Is Financial Infidelity Abuse? (signs, how to protect yourself and recovery advice)

Halima: [00:23:05] I lost everything except for my children.

Ramit Sethi: [00:23:09] Do you mind telling me a little bit of what happened?

Halima: [00:23:11] No, I don’t mind. With my first marriage, I divorced my ex-husband because of financial infidelity.

Ramit Sethi: [00:23:22] What happened?

Halima: [00:23:24] We were going under, and I didn’t know. I was a high school teacher, and I had a great job, and I got pregnant with my firstborn and decided that I wanted to be a housewife and have babies, raise children. And that the man of the house was going to work. And my ex-husband was in banking. He was in finance. And to me, I feel like if you’re dealing with money, you know everything about money.

Ramit Sethi: [00:24:07] Ah.

Halima: [00:24:08] Yeah, yeah. The house that we purchased when I was working, we were going into foreclosure. He was responsible for all the bills, and I trusted him with that as any good wife. In the beginning, I was married to my ex for about 10 years, 12 years total, being together with him. So I trusted him, and I loved him.

The house was being sold because I thought that—I was pregnant with my second now. They’re only 16 months apart, and we needed to upgrade. We were living in a really small 1,200 square foot home, so we wanted to upgrade and buy something bigger and better. So for about six months while we were—we sold the house, but it was actually foreclosed. The bank took it.

Ramit Sethi: [00:25:10] You didn’t know this?

Halima: [00:25:11] I didn’t know this. I didn’t know this.

Ramit Sethi: [00:25:13] Wow.

Halima: [00:25:13] We ended up renting a house. And while we were renting this house and sold our home, with that money, we were going to buy something bigger. So for about six months, I became really, really good friends with the real estate agent that we were working with because my Saturdays and Sundays would be going to look at homes with him. Even weekdays, we’d look at homes. So it was this grand plan for him to drag things on because he knew that once I found out, I was going to leave him.

And it ended the day after Halloween, on November 1st, 2019. We got a knock on the door. It was the owner of the house with the sheriff, another cop, evicting us. My son, at the time, was about 18 months old. My daughter was a little bit older. They were both in diapers, and I still have the hamper that’s downstairs that I was able to fill in with whatever I could. And that’s how I left the house.

And my whole foundation, my whole world came crashing down. Long story short, he left the country because there was really nowhere else for him to go. Nobody trusted him anymore. He was borrowing money left and right. Nobody believed him anymore. And he left me with the two babies.