I get asked all the time how women can effectively hide money from their husbands before or during the divorce. This is a tricky question to answer, because it’s generally wrong to hide money from your spouse.
Even if the marriage is essentially over and you hate each other, when you got married you agreed to shared lives and finances. When you’re splitting up, you both have rights to the money and the assets, so neither of you should be hiding money.
I don’t care if you think something should be solely yours because you “worked for it” or you owned it before the marriage. The laws in your state will dictate how the money should be divided. If you didn’t want to be subject to those rules, you should have had a prenuptial agreement or you should not have gotten married. Your feelings of entitlement do not justify hiding money before or during your divorce.
The one big exception to all of this is cases of abuse. If you are the victim of domestic abuse, it may be necessary for you to hide money so you can escape the relationship safely. But even in this situation, you must be prepared to account for all of the money you have hidden. During the divorce, you will be expected to show how much you hid and what you did with it.
Assuming there is a morally and legally justifiable reason to hide money from your spouse, here are some of the most common ways it is done:
- Hiding cash in a safe deposit box, a safe, or with a friend or family member
- Getting gift cards or cash back at the grocery store or big box store
- Siphoning money from paychecks or joint accounts a little at a time and putting the money in a secret account
- Buying valuable assets and hiding them, especially if the assets are bought with cash and are more likely to go undetected
- Overpaying creditors like the IRS or credit cards, and hoping to get a refund of the overpayment after the divorce is over
- Getting paid cash under the table at the job or side hustle
- Having an employer withhold pay like bonuses, commissions, and overtime until after the divorce is over
- Putting accounts or assets in the name of a trusted friend or family member
To be clear, I am not advocating that you hide money in any of these ways. I’m presenting these to you for educational purposes, because it’s possible that your husband is doing some of these things to hide money from you.
If money is being hidden from you in your divorce, you can find it, and you don’t need an expensive forensic accountant to do it. You just need a willingness to dig into your family’s finances to discover what has been going on.
