Money issues are fairly common in relationships. After all, it’s impossible to please two people all of the time. Those issues get even more complicated if you add lies to the mix.
In a recent survey of 500 U.S. adults by MagnifyMoney, 1 in 5 divorcees said money was the cause of their divorce. In fact, half of the respondents admitted that they or their spouses had lied about money at some point during their marriage.
“We all make mistakes, but sometimes people are so traumatized by their financial mistakes they hide them, avoid them and deny them,” says Carolyn Nunez, co-founder of Bethesda, Maryland-based Ithaka Financial Planning.
Here are some common lies that can derail your marriage.
[See: 7 Signs Your Romantic Partner Is Financially Unstable.]
1. “I’ve got excellent credit.” If you’re lying about your credit score, the truth can only come out at the most inconvenient times. Usually, it’s when you need a good credit score to get a better financing offer on a loan.
If you or your partner — or, worse, the both of you — have poor credit, you might run into difficulties qualifying for low-interest financing on things like a mortgage or car loan. Lenders take both of your scores into consideration when you apply for a loan. The lower your joint credit score, the higher your mortgage rate will be.
You can always try applying for the mortgage on your own, but that’s a temporary fix and only works if you aren’t counting on your spouse’s income to qualify for a bigger loan.
Beyond the loan applications, a poor credit score could indicate that your partner isn’t as good with his or her finances as you’d initially thought. If that’s the case, then you may want to watch for any poor money-management habits moving forward.
To avoid surprises, Nunez suggests that couples pull their credit reports and tax returns and review them together before they get married.
2. “We can afford it.” If your spouse is showering you with expensive gifts that you know aren’t in the household budget, be wary. Your partner may be breaking the bank to keep up with a certain lifestyle.
This is an easier lie for those who work in commission- or contingency-based occupations, Nunez says, so they get paid in large sums once in a while.
[See: 9 Scary Things Consumers Do With Their Money.]
3. “I kicked my shopping addiction a long time ago.” Addictions can be costly to a marriage in many ways. Not only could shopping or gambling addictions lead to overspending and debt, but a spouse with an expensive addiction could lie to cover up the financial repercussions.
The common joke is that women are the bigger spenders, but that stereotype isn’t necessarily true, says David A. Frisch, a financial planner in Melville, New York.
“Stereotypically, the woman will have far more transactions with lower dollar items,” he says. “And the man has fewer transactions for larger amounts.” In reality, both spouses might be spending similar amounts. It just seems as if the woman is spending more because she makes more purchases.
Secret spending in a marriage could mean many things, including infidelity, addiction struggles or another life a spouse knows nothing about.
“I know a spouse who clipped coupons scrupulously, pocketed the savings and used [the] cash to gamble,” says Lili Vasileff, a financial planner at a fee-only financial planning firm that specializes in divorce, based in Greenwich, Connecticut.
4. “Business is going great.” There are plenty of opportunities for financial infidelity when your partner owns a business, and you aren’t filled in on what’s going on financially with the company.
“Business owners have lots of ways to hide money issues, and their lives are confusing and risky to non-business-owner spouses. It can be a precarious existence,” Nunez says.
If your partner also takes care of most of the household’s finances, it can be a doubly-veiled situation and have twice the impact on the financial well-being of the marriage.
This could go either way. The partner who has control of the money could drain their personal assets to support the business or hide assets if the business is profitable.
If you find yourself in this situation, you should stay in constant communication about the state of both the business and the family pocketbook.
When your spouse is a business owner, Nunez suggests that you ask to see three years of tax returns to be sure they’ve been setting aside enough to pay their quarterly taxes, so you both won’t be surprised with a bill from the Internal Revenue Service.
5. “You know exactly how much I own.” Misleading a spouse about assets, especially during a divorce, isn’t uncommon.
“I have seen spouses move their businesses entirely to be held in an asset-protection trust to deprive their spouse in divorce,” Vasileff says. Many spouses may not even be aware of inheritances or asset-protection trusts, she says.
In some cases, moving the assets does not eliminate the other partner’s claim to them. It all depends on your state’s laws and how the funds have been managed, spent, added to, commingled or segregated, Vasileff says.
The best way to know what your spouse owns is to lay everything out on the table with a financial planner early in your marriage (or better yet, before your marriage).
[See: 8 Big Budgeting Blunders — and How to Fix Them.]
6. “I’ll pay all our bills on time.” Some couples manage their finances separately. For some, keeping bills, bank accounts and credit cards separate helps them feel more organized when it comes to planning their finances. The arrangement also involves trusting the other partner to pay the bills for which they are responsible, which is where things can get tricky.
“A big danger is in ever thinking your finances are separate,” Nunez says. It’s OK if you and your partner split the bills, she says, but you need to know the details of your spouse’s income, savings and debts.
If you don’t, you may discover months of unpaid bills that you believed your partner was paying all along. Everything might be fine until the water goes cold during your shower, and the lights turn off.
7. “I want to file separately.” Think twice if your spouse suddenly wants to start filing taxes separately this year. Ask your partner why, and what the benefit would be to you both financially. Filing separately can be beneficial when you need to separate your tax liability from your spouse’s, or if one partner has a large itemized deduction.
“It may be legitimate, but they may want to protect you from their bad behavior or hide things from you,” Nunez says. She also emphasizes asking for three years of tax returns or having your spouse walk you through what’s going on with his or her money until you are comfortable with the reason for filing separately.
Double-check to read and verify that you know about all of the income and deductions on the return before you sign off on it.
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