“Welcome to the money clinic,” Sally Renfrey laughs, gesturing to her dining room.
The sunlit dining table – set up with her laptop, coffee, an A4 notebook, two phones and some white chrysanthemums – is where Renfrey conducts financial counselling sessions, usually with her black labrador, Piper, lying at her feet.
She is one of three financial counsellors employed by the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety (CWES) who explain financial options to women in an abusive relationship.
Today, Renfrey has three virtual appointments and an in-person meeting.
The first call is at 10am, with Lydia*, a new client who has reached out to the money clinics via the CWES website.
Lydia appears on Sally’s computer screen. She is in the process of leaving her partner, the father of her children, who she says has subjected her to coercive control.
First Sally runs through a safety checklist with Lydia, including asking if it is safe for her to speak today. Lydia says it is: “My husband is at work and as far as I know there’s no surveillance in the house.”
Safety planning is crucial, given research shows when victims of family violence attempt to leave relationships, including by taking steps toward financial independence, violence toward them can escalate. Sally had one client who could only safely call her from the landline at her child’s physiotherapy clinic because her partner monitored her movements and phone records.
Lydia says she was told about the money clinic from a fellow mum at school, who works in domestic violence support. “She kind of said ‘my spidey senses are tingling, are you all right?’ and then we had a bit of a chat and she put me on to you guys,” says Lydia.
“Those spidey senses, aren’t they powerful?” says Sally, who is an effervescent presence throughout the session, reassuring Lydia and praising her for the work she’s done so far to try to get a handle on her finances.
For most of the hour, the pair run through Lydia’s financial situation. At several points Sally stops her typing and returns to the line Lydia introduced at the start. “OK, my spidey senses are tingling there,” Sally says.
She says it when Lydia tells her that her husband keeps opening new bank accounts and that Lydia can’t keep track of the different logins and passwords; when Lydia tells her that she discovered a recently closed joint bank account that her husband told her was nothing; that her husband put a large asset in her name “for tax reasons” and she isn’t clear what the asset is.
“My spidey sense,” says Sally after this last one, wiggling her fingers. “Is there any way there could be a loan in your name? When you were signing those documents?”
“Shit,” says Lydia.
“‘Shit’ is a good response, but I’ll step you through it,” says Sally.
They make a plan to get Lydia’s credit report, contacting her banks to get records of all the accounts in Lydia’s name, and schedule an appointment for a few weeks’ time to discuss what they find.
Lydia, who has been alert and focused for the hour-long session, pulling documents from piles of papers near her computer, finally exhales and her shoulders drop. “Thank you,” she says, before ending the call.
The ‘sneaky’ nature of financial abuse
While there are financial counsellors at many domestic violence shelters and community legal centres, the bar for accessing them is often high, requiring women to have a very low income, or have incurred significant debts.
That makes CWES’s money clinics – which accepts a broad range of clients – unique in Australia.
“What we find is that no matter what people come to our service with – so it may be debt, it may be that they don’t know their financial position, or they’re thinking about leaving an abusive partner but not sure what next – often what will then happen is that we’ll uncover a range of other financial concerns that … only come to light once you start uncovering or delving into other issues,” Rebecca Glenn, CWES’s founder and CEO, says.
In the first four months of 2024, the money clinics have supported 191 women over 328 sessions.
Financial abuse is estimated to be present in between 79% and 99% of cases of domestic and family violence. Across Australia, 16% of women and 7.8% of men will experience partner economic abuse in their lifetime.
Glenn says that the women’s sessions with the financial counsellors are often the first time many women have ever acknowledged they may be the victim of financial abuse.
This might have to do with shame, a lack of understanding of what financial abuse looks like, or the “sneaky” nature of financial abuse, says Glenn. It can look like normal behaviour in a healthy, loving relationship (such as one partner doing the tax returns for both people or having a shared bank account) but when abuse is present, can be used to control or exploit the other person.
“I think we have seen significant progress and change over the last three years in more public conversations about financial abuse, that people are beginning to recognise it, but it is still less well known than some of the more stereotypical ideas of domestic violence and physical violence.”
Going through the web of problems ‘step by step’
Sally’s second client for the day cancels – sick with Covid – and then after lunch, she heads out to meet a client, Penelope*, with whom she has been working for over a year.
Penelope’s case is one of the most complicated Sally has come across. Over the course of an hour, sitting next to one another at a cafe, and both speaking at breakneck speed, Penelope and Sally barely manage to unpack all the knotty complexities of the financial situation Penelope’s partner left her in.
In a nutshell, Penelope’s partner, struggling financially, made Penelope the director of his business. She says she signed the paperwork under duress. Then her husband took out a business loan totalling tens of thousands of dollars, which he spent on himself, leaving Penelope, as company director, on the hook. The lender started chasing her for the money.
Her husband did not file tax returns for his business, and, as director, she is now waiting, terrified, to hear how much tax the business owes. Penelope says the wait to find out what debt the ATO will bring against her is “terrifying” – “we don’t know if it’s going to be $50 or $50,000.”
Over the last few years, her husband relapsed with addiction issues, became physically abusive, took a car insured to her and crashed it, destroying it and several other vehicles. The insurance company chased her for the debt. There were also traffic fines against Penelope’s name from when her husband had taken out her car.
All of this drastically complicated her Centrelink application, meaning she did not receive payments, or any income, for months.
She has not worked for many years, in part due to child-rearing responsibilities and in part because “I had an issue with my ex-husband being a control freak and saying ‘it’s better that you don’t work’”. This gap in her employment history, which she doesn’t feel she can truthfully account for to potential employers, has made it hard to get a job.
“People that experience DV should be able to go to an employer and say, ‘look, I’ve been out of work for nearly 10 years because of what I’ve been through, give me a chance’ … but you can’t do that, because no one will take you.”
Unable to make her mortgage payments, she was on the brink of losing her apartment. It was at this point, last April, she was put in touch with Sally.
Sally recalls the first meeting. “I remember the first thing you said was ‘I’ve been told I have to go bankrupt, there’s no other options. It’s such a mess, it’s too much.’ And do you remember what I said? ‘We’re going to go through it all step by step.’”
So far those steps have included: months of back and forth for Sally with the loan company over the business loan taken out in Penelope’s name (Sally eventually escalated this to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority and days before mediation was due to start, the insurance company waived the debt); a drawn-out battle to get the insurance company to waive the charges against Penelope over the car, which was successful; negotiations with the bank to get Penelope on a more manageable mortgage repayment schedule (Sally sings the praises of the bank’s case manager, who she says “has really done everything she can to help us”).
They are now trying to deal with the tax situation and Sally has linked Penelope up with one of the government-funded tax clinics at a university.
Sally estimates she and Penelope have had around six formal counselling sessions and scores of calls and texts. Sally is so familiar with Penelope’s case she knows the day of the month her mortgage payments are due.
For Penelope, things aren’t solved, and the rounds of financial battles feel relentless, describing it as like “quicksand”. But crucially for Penelope, she is not navigating it alone.
“My whole world just turned upside down out of the middle of nowhere. When I met Sally it was like a lifeline given to me … No one knows the crux of it all except for Sally.”
Names of clients in this story have been changed
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
