Financial Infidelity

Shannon discovered it in her marriage. She called up her financial planner to ask for help getting out of debt. The financial planner asked her, “Shannon, what kind of debt are we talking about?” Shannon replied, “$30,000.00!” How did she discover it?

Well, a few weeks before, she got a call from a video store telling her that one of their movies needed to be returned and the late fees needed to be paid. When she asked the name of the movie, they replied with some title that was obviously pornographic. Shannon replied that there had to be some mistake because they didn’t rent movies like that. A couple of days later, they called back with the same story. When she gave the same reply, the video store clerk said, Well, then someone stole yourcredit card because this is the account we have in our records.’ So she went down to the store to straighten them out. They showed her the rental agreement and she recognized her husband’s signature.

Shannon was devastated. She began to investigate and discovered that, not only was her husband renting porn flicks without her knowledge, he was behind on car payments and life insurance payments and had a stack of unpaid credit card bills. One of the cards had many charges from pornographic web sites. Shannon had never suspected anything, but she was now the proud co-owner of a 30,000.00 debt for many items that actually betrayed her own trust.

So she and her husband went to work on the problem along with their financial advisor. After three years, they managed to work their way out of debt. Dave Ramsey would have celebrated if they had called into his show, but guess what? Two years later, her husband has again run up more than 30,000 more dollars in credit card debt, back taxes, and loans against their retirement fund. Shannon could end up in legal trouble because of the tax situation. What happened? Well five years ago the issue was treated as a purely financial problem. Wrong. The money mess was a symptom of something else. It was a symptom of financial infidelity.