account was being charged every month, even though he always told me he canceled. 

He played dumb, pretending that it was Xbox’s mistake. It would disappear and then turn up again a month or so later. I finally had to make my bank block any charges from Xbox to stop the charges. 

He claimed he didn’t know what was happening, but looking back, I know exactly what was happening. He stole my card and used it for his Xbox subscription, thinking I wouldn’t notice the ten-dollar-a-month charge. Then, he played dumb and pretended he was trying to fix it to keep using the service.

Forcing You To Subsidize His Life

An insidious form of financial abuse pops up on the internet all the time as women seek advice about their situations. 

In these stories, the men (and in the forums, it’s nearly always men attempting this) typically earn far more money than their girlfriends yet insist on a 50/50 financial split when moving in together. That wouldn’t be so bad if the men worked within the girlfriend’s budget, but they never do. 

They always want to live in luxury apartments closer to their jobs, which stretch their girlfriends’ budgets to the limit. The women live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay their half of the bills, while the men fund their personal retirement savings, take lavish vacations, and buy fancy sports cars. 

He can only afford his lavish lifestyle because he’s forcing her to overextend herself under the guise of “50/50.” But if she complains or asks for a more equitable split, she’s a “gold digger” after his money. 

Lines of Credit

It gets even more severe when abusers open lines of credit with no intention to pay them off. 

Married abusers will open secret credit cards, charge up massive bills, and leave their spouses responsible for the debt that they never even knew about. Some victims discover thousands of dollars of debt in divorce proceedings. Since it was opened while they were married, both parties are responsible, but the abuser often doesn’t have the means to pay anything or the credit to care. 

Sometimes, parents open credit cards in their children’s names, leaving their kids holding the bag. 

Controlling the Household Income

In many cases of financial abuse, the abuser controls the household income. Though this situation often occurs when one partner stays home to raise kids, it can also happen when both partners work. 

All the money goes into the abuser’s personal accounts, which the victim can’t access. The abuser decides how to spend money. They control the budget, the retirement accounts, the investments, and the spending money. The victim gets nothing. Sometimes, they can’t even buy themselves a cup of coffee or afford groceries. 

Economic Abuse

Economic abuse covers the most severe forms of financial abuse. According to Wikipedia, in this type of abuse, one person has complete control over the other’s financial resources -bank accounts, paychecks, etc. 

The abuser decides whether the victim can even have money to meet their basic needs. In addition, the abuser will prevent the victim from doing things that will improve their situation by denying access to educational opportunities and preventing the victim from getting a job. 

Economic abuse leaves the victim completely reliant on the abuser for survival.

Who Is At Risk For Financial Abuse?

Many groups have risk factors for financial abuse. These groups include the elderly, intimate partners, and children.  

Because these relationship dynamics are so different, it’s prudent to break down the examples by relationship type.  

Elder Financial Abuse

Financial abuse is an unfortunately prevalent form of elder abuse. Older adults are at high risk of abuse by their caregivers, family members, and financial scammers.

Caregivers often abuse their patients financially by convincing them to rewrite their wills, forging the victim’s signature, and using the victim’s property without permission. Frequently, the victim no longer has the mental faculties to understand what they are doing, and caregivers take advantage of that.

These caregivers can also be family members. I’ve read far too many stories on Reddit about a distant family member swooping in on the eve of a parent’s death, demanding to be included in a will, or taking items without permission. It’s so sad to see people’s true colors emerge when the possibility of inheritance is at play, and it’s heartbreaking that so many people seem to care more about what they will get than the person they are getting it from. 

There are also a plethora of scams that target older Americans for financial abuse. The scams typically feature an online “partner” who insists the victim send them money. Although these scams don’t only target the elderly, they’re more vulnerable, whether due to loneliness or declining health. Check out the National Council on Aging’s thorough resource on the top scams that target elderly populations.

If you believe one of you family members is being abused financially, please contact Adult Protective Services. They can help vulnerable adults escape abusive situations. 

Financial Abuse in a Relationship

Financial abuse is a form of intimate partner violence. It often goes hand in hand with emotional abuse and sometimes even physical abuse. Abusers don’t generally stick to one form – they tend to escalate.

In my case, I was specifically targeted because I was vulnerable. I had just escaped an emotionally abusive relationship which actually did escalate to physical abuse at the end, and I was open about it. 

That was a big mistake. 

He knew he just had to act like he cared in order to get me to pay for stuff. I was so desperate to be loved and respected for me after enduring that misery for five years that I would have done anything for someone who would be a true partner – so he pretended to be that.

It took me a year to realize it was all just pretend. 

He said whatever I wanted to hear while stealing from me behind my back. He’d slyly add gift cards onto the conveyor belt at the grocery store -and when I mentioned the price seemed high he’d tell me I must have miscounted while hiding the receipt. I won’t go as far as to say that he was a narcissist, as I’m not a trained psychologist, but he sure was stingy with his own money and free with mine. 

Am I the Abusive One?

Sometimes, an abuser will go to great lengths to gaslight you and make you think that you are the abusive one. My ex regularly made me think I was a financial bully. 

When we fought about him blowing his money on video games, he always turned the argument around. Why do I get a say in how he spends his money? He works, he should be able to treat himself. I’m a terrible person for telling him what to do.

And the thing is, I believed him. It wasn’t my place to tell him where to spend his money, even if that meant I had to spend even more money to pick up his slack. I made more, I could afford it. He would also bring up the fact that I splurged once on an eighty-dollar bag – if I could do it so could he, right? Why am I allowed to make a one-time purchase of something that would bring me joy, but he’s not?

The answer is because that (one time) eighty-dollar purchase did not prevent me from paying any of my bills. I didn’t expect him to subsidize any of my purchases or my bills. I only requested a tiny portion of his paycheck to help cover the bills. 

But, if I brought that up, I was just a horrible girlfriend who controlled his spending and didn’t let him have any fun. 

Spending My Money

He used similar tactics when it came to spending my money. I wanted to go out for a cheap dinner—I was on a budget and had a certain price point in mind. We decided upon a restaurant, and I told him I didn’t want him to order any adult drinks because those could easily add twenty to thirty dollars to the final bill. 

Instead of being understanding, he used my previous relationship against me. He turned it into a trust issue and accused me of thinking he was an alcoholic like my ex. He made me feel horrible for even asking him to abstain, and made a huge deal of comparing himself to my ex. 

That horrible relationship was still fresh in my mind, so I started questioning myself. Was I only telling him to abstain for fear he would turn into my ex? Was I being unreasonable and holding my previous experiences against him? I never wanted to be that person. Of course, in the end, he ordered a few margaritas, which I paid for. 

He always found a reason why it was okay to spend my money.

Codependency 

That’s not even the worst of it though. He knew that I struggled with codpendency due to the abuse I suffered in my previous relationship. My issues made it difficult for me to set boundaries and to say “No”. So he didn’t even feel the need to ask me to pay for things. He would just talk about them as if they were already happening, knowing full well I wouldn’t say no if he acted like I had already said yes.

For example, he coerced me into paying for him to fly to bring his daughter to Georgia for a visit. He never asked if I would pay for it, he just started talking about doing it. Researching tickets. Telling me when the best flights were. The thing is, we both knew he couldn’t afford to pay for it. He just assumed I would, and didn’t even feel the need to ask. Acting like it was a done deal was a manipulation tactic that he used to prevent me from saying no. He did this all the time.

I get that it was partly my fault for not having boundaries and not being able to say no. At first, I just blamed myself for my weakness. But, I realized that it was also his fault. He manipulated me on purpose to get what he wanted. 

Good people don’t do that to each other.

More Severe Examples of Financial Abuse

I was lucky, in that I could afford those things and his abuse didn’t destroy me. But financial abuse in relationships can be much more severe.

Some abusers will take out additional lines of credit in their victim’s names, force all earnings into a bank account that only they have access to, and prevent access to family resources.

The most terrifying forms of financial abuse come from stay-at-home parents and their financially abusive spouses. 

Usually, one person in the relationship decides to stay at home, while the other works. In a healthy relationship, it’s acknowledged that the partner who stays home is contributing just as much to the household as the working spouse. However, in an abusive relationship, the working spouse holds the fact that they make the money over their partner’s head. They hoard resources, make all the decisions, and make the stay-at-home partner feel bad about needing anything. This dynamic can also lead to increased isolation of the victim, as they have no money to even try to escape.

Financial Abuse of Children

Sadly, sometimes the perpetrators of abuse are the very people that are meant to protect us. Yes, I’m talking about parents financially abusing their children, and yes, it happens.

There are instances of parents using their children’s social security numbers to open lines of credit, parents forcing their children to help pay for their own expenses, and parents taking advantage of their children’s love and admiration for them. Often times the kids involved will feel horrible about involving the police or filing an actual report, because “it’s my mom”.

Financial abuse of children is a form of child abuse. It destroys a child’s credit before they can even legally access it, and it may take years for them to recoup the losses. They are also rarely even in a position to realize that it’s happening until they are old enough to apply for their own credit.

Overcoming Financial Abuse

The best way to overcome financial abuse is to get help. Talk to a therapist about your situation. Therapy helped me understand my codependency, and helped me learn how to set healthy boundaries.

It’s not always easy. I still struggle to say “no” to an intimate partner, but, I’m learning and growing every day. I also learned to recognize some red flags of manipulative behavior, and now I have a partner who doesn’t do those things. It would have been so easy to fall back into those old habits if I had dated someone else with ulterior motives.

Sometimes its might be better to stay single for a while – to learn and grow and develop on your own. I can’t tell you which path is right for you, these are things that should be discussed with a therapist.

Help for Financial Abuse

If you or someone you love is being abused financially, there is help. The National Domestic Violence Hotline helps victims of all types of abuse. Call 1-800-799-7233.

 

Get help – Call 1800-799-7233

It’s important to remember that abuse of any kind: financial abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, etc. is never the fault of the victim. Although we may feel shame for feeling like we allowed it, the fault lies with the perpetrator. They are the ones who purposefully hurt us, and they are the ones who made us feel guilty about it.

If you’ve experienced anything similar to what I’ve written about in this post, please get help.  A therapist can help you identify the cycles of abuse that you’ve experienced, and give you tools for setting boundaries and preventing further abuse.