The Secret Stash

Ang

ela has been concealing money from the men in her life ever since high school. "When I started dating, my mother said to always bring some money on your person so you can get your own way home," she recalls. So Angela would neatly tuck a $10 bill in the bottom of her shoe as cab fare in case the date went sour.

Now 51, Angela, a publicist in Ohio, has been happily married for 20 years, yet she continues to feel the need for a secret stash of cash. "I always want to have a little on the side just in case I have to pick up in the middle of the night," she confesses. "You never know what's around the next corner." By pocketing a portion of the money that's budgeted for her lunches at work and keeping her gas-mileage reimbursement checks--"the money my husband never sees"--Angela (who, for obvious reasons, prefers not to be identified by her full name) has amassed wads of $10 and $20 bills. Her stash is shoved deep in the bottom of three extra purses she keeps in her bedroom closet. Current total: $5,000.

Angela's creative approach to home economics is only the latest chapter in a long and storied female tradition. Wives have probably been hiding money from their husbands since marriage was invented. The Japanese have a special term for the secret funds: hesokuri, variously translated as belly-button money or spindle money. Before the revision of marital-property laws, a state-by-state process that took until the 1930s, American women had good reason to be stealthy about their hoards, says Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer, author of the Social Meaning Of Money. All household property legally belonged to their husbands. Zelizer tells of an early 20th century husband who got so tired of his wife's pinching coins from his trousers while he slept that he set a small rat trap in his pocket. Caught literally red-handed at 2 a.m., the wife filed charges against him the next day; but the judge dismissed them, upholding a husband's right to safeguard even his small change.

But that was 1905. What's surprising is that today, despite greatly expanded financial opportunities and legal rights, women still feel the need to play this cat-and-mouse game, albeit an updated version. No one knows how many wives hide money from their husbands, but there is evidence that the practice is widespread. A survey of 1,000 professional women conducted by working woman magazine in 1995 found that 13% of those interviewed had a secret stash. Women who have been divorced may be more likely to keep hidden funds: 1 in 4 women surveyed in 1999 by the Stepfamily Association of America, 71% of whom were married for the second time, said they kept some money aside. Author Heidi Evans estimates that millions of wives hide money. For her 1999 book, How To Hide Money From Your Husband ... and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg, Evans interviewed women ages 26 to 83 whose secret stockpiles ranged from a mere $200 to a mountainous $200,000. "It's something of a sisterhood," she says.

Like Angela, many secret stashers are saving for a rainy-day catastrophe — divorce, unemployment or a sudden shortfall in the family budget. Donna Johns, 44, of Ocala, Fla., started depositing spare change in an olive jar hidden in a kitchen cabinet after giving birth to a premature baby six years ago. She had quit her job to care for the infant, so money was tight. "You'd be impressed at how fast it adds up," she says. Over the years, the olive jar, which reached $600 at its peak, has paid for Christmas presents and car insurance. Relieved whenever his wife comes up with extra cash, Donna's husband doesn't probe.

For other women, the secret funds are simply a way to acquire some financial independence. Jennifer, 40, started her stash several years ago, when she ran a home-based business and got tired of her husband's nosing around in her books. "Every time I turned around, he'd ask me which bills I had paid and how much was in my bank account," she complains. "It was aggravating." So with a few computer keystrokes, Jennifer altered the entries in her Quicken accounting program, derailing her husband's ability to keep track of her income.

Now that Jennifer works for an insurance company, she cashes her child-care reimbursement checks and stores her loot in a secret location in her bedroom. She spends the money on clothes for work and toys for the kids. "It's not like I waste it," she says. "It's just kind of nice to have your own stash and know you don't have to answer for it."

Such views are common in an age when women are marrying later in life and bringing more of their own hard-earned money to the altar. When Terri, an executive at a nonprofit organization, wedded at age 30, she already had a thriving career and her own condominium. "I brought assets, and my husband brought debts," she says. Instead of commingling all her resources, she secretly deposited $25,000 from the sale of her condo into a bank account that listed her mother's address.