The Secret Stash

By LESLIE WHITAKER

Angela has been concealing money from the men in her life ever since high school. "When I started dating, my mother said to always bring some money on your person so you can get your own way home," she recalls. So Angela would neatly tuck a $10 bill in the bottom of her shoe as cab fare in case the date went sour.

Now 51, Angela, a publicist in Ohio, has been happily married for 20 years, yet she continues to feel the need for a secret stash of cash. "I always want to have a little on the side just in case I have to pick up in the middle of the night," she confesses. "You never know what's around the next corner." By pocketing a portion of the money that's budgeted for her lunches at work and keeping her gas-mileage reimbursement checks--"the money my husband never sees"--Angela (who, for obvious reasons, prefers not to be identified by her full name) has amassed wads of $10 and $20 bills. Her stash is shoved deep in the bottom of three extra purses she keeps in her bedroom closet. Current total: $5,000.

Angela's creative approach to home economics is only the latest chapter in a long and storied female tradition. Wives have probably been hiding money from their husbands since marriage was invented. The Japanese have a special term for the secret funds: hesokuri, variously translated as belly-button money or spindle money. Before the revision of marital-property laws, a state-by-state process that took until the 1930s, American women had good reason to be stealthy about their hoards, says Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer, author of the Social Meaning Of Money. All household property legally belonged to their husbands. Zelizer tells of an early 20th century husband who got so tired of his wife's pinching coins from his trousers while he slept that he set a small rat trap in his pocket. Caught literally red-handed at 2 a.m., the wife filed charges against him the next day; but the judge dismissed them, upholding a husband's right to safeguard even his small change.

But that was 1905. What's surprising is that today, despite greatly expanded financial opportunities and legal rights, women still feel the need to play this cat-and-mouse game, albeit an updated version. No one knows how many wives hide money from their husbands, but there is evidence that the practice is widespread. A survey of 1,000 professional women conducted by working woman magazine in 1995 found that 13% of those interviewed had a secret stash. Women who have been divorced may be more likely to keep hidden funds: 1 in 4 women surveyed in 1999 by the Stepfamily Association of America, 71% of whom were married for the second time, said they kept some money aside. Author Heidi Evans estimates that millions of wives hide money. For her 1999 book, How To Hide Money From Your Husband ... and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg, Evans interviewed women ages 26 to 83 whose secret stockpiles ranged from a mere $200 to a mountainous $200,000. "It's something of a sisterhood," she says.

Like Angela, many secret stashers are saving for a rainy-day catastrophe--divorce, unemployment or a sudden shortfall in the family budget. Donna Johns, 44, of Ocala, Fla., started depositing spare change in an olive jar hidden in a kitchen cabinet after giving birth to a premature baby six years ago. She had quit her job to care for the infant, so money was tight. "You'd be impressed at how fast it adds up," she says. Over the years, the olive jar, which reached $600 at its peak, has paid for Christmas presents and car insurance. Relieved whenever his wife comes up with extra cash, Donna's husband doesn't probe.

For other women, the secret funds are simply a way to acquire some financial independence. Jennifer, 40, started her stash several years ago, when she ran a home-based business and got tired of her husband's nosing around in her books. "Every time I turned around, he'd ask me which bills I had paid and how much was in my bank account," she complains. "It was aggravating." So with a few computer keystrokes, Jennifer altered the entries in her Quicken accounting program, derailing her husband's ability to keep track of her income.

Now that Jennifer works for an insurance company, she cashes her child-care reimbursement checks and stores her loot in a secret location in her bedroom. She spends the money on clothes for work and toys for the kids. "It's not like I waste it," she says. "It's just kind of nice to have your own stash and know you don't have to answer for it."

Such views are common in an age when women are marrying later in life and bringing more of their own hard-earned money to the altar. When Terri, an executive at a nonprofit organization, wedded at age 30, she already had a thriving career and her own condominium. "I brought assets, and my husband brought debts," she says. Instead of commingling all her resources, she secretly deposited $25,000 from the sale of her condo into a bank account that listed her mother's address.

Is such dissembling an act of bad faith, or is it merely an act of pragmatism in an era when only half of marriages survive? "People still want to be committed to a long-term, lasting relationship, but we've become a society in which you can't depend on permanence," says New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson. "They need to be and feel economically self-sufficient, but that flies in the face of our ideals of trust and companionship. Typically, when we are faced with two competing, irreconcilable values, we pursue both and deny the inherent contradiction," she explains. "One form of denial is secrecy."

Keeping secrets from the people we love is extremely common, experts say, and money is among the most difficult subjects for couples to discuss openly. Forty percent of the men and women polled by reader's digest in 2001 admitted lying to their spouses. The most frequent lie--covering up the price of a purchase--was money related. While such relatively minor fibs are by far the most common, women's more substantial financial secrets range from saving money to surprise a spouse with an expensive gift to hiding assets from a husband in anticipation of a divorce.

Of course, if an unsuspecting spouse discovers a large stash, it can undermine the trust in a marriage. Psychologists point to another danger: stashes that are used to avoid conflict. "Money is such a loaded issue, many couples don't have the communication skills to talk about it," says Ellyn Bader, co-founder of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. But if you never engage your husband in frank discussions about the budget, you may drift further apart, she warns. "I see lots of premature divorces among couples who keep things so toned down that eventually the relationship feels empty."

Many financial planners offer a fairly straightforward solution: three bank accounts--yours, mine and ours. Simply deposit the bulk of the family income into the "ours" account, which can be used to cover joint expenses, such as the mortgage. Then set aside a monthly allowance to be deposited in "his" and "hers" accounts, which can be spent as each partner pleases, no questions asked.

A Seattle couple has opted to stick with the stash but set aside the secrecy. Cindy, 53, started stockpiling cash in the late 1990s, when the family business slumped. "There was a lot of tension, and I had seen some ugly divorces," she explains. so she began to stow $100 bills in an old pair of alligator shoes hidden under a pile of hats in a closet. Two years ago, when the family finances had stabilized, she told her husband about her stash. By then it was so large--$12,000--that she felt he should know about it in case anything happened to her. They agreed to put the money in the bank, earmarked for a family trip.

Soon Cindy realized she missed her "security blanket," so she started stashing again, this time with her husband's knowledge. Last summer, when he decided to save for a trip to Israel with their son, her husband started his own stash. "He's not half as adept at it as I am," Cindy says, laughing. That's why she decided to help him out. Tucked into this year's birthday card was her contribution to his private cache: three crisp $100 bills.