New York writer lets her husband handle their money. Then a $100,000 family loan nearly brings them to financial ruin

A writing professor’s account of what happened when she handed her husband the financial reins of the family is landing as a cautionary tale about how to manage money and how to make sure somebody isn’t quietly scamming you.

Susan Shapiro, a New York memoirist whose books include The Forgiveness Tour, recounted the episode in a first-person essay on Newsweek. 

Shapiro married an older man in New York in the 1990s. The couple kept separate accounts and split their bills, but she nonetheless decided to cede the biggest purchase of her life to the husband who out-earned her. 

He told her he had it handled. Her own therapist, who had helped her quit her addictions and publish books, had advised her to let her husband take care of her for a while. The theory was that being looked after would make her feel grateful and nurtured. Well, that didn’t turn out to be the case.

The apartment they bought was a two-bedroom near their jobs. It was also somewhat out of their price range. A wealthy relative of her husband’s stepped in and offered to lend them $100,000 to cover the down payment. They took it, but not without becoming house poor with a mortgage on top.

How Susan saved them from possible financial disaster

Five years of monthly payments later, Shapiro found records in her husband’s checkbook that told a different story. Even after making the payments, the interest rate meant they still owed $105,000, five grand more than they borrowed.

The loan also came with something of a social tax, too. “We had to keep visiting this family member every holiday and birthday out of obligation and guilt,” she wrote.

Shapiro maintained that her husband was honest and brilliant throughout the process. She ended up going to someone who knew their way around New York real estate, and their advice was to double-mortgage the apartment and clear the debt outright. 

The husband didn’t like the idea at first, but he’d had five years at the wheel, she argued. With a real estate lawyer friend walking her through the loan language, she cut the relative a check for the full amount.

The relative, for their part, immediately pitched the couple on a new fund he promised would return 12 percent a year. Shapiro, deciding not to take any chances, called her father that night to ask what you call an investment like that. “Bernie Madoff,” he reportedly answered. For those who don’t know, Bernie Madoff was the American financier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. In other words, it was fraud.

Her advice now is the kind that comes from personal experience. In essence, she asks that you walk into a marriage with your eyes open and preferably, with your own name on the paperwork.