Did you know that money is one of the top ways that narcissists use to control their
targets?
Indeed.
By the end of this interview with Jason Crowley, you're going to know what the top five ways
are that narcissists use money to control their targets.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% attorney and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like You Matter and Breaking Free: A Step-by-Step Divorce Guide.
I've helped thousands of people all over the world go from lives of drama, trauma, and
chaos, just step into lives of freedom, possibility, and purpose, and I do the same thing for you
right here in these videos and on this channel.
Make sure you subscribe and you hit that notification bell, and then you'll get notified when I
upload brand new content, including Part Two of this interview.
This is Part One of my conversation with Jason Crowley, who is a financial advisor and also
a narcissism expert, a very rare commodity indeed.
This is Part One of my conversation with him on the top five ways that narcissists use
money to control their targets.
Welcome to another episode of Negotiate Your Best Life.
I'm Rebecca Zung and I'm so excited to have Jason Crowley back on my show.
We did a short little show a couple months back about narcissism, and money, and how
narcissists use money to financially abuse their targets.
It was such a popular video and it's such a popular topic that I wanted to bring him
back onto the show so welcome, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you, thank you.
Jason is a financial advisor and he's got, oh my gosh, so many letters behind his name.
He's a CFA CDFA, I think several different ... You've definitely dedicated yourself to
the world of financial planning and being good at that.
Even more interesting, I think that you're probably one of the only financial advisors
that I'm aware of that specializes in dealing with finances and well-being when people are
either in a narcissistic relationship or coming out of a narcissistic relationship, is that
right?
Yeah.
How did you come to have that as your target area, as your niche?
It's just something that comes up really, really frequently.
It started off kind of just more in the generic financial planning, financial advisory, wealth
management space.
Then from there, I kind of niched down to get more into the divorce financial planning
world.
Then the more work that I was doing in divorce financial planning, from there then kind of
niched down a little bit again as I started seeing a lot of the financial control and
financial abuse that tends to happen in narcissistic relationships.
It was just something that happened by chance as a result of where our practice went.
That was how I ended up getting involved in that.
Yeah.
You have a fantastic website that has lots and lots of information and free tools.
We'll get more into that at the end where you can talk about your website, but you really
have built such great resources for people who are dealing with divorcing and finances
being one of the issues.
I recently did a survey of my community and found that money overwhelmingly is the biggest
controlling tool and the biggest area of angst, and anxiety, and trauma that my community
sees.
We had, I think, about 400 people who responded to the survey and, in that, we found that
66% of those surveyed stated that money is a tool that was used to control them, it's
an agent of power, influence.
48% said hiding money is a top concern, 22% said that their narcissistic partner controls
their monthly spending, and 30% said that they were concerned that their narcissist
was putting them into debt.
It goes on and on.
53% said that their narcissistic partners spend money on themselves and not to them.
These people need help.
They need ideas to turn the tables and learn how to be in control.
Attorney's fees was a big deal too.
A lot of my people surveyed said that they spent ... 87% said that they spent much higher
fees than expected due to all the extra hours required to deal with a narcissist.
A huge percentage of the people who responded said that their fees went way over $100,000
so this is a real issue.
That's why I wanted to talk about the top five ways that narcissists use money to control
and wanted to bring you on because you're the expert, you know.
Let's talk about the first way, which is cutting off credit cards.
What do you see with that and what can people do about it?
I think the first thing you need to do is start planning ahead of time.
If you're in a relationship with a narcissist, as you said, Rebecca, they're going to use
everything that they can to try and maintain control.
Money really is just a tool to enable them to do so, the narcissist to have control.
All of these different ways that they use money as a tool to control are things that
you have to be aware of so that you can plan ways to prevent or to take back some of the
control and turn the table.
When it comes to cutting off credit cards, I think the first thing you want to do is
just start to build your credit.
There's actually a interesting tool I just came across the other day, I think it's called
Grow Credit.
What it enables you to do is actually start building your credit through subscriptions.
If you're not the person that has control over your own finances, you can use a program
like this to actually be able to start building credit through things like your Netflix subscription,
just all the types of things that are already paid regularly.
Really, all this program is doing, is it's starting to report those subscriptions to
the major credit bureaus.
In doing so, that will enable you to start building your credit.
Now, this way, when the time comes to pull the trigger, you'll be in a position where
you do have credit established and you're able to open credit cards in your own name
and really start to still have a lifeline to be able to have access to capital.
Okay.
I'm hearing a lot of people, I can feel what the collective is going to be saying.
They're going to be saying, "But how do I know that he or she is going to cut off the
credit cards?"
Or, "How do I know that this is going to happen?"
What could they do about that?
The first thing is, you never know exactly what someone else is going to do but you always
want to prepare for the worst.
I think by taking some of these steps you're really hedging your bets.
If you've done all of the things to enable you to prepare for the what if's, for if they
do take certain actions to maintain control to cut off your credit cards, and then they
don't, great, no big deal, but if you haven't taken those steps then you'll be in a much
more challenging situation.
I think one of the biggest things, if you're in a relationship with a narcissist, is you
do have to be more strategic.
You do have to plan ahead.
You do have to plan for the worst and recognize some of those tactics that they like to use
and figure out ways that you can prepare or set the table so that you're able to deal
with those tactics better than you would if you hadn't done any of those things in advance.
It's much more challenging to do so if you wait and then these things happen at the last
minute and you haven't taken any of the steps in advance.
Exactly.
Especially if you're dealing with somebody that you suspect is either a narcissist or
has narcissistic traits, then just understand, look at the data, look at the data from the
survey that I just read out to you.
It's more likely than not that they're going to start engaging in these kinds of tactics.
If you think that leaving might be something that you're looking at or that they are considering
leaving you, then starting to take these steps that Jason was just talking about is something
that you should at least start investigating and be ready to take those steps if you need
to.
That's one of the things I hear time and time again when I'm working with clients is, they
weren't able to name what this is.
If they weren't, maybe, exposed to narcissism much in the past.
I think everyone's become a lot more familiar with it as a term but the ability to tell
that your partner is a narcissist, a lot of people just aren't able to see clearly about
that until it's too late.
The better job that you're able to do of educating yourself and understanding some of the tactics
that they use, that's going to put you in a position where you're able to identify and
see things more clearly for what they are as some of that starts to fade, and then you
start to peel back the layers of the onion.
Really, knowledge is power in all of these things because, in a lot of ways, they're
going to use every tool that they have to control.
If you understand what the narcissist playbook looks like then you can develop your own playbook
in response to that.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's a good segue into the next one, which is hiding money or moving money.
I can say that as a divorce lawyer that a lot of times people think that there's money
being hidden or moved a lot more than it actually is.
In today's day and age of the digital world where you really can see any movement of money
pretty much, even if you take out sums of cash, where did all those sums of cash go?
It still doesn't help or assuage that fear that this person is going to hide money or
move money and it's going to be somewhere else.
Even if you can find it, it costs money to find it, and sometimes people can be really
good at finding places to put it or whatever, so let's talk a little bit more about that
and what you've seen and what will work for helping that.
Yeah.
I think the hardest piece to track is cash.
If you have someone who's got a cash business where they're taking in a lot of cash, that's
going to be the situation where it's the most challenging to be able to track because it
really never came in to your financial ecosystem, you and your spouse's financial ecosystem.
That's the one that's going to be the most difficult to track.
In the absence of that, as you said, everything is available really online and is digitized
and so there's a lot that you can do to be able to get a sense.
I would say that I find that more often than not it's a very legitimate concern that is
not as grounded in reality as when we actually really start to look under the hood and try
and see is there any hidden money, et cetera.
One of the things that I often like to do because it is a cost benefit analysis.
I think it's a big mistake to try to get to the bottom of things for the sake of getting
to the bottom of things.
You really want to be smart about where you're spending money.
It doesn't make any sense to spend $10,000 to recover one.
One of the approaches that you can take, particularly if you have a long-term marriage, is pick
a year and look at that year and try to see if that makes sense.
A lot of times what comes up when I make the suggestion to clients is, "Well, he's been
planning this for a few years so maybe he's covering his tracks."
Maybe you go back a few years and actually look at that period.
You can do what I call the smoking gun analysis and you just try to get an assessment of what's
the total income for the course of the year.
What were the total expenses, total taxes paid?
That should be your cashflow surplus or deficit.
Has there been any gains or losses in terms of financial assets?
When you take those things together, does it make sense with what the balance was at
the beginning of the year of your all assets versus the balance at the end of the year?
If those things line up, plus or minus within reason, then hopefully that alleviates some
of the concerns.
Where this really becomes a challenge is, if they're not hiding money and you accuse
them of hiding money or you're in your own head about the concern, if you can't move
past that you might actually have a decent settlement deal on the table that you're not
willing to agree to because of this lingering concern.
You want to try to address it in the most cost effective, efficient way that you possibly
can, and that's one of the ways to do it.
I love that.
You're kind of back ending your way into that.
I use that methodology when I'm looking at income sometimes, where I look at, "Okay,
well, what has your lifestyle been?"
Obviously, if you have your kids in private school, and you're living in this million
dollar home, and you've gone on vacations and you've done all of these things, then
this person is not making $25,000 a year like they say they are on their tax return.
Most of the time you see that actually when somebody is self-employed because they've
been able to deduct so many things.
If they're an S-corp and it's a pass through income, then they've deducted so many things
off the business.
That's when you have to go back and look at the business and you start doing add backs.
It's the same sort of thing where you're back-ending your way into, "Well, you couldn't have had
this lifestyle unless more money was coming in."
Exactly.
Then if things don't add up, now at least you've substantiated that concern and then
you can dig deeper, whether it's through a full forensic analysis, whether it's through
hiring private investigators to do an international asset search and see if there's things in
their name.
You've avoided the unnecessary expense and escalating the conflict by doing all of those
things by first using a, throwing out a trial balloon, if you will, to see is this really
an issue or not.
Yeah.
That can be a huge, huge cost savings because you can spend tens of hundreds of thousands
of dollars trying to, throwing really good money after bad in some of these situations.
Is that something that you help your clients do?
Yeah.
I'm not a forensic accountant so if someone wants to dig into every, look under every
nook and cranny ... Just that first blush, like should we even
bother with a forensic accountant, you can help your clients with that.
Exactly.
We have a forensic accounting firm that we work with as our back office and in situations
where they want to go and dig deeper.
Right, okay.
Just from the attorney's perspective, I'm not licensed in all 50 states or all around
the world but I have people who have bought my programs and who watch my videos from all
around the world.
I do want to say that, in general, if money is being hidden or moved or spent or whatever
in a way that wasn't part of the marriage decision and you didn't benefit from that
in some way, then there potentially could be a claim for waste or dissipation or a claw-back
or bringing that back in as part of the overall property division conversation.
That's why you want to make those inquiries and do those sorts of things, it seems worth
it.
Again, you want to make sure that there's a good return on your investment.
Using somebody like Jason who's already managing your finances as a client, he can do just
this first blush, is it even worth it to go deeper?
Then if it is, how much?
That's something that you would be able to tell them too.
"Hey, there's $500,000 missing over here."
Okay, it's going to be worth spending a few thousand bucks on an asset search person or
maybe a forensic accountant.
If it's only $10,000 that's missing, then it probably won't be worth the return on your
investment.
Exactly.
You never want to minimize $10,000 or anything like that, I know that can be a lot of money
to people, but there's just ... We've got to keep in mind that there is the cost involved
of going after it.
Absolutely.
Everything is a cost benefit decision as you're going through a divorce or if you're facing
those decisions.
Exactly, exactly.
Thanks for joining me today in Part One of my conversation with Jason Crowley.
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Thanks so much for stopping by today, I'll see you in the next video.
Remember, today's a great day to start negotiating your best life.