My husband makes £130k – but I’ve only got £3.43 in the bank because he refuses to have a joint account
My HEART sank when I checked my bank balance online and saw that, yet again, I am almost in the red. The only thing keeping me from going into my overdraft is the £3.43 I have left sitting in my account.
Then I feel a surge of resentment when I think of my husband, who has a six-figure salary and is currently away on a work trip in Munich, probably having a long lunch with a nice bottle of wine on his expense account. While it’s beans on toast for me.
you see, even though we’ve been together for almost 18 years and married for 14, we have separate bank accounts. He earns around four times as much as me and is often oblivious to my financial woes.
I don’t even know what his salary is as he’s so secretive about it and anything much to do with our finances. And while I am a selfemployed writer and lurch from month to month in my overdraft, his corporate job brings in around £130,000 (at least, I think that’s what he said, one of the few times we had a frank discussion about our respective incomes) and lives comfortably on his generous salary.
How can this be? you might well ask. The fact is, we have always had separate accounts and an arrangement where I cover the costs of our three children, and he covers the mortgage and bills.
But it’s become a problem in the past few years. The cost of living crisis has exacerbated things. Our mortgage, which has gone up by £500 a month, and rising utility bills have, he says, left him with less disposable income than ever. In the past, if things were tough for me, I might ask for a top-up but that is not an option in our current circumstances. Plus, the children seem to have become more and more expensive.
Last month, for example, I had to shell out for my teenage son’s new football kit and boots (£155), the deposit for my youngest daughter’s upcoming school trip (£200) and the presents and the party for my middle daughter’s birthday (£325.) And I still haven’t been paid for my last three invoices.
yet every time I broach the thorny topic with my husband, Jack* — ‘do you think it might be time we got a joint account? It’s been a very expensive month’ — he tries to change the subject. ‘Let’s not do this now,’ he says. ‘Things are really difficult at the moment. Our finances are already stretched with the increase in the mortgage and bills. I’m just about managing it but it’s easier for me to keep an eye on things when it’s just one account.’
If pushed, he is, he tells me, building up a pension which both of us will one day benefit from and I should really leave it at that. I’m left feeling that I am being unreasonable or demanding.
Our arrangement, with him covering the basics while I cover the children’s outgoings and the ‘fun’ stuff — days out, lunch at the pub and so on — has become increasingly unmanageable with the costs varying massively from month to month.
So, I wasn’t surprised to hear that an upcoming study, by Mount Saint Mary’s University in the US, found that women face bigger financial burdens than their men. On average, women have less than half of the savings of their male counterparts, have smaller retirement funds and bear the weight of unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
It is clear I’m not alone in feeling aggrieved by financial inequality but my husband won’t seem to accept or address this. At worst, it makes me feel resentful and hostile. ‘ How can we be a team and a partnership if we have separate accounts?’ I say. ‘Isn’t it just easier for me to manage things on my own so you don’t have to worry about them?’ he tells me.
The thing is, until we had our first child just over 13 years ago, we were fairly equal in many respects. I was earning around £35,000 in London and Jack was probably earning double that but, back then, in a two-bedroom flat, I paid only a third of our mortgage while he paid the rest because we had agreed to pay based on our respective incomes. I was grateful, life was good and I didn’t give any thought to getting a joint account.
My mother always told me it was wise to have my own ‘running away fund’ and I was happy not having to answer to anyone about what I spent, least of all my husband. If I wanted a £140 cashmere jumper, so what? I relished my financial independence.
It was when we started a family that things became more difficult. I left my job on a magazine to become self- employed and care for our baby while my husband stayed working full time and got promoted. It’s a wellknown phenomenon — the motherhood penalty.
While his career flourished, mine floundered. Taking a second maternity leave less than two years after our first was born put me out of the game completely for a while.
It was around then that Jack started talking about moving out of London. Our two-bedroom garden flat was bursting at the seams and while I was happier to move further out to the suburbs, Jack said: ‘There is no point living in London if we’re going to live on the outskirts.’
We found a four-bedroom house on the edges of the Home Counties which was great for our family, less so for my career. I started doing a little work in between chasing around after a toddler and a baby but with Jack out by 7am every day and rarely back before 8pm, and the ruinous cost of childcare, there was very little paid work I could do.
And I suppose, if I am perfectly honest, over the years the resentment has grown.
THe indignity of having to ask Jack for a ‘hand out’ if I’ve got a big event coming up — like my old school friend’s 40th a few months ago, when I didn’t have anything left over after I’d forked out for a hotel and dinner, so asked for £100 for drinks and a present — really grates. He rolled his eyes and said he’d transfer the money the next day, but I had to remind him twice. It makes me feel more like his employee than his wife.
I also spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about money. How am I still in this precarious position in my mid-40s?
I’ve never been great with money — definitely a spender rather than a saver — and I racked up about £8,000 worth of debt in credit cards in my 20s. But I never imagined I would still be living in my overdraft in middle age. I thought I’d be financially solvent by now. Sometimes it seems ridiculous that I’m living such a precarious, penny-pinching life when I’m married to a man who is, by all accounts, wealthy.
That said I can’t deny I quite like being blissfully ignorant of our finances at times — such as when Jack is moaning about energy prices going up again — it’s his problem, not mine and ditto the mortgage. I also like that he can’t try to micromanage me or question why I’ve spent £80 on underwear.
But I can’t help feeling our marriage would benefit from more openness. The fact Jack insists on keeping things separate sometimes makes me wonder if we really are, as he claims, a team. Wouldn’t we feel more united with a joint account?
Sometimes, I think I might be better off single but after all these years, I can’t really imagine life without Jack, despite our financial situation.
* Names have been changed