Do you suspect that you might be a victim of a narcissist financial abuse?
By the end of this video you'll know what kinds of things narcissists do in order to
financially abuse their targets, and their victims, and what to do about it.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% divorce attorney, and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like You Matter and Breaking Free, A Step by Step Divorce Guide, And I've helped thousands
of people go from lives of drama, trauma, and chaos to step into lives of freedom, possibility,
and purpose.
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Today on Negotiate Your Best Life, I have a very special guest, Jason Crowley.
Jason Crawley is a financial planner who also happens to specialize in working with people
who have been victimized by narcissists.
So I asked Jason to come by and give me some of his ideas on what the worst kinds of things
that he sees narcissists do to inflict financial abuse upon their victims.
So without further ado, let's dive in.
What are the kinds of tricks that they pull?
A lot of narcissists really like to use money as a tool for power and control and leverage.
And so I think just sometimes just recognizing that it's not about the money and that it's
about the power and the control can be helpful in normalizing.
In terms of some of the tricks, and going along the control theme, a lot of times they
have all the access to everything.
And so what I see a fair amount is that that translates into they have entire visibility
over all the finances, but then you don't have any access.
So they have control over all spending, et cetera, those types of things, and so I think
one of the approaches that can be helpful, not necessarily if you're going through divorce,
but a little bit before then, and tell me if that's in the right track, but I imagine
you probably have people that are contemplating divorce.
Yeah, I think that's perfect.
But I think one thing that can be really helpful is if you're able as you're trying to save
the marriage to convince them to sign up for one of these platforms, like a personal capital
or Mint or things of that nature that have account aggregation, so you can see kind of
all of the finances at once.
And if you can do it in the way of like, "This is really a hot button for me and that we
don't have transparency.
And it'd be really helpful for us to work on our marriage."
And so you're still kind of giving them this dissemblance of control, but that can be a
good way to backdoor your way into having visibility over all the finances, at least
with what they're willing to add to the personal capital account.
So that's something that I find it can be kind of pretty effective there.
Boy, those are both really, really good.
Really, really good.
I was just thinking, hiding money, they tend to be the ones that'll move money off shore
or put it in separate accounts or get paid in cash.
And what happens is they've been working on their target for so long that the target ends
up kind of feeling paranoid anyway, and feeling like the other person has all the control,
and so they kind of have this imagination that there's all this stuff going on, and
it may not be as bad as they might think, but they just imagine all the worst things
like, there's millions of dollars off shore or there's millions of dollars being paid
in cash.
And their income is five times what they say it is.
So I think part of it is just kind of looking at the facts and also saying, "Okay, in today's
day and age, it's not as easy to hide money, and money usually has a trail."
You can usually see wires going places.
It's really hard to move money around without some kind of trace, tracing, traceability.
I mean there's going to be some weird wire to some bank in the Cayman Islands or Nevis
or something that you're going to see, or some big amount of cash that was taken out,
and there's no way to account for what happened to it.
So that's what I usually tell people, it's kind of not as easy to hide money is as people
think that it is.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that I often suggest for people because like you said,
people can kind of work themselves into a tizzy where the fear of the unknown becomes
this massive problem and kind of manifests into a massive problem that may or may not
exist.
And so sometimes what I think is the best way to evaluate that relatively quickly because
the decision is primarily, I've got this lingering concern.
Am I going to be able to move forward with this lingering concern or not?
And so you then have options to address that concern.
You can hire a private investigator and do a world search of different bank accounts
and see if something like comes up, you can do full forensic accounting tracing, but all
of those things come with pretty hefty price tags and they also take your case in a direction
that can make it really, really difficult to resolve amicably, if the event that that
is a possible outcome, which often isn't the case when you're divorcing a narcissist, but
in some cases, that does work.
And so something that we often do is the smoking gun analysis, which doesn't get to any, it's
not a full tracing, but it's more just trying to look at all financial records for a year,
and do a real rounded corners that say, "How much did we make?
What happened in terms of the return on investment?
And does it make sense for us to be where we're at?"
Because at the end of the day, your starting balance and your ending balance, the difference
between those two are going to be based on gains or losses during that period, total
income, less total expenses.
So when you do that kind of smoking gun analysis, and you look and you see how much in expenses
does this imply that we had, is that in the ballpark?
So, if you look at it and you say, "I think we're spending 15 or 20,000 a month."
And then you look at this type of analysis and it's showing 50 or 60,000 in implied expenses,
then maybe there's something there that that should cause you to do a real deeper dive,
ask for six years of documents, do bring in a private investigator, go further down.
So that's often what we do, we call it kind of the smoking gun analysis of just trying
to do it a little bit- Kind of a backend way.
Right.
You back your way into it.
I like that approach.
That's good.
And another thing, which is kind of similar to what you were just saying is if the person
is paid all from one source, like a company, and the person is not paid in cash, maybe
there's a C level executive of some sort, but maybe they do get paid in many different
ways.
Maybe it's restricted stock units or maybe it's, I've had C level executives that get
paid in various, like one was an Indian owned company that the guy was living in Brazil,
but he worked for the American portion of the company, and some of his retirement stuff
was in rubles and then some of it was in like Brazilian Rios, and some of it was in American
dollars.
But it all came from one source, the company.
And so one of the things that I've done is subpoena the company and say "Give us a breakdown
of every single dollar this person has earned, or every single bonus or stock or whatever.
And where did it go?
Which bank accounts did this person direct it to go in to, give us the exact checking
account, routing number, the bank name."
Because you can go right to the source and figure out how much was made and here are
the expenses.
And so here's how much should be left over.
What's missing here?
Yeah.
To that point, I think step one is really understanding the compensation structure.
Right.
Subpoenas often are a more efficient way of getting to the bottom of things if you don't
have full disclosure.
You often will get a very organized packet back from the company, as opposed to bankers
boxes of documents that have been pieced together.
So in some ways it can actually be more efficient.
It does take things in a little different slant.
But the other thing that I think is really important is that people get educated because
to your point, I think a lot of people don't necessarily have a full understanding of how
things like RSUs and stock options and how much people pay in taxes.
And so I've seen plenty of situations where someone said, "Hey, I think my husband's hiding
money.
Look, here it says that 1000 RSUs vest.
And I only see 400 shares in the account."
Well, 400 of them were withheld for taxes and then I see that you sold 200 shares.
And so a lot of times there actually is a good explanation.
Absolutely.
And so trying to get educated, and stock options are another great one, because sometimes there's
actually no money that came into the account.
It might just have been an outflow because you exercised the options, but didn't sell.
So yeah, those are really- Or maybe they haven't even vested yet.
Maybe they won't vest for another five years.
And if the person isn't with the company in five years, they're not going to even get
them.
So if they're not ripe then maybe they're not even something that would be put into
the pot to be divided.
So there's that, but I think what happens is people get caught up in the cash element
of things a lot of times, but do you want to spend 10,000 on a forensic accountant to
recover 5,000 or whatever?
How much cash are we really talking about a lot of times, unless they're-
I think one of the other tricks that a lot of people do is put a bank account actually
in their spouse's name.
That's the other thing that I've seen happen quite a bit.
Or a new significant other, or their brother, or their parent, or something.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
But in particular, in their spouses name, because then usually they actually have full
access and control to it because they were the one that said-
Well, I'm thinking in a divorce situation, if they're not liking their spouse very much
at that moment.
So am I.
Yeah, well.
One of the private investors- But then, then it's easier to get for them
to get access to it.
So I'm saying like, they put it in a place where, "Hey, that's my mother's account.
I can't touch that.
That's her money."
But they have no idea about it.
Yeah.
So it's a way for them to get away from the, "I was the one that hid money because they're
almost placing it."
Oh, yeah.
"They're the one that was."
Yeah.
Another thing that I think people do quite a bit in terms of just the financial abuse
is you need to be cognizant, if you drive a Tesla.
Anything that has a computer in it can be a tracking device.
Yeah.
And used to triangulate in terms of location, which is part of that financial control dynamic.
Perfect.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
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