‘I was a victim of financial abuse’

This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘I was a victim of financial abuse’

Claer Barrett
Hey Money Clinic listeners! Claer Barrett here. We’re keen to hear more from you and want to know what you’d like to hear more of. So we’re running a survey which you can find at ft.com/moneyclinicsurvey. It takes around 10 minutes to complete, but you will be in with a chance to win a pair of Bose QuietComfort earbuds. So don’t hold back, we want to know what you think. You can find that link in today’s show notes.

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Sarah Coles
It’s this whole idea of, you know, boiling a frog. That if you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. Whereas if you heat the water very gently, it stays within it, it passes away. So a horrible analogy, but that’s it really so much what it was like.

Claer Barrett
That Sarah Coles. She’s telling me about her experience of ending up in a financially abusive relationship.

Sarah Coles
It’s built so very gradually that you just adapt over time and then it becomes this, you know, impossible situation.

Claer Barrett
Hearing about Sarah’s account of her past relationship is chilling. But when I first heard about her experience of economic abuse, there was something that made it even more shocking. You see, the reason I know Sarah is because we’re kind of in the same world. I write about money for a newspaper and Sarah is a personal finance analyst for Hargreaves Lansdown. So many of the money stats and insights that we share on the podcast come directly from her and her team.

Sarah Coles
A lot of people had sort of felt that there might be a sense of shame around having become a victim and feeling that it was something they shouldn’t have fallen victim of because of my background in finance. Personally, I just don’t feel at all the shame. I think anyone can fall victim to abuse.

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Claer Barrett
Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times about personal finance and investing. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor.

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This week we’ll be looking at the topic of financial abuse. How does someone like Sarah, who is so well-versed in the details of how people manage their money, end up in a financially abusive relationship? What are the signs of abuse and how can you separate yourself and your finances from an economic abuse of any kind, whether they’re a romantic partner, a relative, or even a friend?

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As well as Sarah Coles, I’ll be speaking to another woman, who we’re calling Francesca, about her own experience of being in and leaving an economically abusive relationship. Plus, I’ll be speaking to the founder and CEO of the charity Surviving Economic Abuse. Before we go on, just a warning that this episode does contain accounts of coercive control that some listeners may find upsetting. And please, if you or anyone you know is affected by the things we discuss in this episode, do check out our show notes for links to where you can get help and advice. For now, back to Sarah.

Sarah Coles
So, I’m Sarah Coles. I’m a senior personal finance analyst from Hargreaves Lansdown.

Claer Barrett
Now, you mentioned that people not understanding how somebody like you could end up in a position where their finance is all being controlled. I mean, just tell us a little bit about how it started and then the stage that it got to by the time you felt you had to leave, how it did build up.

Sarah Coles
For me, it was things like when I went home, spent my own money on things that I needed, there would be an element of disapproval, and that over time grew so that the reaction to my spending money became quite extreme. So for example, you know, if I went out and bought a pair of jeans because I needed a new pair of jeans and he was very angry about it and he left for the day. He left the house and didn’t tell me where he was going. Didn’t come back for hours because the element was sort of to try and, you know, to make you feel that you couldn’t do these things because the price that you paid for it was too high emotionally. But basically, over time, he came up with sort of new rules that I had to conform to. So things I wasn’t allowed to spend the money on or places we weren’t allowed to go. But what I then found was, you know, at any stage if I tried to push back, the rules would get harder, the punishments would get . . . not punishments but, you know, the price I would pay for it would get worse. So it became a question of you can’t win by arguing, so how do you adapt your life more and more in order to make it acceptable to your partner?

Claer Barrett
And tell me about what your work lives were like between the two of you. Were you able to continue working while in the relationship?

Sarah Coles
Economic abuse kind of stretches beyond what you spend and it looks at things like work. And some people will not let their partner work. In my case, he gave up work about a week after my daughter was born and said that I couldn’t take maternity leave any longer. I had to go and work because he was stopping. And in order to pay the bills, I had to take three jobs. It was really got to the stage where I felt I was working so hard. I wasn’t seeing my kids and I was feeling that I didn’t have any power to change anything in my life anymore.

Claer Barrett
We’ll hear more from Sarah soon about how she extricated herself from that situation. But first, let’s hear from Francesca. She, too, suffered years of economic abuse. In her case, it started when she was perhaps at her most financially vulnerable, on maternity leave.

Francesca
I had my daughter quite young in my early twenties, and I was definitely very naive. I just assumed that during maternity leave and potentially after I would be financially supported because obviously I was one that had the drop in income. But you know, I was having a baby. So I just expected some support there and it just didn’t happen. And I wasn’t allowed to work outside of the home because I was told if I had to pay for childcare that it was going to be 100 per cent on me. So I just felt really isolated. And I lived in the sticks at the time, so I really just felt like I was just in the house all the time. I didn’t see anyone or do anything and, yeah, it wasn’t a great time.

Claer Barrett
No, it really doesn’t sound like a great time. And I mean, if you weren’t being supported financially, were you able to earn any of your own money?

Francesca
I did find a part-time job I could do from home in the evenings, but it was just not great money at all. And it was getting to the point where I just couldn’t afford to buy her things. Something that really stands out to me in my memory is a time when I couldn’t afford to buy her a new coat and you know when it’s like getting a bit short on the sleeves. And I just remember I was trying so hard to buy a coat and I couldn’t afford it. And I know people might be listening and saying, “Well, you can just get one for a few pounds.” But when I say I had no money, I didn’t have those few pounds. So I asked, you know, “Can you buy the coat?” And I was told no. I’m made to feel really bad about it. And then the reason it stands out in my mind is because she went into nursery. This is when you had the free childcare hours and she came out and she said, “Mummy, they said that you need to buy me a new coat. This one’s too small.” I remember just being so upset because I obviously knew she needed a new coat. I didn’t need someone telling me that I needed to. I just couldn’t afford it.

Claer Barrett
Oh, Francesca, I can completely understand why that would upset you. And I’m so grateful for you going back there and talking to us about it. But while you were living this very financially squeezed lifestyle, what was life like for your partner?

Francesca
I was trapped in the house and then I was watching my partner at the time go on holiday with their friends all the time. They were eating out every day, whereas I actually ended up eating really badly because I was trying to make sure my daughter was eating really healthily. And I mean, I didn’t have anything for myself. So I ended up for, like, years I lived on, like, plain pasta or vegetable soup to the point now where I can’t even look at vegetable soup without feeling sick. Honestly, just the thought of vegetable soup is, like, traumatising to me.

Claer Barrett
Inevitably, there are going to be people listening to this episode who are thinking, “Well, why didn’t she just leave? Why didn’t you get out of the situation?” But of course, it’s never that simple, is it?

Francesca
When you’re in the moment, you just kind of downplay it and you just think, “Oh, it’s not that bad.” Or I just kind of. I think I’d accepted it. I just thought, this is it. This is my life and I couldn’t see how it was going to get any better.

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Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
My name is Nicola Sharp-Jeffs, and I am the founder and chief executive of the charity, Surviving Economic Abuse. So we want to raise awareness of economic abuse so that it can be recognised early on and perhaps to prevent abuse escalating, and also we want to seek to transform responses to it. So that’s both within the domestic abuse sector but also more broadly within housing and financial services.

Claer Barrett
Well in fact, you’ve got a stat on your website, haven’t you, saying that one in six women will experience economic abuse at some point over the course of their life? Now, I had to read that a couple of times. I thought of, I was thinking about all of my friends in a room, one in six experiencing that. It’s a huge number.

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
That’s right. It can happen to anyone. And it’s not always confined to romantic relationships. It’s, um, as a mechanism of power and control, it’s used in a lot of different situations of abuse when someone’s seeking to control the behaviour of somebody else. A lot of women experience domestic and economic abuse because of gender inequality, but certainly people who are discriminated against for all reasons, whether that be sexuality, whether that be religion, whether that be race, whether that be socio-economic status, whether it be disability. Very sadly, abusers use those contexts to introduce abuse because of that kind of vulnerability, I guess, that the victim or survivor might have, which is taken advantage of. So it’s really important that we recognise the different contexts and ways in which victims and survivors experience abuse and that we take our responses accordingly. But I think because as a society, money is not usually something that we talk about with our friends and family, it’s quite difficult to kind of get a sense check about what’s normal, what’s not normal, what’s healthy, what’s not healthy, what is abusive and what’s not abusive.

Claer Barrett
Well, it just shows you, doesn’t it, that anyone can experience financial abuse. And people might be surprised that a finance expert like Sarah couldn’t recognise the early signs of an abusive relationship. But with your experience, Nicola, if someone’s listening and has suspicions, what are the signs that they should look out for?

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
There are lots of different signs, and we’ve worked with survivors to identify those and to share them publicly via our website. Francesca provided a fantastic example of the fact that her daughter’s coat didn’t fit. So you know, as a childcare provider, that might be a sign that you’re looking out for. We see changes in the physical appearance of victims and survivors as well. They might not colour their hair. They might not be as, sort of, polished in appearance as they used to be. So it’d be a number of tactics through which economic abuse . . . threats, survivors not allowed access to a mobile phone, for example. So they don’t have that support from family and friends. Again, if you’re not working, you don’t perhaps have the support of colleagues or a workplace. So very insidious behaviour which, over time, adds up to the point where absolutely, as you say, the victim or survivor recognises that either they have no control or if they do have access to money, the way in which it’s being used means that they’re economically unstable, which means that they can’t make the choices that they want to. So we’ve talked very much about space for action. So this space for action is reduced over time and it really limits somebody’s life. And you know, once you recognise that you might be experiencing economic abuse, then it would be time to start preparing to leave.

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Claer Barrett
Sarah, back to you. Could you tell me about when you decided to leave the relationship? What was the moment that made you realise something wasn’t right?

Sarah Coles
And it was really, you know, after a conversation with a friend who made me really see that quite clearly. That was when I thought, well, OK, you know what, I do, not only for my sake, I need to go, but also for the sake of the children. They need to know that this isn’t a model for relationships in the future. This isn’t how, you know, people behave. And so that’s when I made the move.

Claer Barrett
Tell me a bit about that conversation with the friend. How did that go?

Sarah Coles
We were out together and she was talking about how my clothes didn’t fit because I’d lost a bit of weight and I was wearing sort of these baggy clothes. And I just said, “Oh, I’m not allowed to buy any new ones.” And to me, because of my mindset by that stage, that felt like a perfectly ordinary thing to say. And of course to her, it seemed really shocking. And over time, the kind of the scales gradually fell from my eyes, and I realised that exactly what sort of situation I was in and that it was abuse, because, you know, up until that point you’re just so busy coping with it that you don’t really take a step back and think about the full picture of what’s happening to you.

Claer Barrett
And tell me a bit more about the process of leaving the relationship. Was it difficult to financially extricate yourself from your partner?

Sarah Coles
Yes. I mean, it is very, very difficult to leave. There’s no doubting it. And you know, I was in a lucky situation in that because I was the one who was making the money — and I did, you know, I had to obviously give it to him — but I was in a lot more control. I had oversight of what I was earning and I had, you know, the ability to just know where I stood financially. A lot of other people, you know, they lose control of their accounts completely. Their partner will take over their online accounts, change their passwords and lock them out. And so they’ve got no access to their own money, which it makes it unbelievably difficult to make a move. I think even in my position, I was again, you know, I couldn’t have moved without the support of my family. I was actually, I needed to move because I couldn’t afford to stay in the place I was living. So my sister said, “Well you do come move in with me for now and we’ll deal with everything.” You know, sort of close down the living together bit and then you can sort of start afresh.

Claer Barrett
What advice would you give to somebody, maybe somebody listening to the show, who is preparing to leave a relationship but doesn’t have that oversight of the money like you did?

Sarah Coles
You know, if you can get access to your own money and save up a fund in order to help you make that move. Sometimes people will ask a friend to look after that money for them so that they’re not concerned about it being discovered. And it can also be really helpful if you can get hold of documents that are related to your finances. So that’s all your usual documents, things like your passport and birth certificate and, you know, savings statements, all those sorts of things, if it’s possible, then it’s really helpful to have them. It’s not, you know, it’s not the end of the world if you can’t get hold of them. If that’s going to put you at risk, then absolutely you can deal with it later. But the more information that you have when you leave, the easier it is for you to start piecing things together and working out how can you move forward from it.

Claer Barrett
And at the point that you were preparing to leave the relationship, you didn’t just have yourself to think about. You had your children, too. Now, that must have made separating much more difficult.

Sarah Coles
Yes, you’re right. It’s simultaneously more difficult and more important. And I couldn’t see a situation in which I could possibly leave and pay for childcare and pay my mortgage. And so what I did in the end was obviously move somewhere much, much cheaper and, you know, go freelance and then be able to work more flexibly and then require less childcare. So we had a very big conversation about all of those sort of lifestyle things which can be really useful because then you’re not thinking it’s completely impossible, I can never leave. You’re thinking, “OK, these are the changes that I need to put in place in order to be able to leave.” So I, yeah, it’s not easy and particularly, you know, with the cost of everything rising and, you know, rents going up and it is incredibly difficult to start a whole new life, especially when you’re caring for kids.

Claer Barrett
Francesca you’re no longer in that relationship, but tell me what it was like getting yourself out of that situation. Was there a penny drop moment when you realised that you had to leave?

Francesca
I don’t think there was a penny drop moment. I think it was one of those things where I had it in the back of my mind probably the whole time, to be honest. But I think one of the hardest things when you are leaving any kind of bad situation that a lot of people don’t actually talk about is how bad your mental health is at that time. So if it was me now and I wanted to leave my new partner, it’d be fine, I’m not battling my own mind in it. But I think when your mental health is so bad, doing anything is difficult. But if you’re going to try and change your home life, especially one that affects your child, it’s really, really difficult to wrap your head around. And that’s why I think it does take people quite a long time to do. It’s not ever an instant decision. And you do have to weigh it all up.

Claer Barrett
Mm-hmm. And how did you plan yours? Presumably, you confided in other people to help you, whether that was friends or family members or maybe a professional.

Francesca
I actually didn’t. No, I did it all on my own. (laughter)

Claer Barrett
Wow.

Francesca
. . . which I don’t recommend. But I just . . . I think, like I said, I really . . . a lot of it was subconscious. So I didn’t want to probably admit to myself what I was doing as well. So I’d racked up some debt at this time and I really wanted the debt gone. That was important to me, and I wanted to make sure that I could financially support myself and my daughter on my own. So a lot of that was I was so super focused on paying off my debt, earning extra money, got a new job. So, but that was when she went to school. So she started school and then I was like, right, I’m getting a part-time job where I don’t have to pay any childcare. So that was like a big goal for me as well.

Claer Barrett
And then eventually you saved up enough money to move out.

Francesca
I didn’t move out. So I stayed in the house. I got him to leave.

Claer Barrett
Wow. (Laughter)

Francesca
Yes. So, I mean, that’s, I actually bought the house by myself. But he had paid the mortgage since we lived there because I couldn’t afford to. Literally, that was the only reason why. And so it was the splitting of the house. And who’s going to stay in the house? Am I going to stay in the house? Is he going to stay in the house? Are we going to sell the house? That was kind of the only thing we kind of clashed on. But I made sure to keep it pretty calm that it was really good. So we didn’t actually have any joint accounts at the time. It was actually quite easy and again I put this down to the planning that I had done in terms of what I, how I set things and how I came across. So I was very sober. I was very calm. He understood that he was in the wrong and I was not in the wrong. And he did understand that.

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Claer Barrett
Now back to Nicola and her wealth of experience from running the charity Surviving Economic Abuse. Once people have realised that they are in an economically abusive relationship, what preparations could they make before they leave it when that space for action is really reduced?

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
We have to recognise in the context of domestic abuse that it is about control. And when you start to challenge that control, that’s when things become a bit more dangerous. So again, it’s not particularly well-known that the point of separation and soon after is the point at which victims and survivors are most at risk of homicide. So certainly two women a week killed by a current or former partner in the UK. So it’s important to do things that a victim or a survivor understands in their particular context is safe. So that would be the overriding message. Usually that might mean disclosing to a family member or a friend, first of all, to get some support, although we recognise that isolation is part of domestic abuse, so that might be a bit more difficult. It could be a trusted professional like a GP, for example. So some surgeries now operate schemes where if you’re experiencing in domestic abuse, there is a way of communicating that. It might be talking to a receptionist or it might be putting a coloured sticker on a sample in the toilet or something like that. Certainly banks are now creating safe spaces. TSB and HSBC. So that’s another space in which you could disclose. Of course, to reach out to a domestic abuse charity is another good route. National Domestic Abuse helpline, which I’ve mentioned. And also if you have immediate concerns for your safety, you know, we would always say, go to the police.

Claer Barrett
And how about financially? How could victims and survivors prepare to leave a relationship?

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
Things that you could do would be perhaps to try and put some money aside that the perpetrator is not aware of. So you might, if it’s safe again, to set up a separate bank account, for example, to create a little bit of an escape fund. You might speak to an employer. So increasingly, employers have policies around domestic abuse.

Claer Barrett
Right.

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
Another route would be to talk to money and debt advice organisations who can help you work out a budget and really importantly provide confidence to a victim or survivor who will probably have been repeatedly told that they can’t live or exist without their partner, that actually they can.

Claer Barrett
After leaving a relationship, there are still many things that need to be untangled financially. Now you’ve got a checklist on your website of things that you do need to separate. Could you just give us a sense of some of the things on there?

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
Some of the things that you might need to separate are joint finances related to a joint bank account, for example. Joint mortgage. There’s a common misperception that there are joint credit cards. There aren’t. But if you’re the cardholder and you have given another card to a partner, you would want to cancel that as well. Other examples would be joint tenancies. If you’re not a homeowner, you might have both names on a council bill or utility bill. So it’s really important to remove your partner’s name because they will sadly use that as a mechanism for ongoing control. So that might be running up an overdraft, for example, or spending on that credit card that you’ve given them, but for which you are liable. That’s really common behaviour at the point of separation. So it’s really important to do that pretty early on to avoid some of those pitfalls.

Claer Barrett
And what about those situations where credit has been taken out in your name or your partner?

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
That’s really common. Those who experience domestic abuse, 95 per cent of them will experience economic abuse. It is so, so common. And with that 95 per cent, 60 per cent will be coerced into debt. So that means that a victim or a survivor might have debt taken out in their name without them being aware. So that can be very difficult and it can make it really difficult for a victim or survivor to move on, especially if it has a negative impact on their credit rating as well. Surviving Economic Abuse, in partnership with Money Advice Plus, has actually created something called the economic abuse evidence form. And that says to a creditor that that person has experienced economic abuse and puts forward a solution. And we have found and we’ve been trialling this for the last couple of years now, that where economic abuse is evidenced, then creditors can be fantastic and in many cases can actually write off the debt completely. And other situations, perhaps where there’s joint liability, they might write off half the debt.

Claer Barrett
Now, leaving the relationship is not necessarily the end of people’s problems. Financial abuse and financial abusers are very persistent.

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
Economic abuse is all about control. So we understand from victims and survivors that the perpetrator might continue to exert control, perhaps through refusing to close joint financial products, through perhaps running up utility bills that might still be in the victim-survivor’s name in the home that they fled so that they get into debt, which makes things difficult in terms of moving on. They might not pay child maintenance, which might make it very difficult. Certainly during the current cost of living crisis, victims and survivors really rely on every single penny of income after they’ve separated from an abusive partner. So again, abusers could be used in the current context to make things even more difficult for them.

Claer Barrett
Francesca, I’m going to give the final words to you. I’m in awe of the fact that you can talk so calmly about what must have been the most awful experience you have gone through. But with the distance of hindsight, how do you feel now about your experiences in that relationship and everything that happened?

Francesca
I think it’s one of those things where you wish you had changed things sooner. But looking back, I had tried to change things, you know, I definitely had, but it hasn’t happened for me. But I just think so many people like myself, I felt, you feel like you’re all alone. But once you start looking, a lot of people are in financially abusive situations. And it’s one of those things where you might not realise that you are. So in the obvious, if they suddenly took all of your cards and your pass and they locked you in a room or something, that would be really obvious. But it’s more when it’s the subtle things and you start to kind of question it, like, “Is this a bad thing? Is this normal?”

Claer Barrett
Well, thank you so much for talking to us today about everything that’s happened. I think lots of listeners are going to take so much from this. So, thank you for sharing.

Francesca
Thank you. I’m actually shaking. (Laughter) I hope that was helpful. I tried not to give too much away, but still I gave a lot away. But yeah, I am sorry, I’m shaking.

Claer Barrett
Oh.

Francesca
I need to get a cup of tea. With a lot of sugar.

Claer Barrett
Yes. Cups of tea all around.

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That’s it for Money Clinic, with me Claer Barrett this week, and we hope this episode has been useful and insightful. Please do check out the show notes for links to get help if you’ve been affected by any of the issues we’ve discussed today. We’re always looking to chat with people about their money issues for the show, and if you’re interested in being part of a future episode, then email us: money@ft.com. You could also take a peek of our website: ft.com/money. Grab a copy of the FT Weekend newspaper or follow me on Instagram. I’m @ClaerB. Money Clinic was produced in London by Persis Love. Our sound engineer is Breen Turner and our editor is Manuela Saragosa. You heard original theme this week by Metaphor Music. That’s all the small print for now. See you back here next week. Goodbye.