Zev and I entered marriage with very different attitudes to financial integrity.

I come from a family where erlichkeit is a paramount value. My parents are scrupulous about reporting to the tax authorities every penny of their income, even money they earn from private tutoring. Zev comes from a family where they try to get away without paying for things. When the family goes to an amusement park, they’ll say the kids are younger than they are so they can pay the cheaper price. When they go to the supermarket, they’ll walk out with 30 extra shopping bags. When they vacation at a hotel, everything movable comes home with them.

In kallah classes, I learned that I’m supposed to follow my husband’s lead and not challenge his way of doing things. Ishah kesheirah osah retzon baalah. So although I didn’t like the way Zev dealt with money, I respected his right to manage our money the way he saw fit. He wanted to be the one handling the finances, and he didn’t like when I mixed in, so I mixed out.

Early in our marriage, I earned a master’s degree and began working at a professional job that paid a respectable salary. Zev worked, too, but his earnings were mostly in cash, and went largely unreported. I never told this to Zev, but I was secretly happy that my earnings were all on the books and there was no choice but to report my income to the IRS.

Even with both of us working, we struggled financially. Zev blamed this on the high cost of frum living: tuition, Shabbos, Yom Tov, simchahs. With all the financial pressures of regular frum life, we were always scrambling to pay our bills, and we never had money for vacations or other extras.

Each year, come tax season, Zev would hand me our joint tax return to sign. In the early years of our marriage, I would flip through the return and try to make sense of the various figures it contained, but when I would ask Zev questions, he would get annoyed.

“Just sign it,” he’d urge me. “It’s fine, don’t worry.”

“But how can I sign something I don’t understand?” I’d ask.

“You don’t trust me, Pessy?” he’d ask in a hurt voice. “You should thank me for doing this! You know how hard I work to handle this stuff for you?”

That usually put an end to the conversation. He was the head of the household, after all. Eventually, I stopped asking questions when he presented me with the tax returns. I just signed them without even looking at them.

Our reported income left us eligible for government housing assistance. For years, that benefit covered most of our rent.

When our fourth child was born, my grandparents gave us money for a down payment on a house. Rather than buy a house and lose the housing benefit, Zev decided to put the house we bought in his great-uncle’s name.

I was highly uncomfortable with this arrangement, but Zev dismissed my concerns. “Everyone does it,” he assured me. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“But what if Uncle Izzy decides to keep the house?” I argued. “Legally, there’s nothing stopping him from passing it down to his own kids after 120.”

A look of pained astonishment crossed Zev’s face. “That’s what you think of Uncle Izzy?” he exclaimed.

The house was duly registered in Uncle Izzy’s name, and we continued to receive housing assistance after we moved in. The house was old and in need of serious repairs, but we couldn’t afford even basic home improvements.

One day, Zev calmly informed me that our accountant, Moishe Greilowitz, had worked out a deal for us with the IRS. “Now, we’re only going to have to pay 20 percent of the taxes we owe for the past five years,” he said happily.

It was then that I learned that we hadn’t paid any taxes in the previous five years. Apparently, Mr. Greilowitz — who advertised, and still does, that he makes “deals” with the IRS — had arranged with Zev that he would artificially inflate our tax liability for five years by failing to report standard deductions, such as childcare, health care, and business expenses. The plan was that we wouldn’t pay our taxes for those five years, and eventually our tax bill would get so high that we would have to declare bankruptcy, at which point we’d cut a deal with the IRS to pay a greatly reduced tax bill.

“What do you mean, declare bankruptcy?” I asked in horror. “That’ll destroy our credit rating! And who knows what other headaches we’ll have because of it?!”

“It’s not a big deal,” Zev assured me. “Greilowitz does this all the time.”

It was a big deal, though. A lien was placed on all our assets. We couldn’t have more than $3,000 in the bank, because then it would have gone straight to the government. When my car started giving trouble, I couldn’t buy a new one. When I wanted to do some renovations to create an office for myself, I couldn’t take out even the smallest bank loan, so I had to manage without an office. It took us five years to settle with the IRS, and the bankruptcy damaged our credit rating for seven years after that.

But by far the biggest change that happened after we declared bankruptcy was that I realized I could no longer rely on Zev to manage my income. What he did with the money he earned was his business, but I couldn’t allow my earnings to be so badly mismanaged.

I opened my own bank account and arranged for my salary to be deposited directly into it.

Zev was deeply wounded. “All the years, I took care of the finances for you, and you don’t appreciate it one bit,” he muttered.

“I appreciate that you took care of it,” I responded, “but I don’t appreciate that you left me in the dark as to how you were taking care of it.”

I tried to explain to Zev that I considered his behavior deeply disturbing, but he kept insisting that he hadn’t done anything wrong and that Moishe Greilowitz was a top-notch accountant.

“You can continue using him if you’d like,” I said pointedly, “but I’m finding someone else to do my taxes.”

After making some inquiries, I heard about a different accountant who didn’t pull any shtick but was a savvy tax planner and helped his clients maximize their deductions and minimize their tax burden. When I met with this accountant, he informed me that the amount of tax I’d have to pay each year, after all the deductions I was legally entitled do, was actually equal to the amount we had paid per year as part of the “deal” Mr. Greilowitz had worked out for us. In hindsight, we hadn’t gained a penny by declaring bankruptcy. But Zev still insisted it had been a smart thing to do.

Several months later, I received a bill from Greilowitz and Co. for several thousand dollars. I called up my rav to ask what to do, and after hearing about the mess Mr. Greilowitz had gotten us into, the rav said, “Tell him to go fly a kite.”

Our rav is a refined, mild-mannered person, and in all the years I had been asking him my sh’eilos, I had never heard him express himself this way. Following his advice, I threw Greilowitz’s bill in the garbage.

When Mr. Greilowitz sent me an e-mail reminder about the outstanding balance, I replied that I wasn’t planning to pay him, because of all the trouble he had caused me with the bankruptcy.

“But I need the money,” he wrote back to me. “I have a bunch of kids to marry off.”

I didn’t respond to that e-mail, although I’ll admit it was tempting to write back that if he wanted a donation, I’d consider giving him some of my maaser money. The lack of professionalism in his response only clinched my decision to fire him.

Zev, for his part, couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to work with Greilowitz anymore. “He’s so geshmak,” Zev said.

Birds of a feather flock together, I thought.

A curious thing happened after I started managing my own income and paying all the bills myself: We suddenly had enough money for all the things we had never been able to afford before. We were able to go on family vacations every year. We were able to renovate the house, without borrowing any money. And we were able to start putting away money for retirement — something we had never done before.

I didn’t get a raise, nor did I start running to the discount supermarket across town to save 50 cents on potatoes. So how did I suddenly find money for all these things?

By lowering our insurance premiums, for one thing. In the past, any time I had asked questions about our insurance plans, Zev had been irritated and insulted. “I’m taking care of this, okay?” he would tell me.

In my desire not to rock the boat, I had let the matter slide. But now that the boat had been rocked, and I was the one paying the bills, I decided to look into our insurance plans carefully. In the process, I discovered that we were paying inflated premiums for home, car, and health insurance. I switched all of these to cheaper plans.

I also paid up the credit card and other debt that Zev had allowed to accumulate. His philosophy was that it’s better to invest money than to pay up debt — except that he did neither. Zev had taken out all sorts of installment plans that were costing us money each month in financing, and I made sure to pay up every one of those.

All the years, we should have been able to live comfortably and pay all our bills without stress — were it not for all the financial mismanagement going on. Yet even after I took over managing the money, and we no longer had any financial stress to speak of, Zev continued to complain about how expensive glatt kosher meat is, how much it costs to make Pesach, how much clothing a teenage girl needs. The fact that we could afford it changed nothing in his mind.

Seeing this, it occurred to me that Zev actually reveled in feeling poor. He enjoyed being able to kvetch to his buddies in shul about the high cost of tuition. He wanted to remain on government housing assistance, even though we didn’t need it.

As I pondered this, a long-ago conversation with my cousin Ruthie, who’s a social worker, replayed itself in my head. “In certain cases, poverty is in the mind,” she had mentioned.

At the time, I had thought Ruthie’s statement was rude and heartless. But now that I saw how Zev embraced a mentality of poverty, regardless of our actual financial situation, I realized that Ruthie was right: Sometimes, poverty really is in the mind.

Understanding that helped me become more compassionate toward Zev. It wasn’t that he was crooked or conniving; it was that he was programmed, from his upbringing, to feel that he didn’t have enough money.

When Zev saw his parents lying about his age in order to get a cheaper ticket to the amusement park, the message he internalized was: We don’t have enough money to pay for the more expensive ticket. What other reasonable explanation could there be for his parents knowingly telling the cashier he was five when he was really seven?

That feeling of financial insecurity became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Zev continued to feel unable to afford things even when our income was more than adequate. This deep-seated feeling of impoverishment caused him to make shortsighted and illogical financial decisions.

Foremost among those was the decision to have our house legally owned by Uncle Izzy — who, we later discovered, wrote the house into his will as his own property, to be inherited by his children. Zev scoffs at the notion that his beloved great-uncle would actually stiff us that badly, but I’m not so sure it’s unlikely. When I asked Uncle Izzy to sign a paper stating that the house really belongs to us, he refused.

My parents didn’t have much money when I was growing up, but in handling their finances on the straight and narrow, they gave me the security of being able to manage my finances without shtick, and without the stress that shtick engenders.

The real victim of Zev’s financial mismanagement hasn’t been our finances, but our relationship, which has remained bankrupt even though we’re no longer in financial bankruptcy. Years after I took over managing my own income, Zev is still deeply resentful of my interference. He doesn’t see anything wrong with his own approach to money, so he can’t admit to having made any mistakes in that regard. He’s never apologized for springing the declaration of bankruptcy on me, nor does he understand why it was grounds for my opening my own bank account. And that lack of accountability makes it impossible for our relationship to heal and move forward.

I wish that I hadn’t been so passive in the early years, that I would have insisted on full financial transparency and partnership from day one, and that I would have taken responsibility for my own earnings instead of blindly leaving them for Zev to manage. Had I done that, perhaps today I would have not just money, but also a house — and maybe a marriage, too. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 692)