When I broke the news to my sister and best friend, I was loosely using the term “money laundering.” Stupid me—the money wasn’t obtained illegally. It was (half) made by me. By prostituting my self-respect and dignity at work. With my cunt boss and toxic culture. If it had been illegal, I probably wouldn’t feel so aggrieved. Maybe he would go to prison for a bit, and I would get a rest.
My husband and I had an agreement. It was simple: we’d each keep a fixed amount in our personal accounts each month. The rest was transferred to the joint account. The joint account was for savings and bills. Simple and effective. So we both had the same play money, and there was no judgment on what we did with this money. Anything in the joint account was a joint decision.
Now, I’m not a things person—in that, I mean a consumerist. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I go through peaks and troughs—one month I’m obsessed with bras, the next it’s jeans, trousers, or jumpsuits. But during Covid, I committed to a 12-month self-imposed shopping ban.
It helped that I mainly lived in the same three outfits throughout Covid. And my weight fluctuated so much that I could have been a size 8 to 14. But I didn’t feel a loss and realised shopping didn’t really give me the high I wanted. Don’t get me wrong—I love clothes, but I hate everything that follows: the aftercare, the washing, and finding space for it. Just loads of clothes/shoes/bags that don’t even get an outing—the constant need to want. I find owning things so stressful.
My husband, on the other hand, is the perfect consumer. From trying the whole of the M&S Christmas specials every year to branded clothes. He loves a little logo over his left nipple. These logos vary—sometimes a horse, rectangles in white, red, and blue, but his favourite is the mighty “G.” He’d buy literal shit if it had a designer label on it. Case in point: he once spent £300 on a Gant coat. He said it was half price. Maybe it was filled with down? No—filled with recycled plastic. He is a walking recycling point. Maybe he wants to do his bit for the environment? He owns so many bags, hoodies, rugby tops, and trainers. If he likes it, he will buy it in every colour. This hoarding is not exclusively for clothes. Once, when he had sciatica, he stocked up on ice spray—eight bottles, excluding the three he finished. What kind of holy hell are we preparing for that requires eight cans of ice spray?
Maybe I wouldn’t mind so much if he was generous with it. I can pretty much guarantee if anyone in my family came to my house with sciatica, he would recommend the ice spray but never just hand one over. Not his style.
So, needless to say, he had no personal funds saved. His money would just come in and out of his personal account like a wave. Me? I saved, invested, and paid for massages.
Anyway, back to the story. I leave my husband to it with all the bills and stuff in the joint account. I handle the big financial stuff: mortgage, renovations, and buying investments. He takes care of day-to-day expenses, bills, and savings.
As long as we can run the house, I’m good. That includes being able to buffer big expenses like the car/boiler fucking up. If the air feels stressed when the dryer breaks down, I am going to have to intervene. Now, he’d been warning me for months that the joint account was running low. He even asked me to transfer money from my personal account to top up the joint account. He said he would do the same.
At the time, I was dealing with an ADHD diagnosis for my daughter. If anyone has been through the process, they will know this is a process that can take over a year. And this is privately! So I had no time for additional projects. At the time, I just transferred the amount from my personal account.
Then we started talking about big school trip expenses. Now, I don’t mind talking about them, but never talking about my kids not going. I have no issues getting my son to hustle for the spending money. But the actual trip cost? As far as I am concerned, my children have no influence over this—the price is the price.
So it looked like this investigation project needed prioritising! In my head, I shuffled a couple of projects around. Scheduling? The next time I had mental capacity, 0–6 month timeline. Mental capacity could be decreased at a moment’s notice by:
- A child being sick – follow-up doctor/hospital appointments.
- School shit – children fucking things up, other kids/teachers fucking with my kids, or a parents’ evening.
- Family/friend shit – someone not doing what they should or being extra!
- Being sick myself!
- Work – being a cunt with deadlines and stupid expectations, all marinated in a toxic culture and fear of redundancy.
- Other – this includes all the other thinking I have to do and catastrophising. This includes clearing out my wardrobe.
Then by pure chance, I walked past him while he had the joint account pulled up on his laptop. We weren’t quite in deficit, but we were close. I said, “One minute,” and put my glasses on. “Scroll down, let me have a look at the incomings—apply the filter.” Turns out my husband had been siphoning money out of the joint account into a separate car account. Okay, not quite, but he was putting in much less than he should each month. I felt sick. My eyes felt wavy—too much information for one day. I didn’t have the headspace to see quite how long this was going on. My mind started glitching. I turned to him to ask if he was aware of the agreement we had. He said yes—but he was saving for a car. At which point, I pointed out that we had a car on the drive, which does approximately 4,000 miles a year. He assured me it was a decision he had made for the family, as an individual.
I explained that a decision for the family should be made by the family. We have plumbing to fix in the house. The outside wall needs repairing. And we should discuss how much we can contribute to financing our children through university. For one of them we were only a year away.
I said, “You need to transfer the right amount to the joint account.” Also, that he would need to reconcile back to when he started to do this. He told me he didn’t know if he could do that. Now, looking back, I am so proud of myself. As the cortisol flooded my body, I could feel the heat rising. I was standing behind him, I wanted to push the back of his head into the keyboard. With his face squashed to the table, I wanted to ask him if he could see himself do it now?
Instead, I told him he had a week to sort it out.
The other day, I walked downstairs, and it was like walking in on Rain Man. He was muttering random numbers—”15, 67, 89, 46″—before proudly announcing that he was “starting the reconciliation.” Yeah, oh, okay! I thought, bitch, I am going to do my own reconciliation, and I do numbers for a living! My G-spot is a spreadsheet, and a reconciliation is my lube. Game on!
Honestly, why can’t people just do what they say they are going to do?
I need a lie-down now.
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