“Welcome to the Money Clinic,” laughed Sally Renfrey, pointing to the dining room.
Renfree conducts financial counseling sessions at a sunny dining table set with her laptop, coffee, an A4 notebook, two mobile phones and white chrysanthemums, most of the time with her black Labrador retriever, Piper, sleeping at her feet.
She is one of three financial counselors employed by the Center for Women’s Economic Safety (CWES) who explain financial options to abused women.
Today, Renfree has three virtual appointments and one in-person meeting scheduled.
The first call came at 10am when a new client, Lydia*, contacted the Money Clinic. CWES website.
Lydia appears on Sally’s computer screen: she is in the process of breaking up with her partner, the father of her children, whom she claims is coercive.
First, Sally runs through a safety checklist with Lydia, asking if it’s safe to talk today, to which Lydia replies, “My husband is at work, and as far as I know, there are no security cameras in the house.”
Safety plans are crucial because research shows that when victims of family violence try to leave the relationship, such as by taking steps toward financial independence, this can lead to an escalation of violence against the victim. One of Sally’s clients can only safely call her from a landline at her children’s physiotherapy clinic, because her partner was monitoring her movements and recording her calls.
Lydia said she heard about the money clinic from a mum friend at school who works in domestic violence support. “She said, ‘My spider sense is tingling, are you OK?’ and then we had a chat and she introduced me to you guys,” she said.
“That spider sense is powerful, isn’t it?” said Sally, who remained cheerful throughout the session, reassuring Lydia and praising her efforts so far in taking control of her finances.
For the better part of an hour, the two of them discuss Lydia’s financial situation. Several times, Sally stops typing and goes back to the sentence Lydia had introduced at the beginning. “I know, my spider-sense is tingling,” Sally says.
When Lydia told me that her husband kept opening new bank accounts and Lydia couldn’t figure out the various logins and passwords, when Lydia told me that she’d discovered a joint bank account that had recently been closed even though her husband said it was nothing, when she told me that her husband had put a large amount of assets in her name for “tax reasons” but that she wasn’t sure what those assets were;
“My spider-sense,” Sally said, wiggling her fingers as she finished her last question, “is there any chance that there was a loan taken out in your name? When you were signing the papers?”
“Damn,” Lydia says.
“‘Damn’ is a good response, but let me explain,” Sally says.
They made a plan to obtain Lydia’s credit report, contacted her bank to obtain a record of all accounts in Lydia’s name, and scheduled a meeting in a few weeks to discuss what they found.
Lydia had been concentrating carefully throughout the hour-long session, retrieving documents from a pile beside her computer, when she finally let out a sigh and her shoulders slumped. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up the phone.
The ‘vile’ nature of financial abuse
Many domestic violence shelters and community legal centers have financial counselors, but women often have difficulty accessing them, either because they have very low incomes or are heavily in debt.
This makes CWES Money Clinic unique in Australia as it caters to a wide range of clients.
“Whatever issue someone is having when they come to our services, maybe it’s debt, maybe they’re unsure of their financial situation, maybe they’re thinking about leaving an abusive partner but don’t know what to do next, often they have a range of other financial concerns that only become apparent as they start to uncover or dig into other issues,” says Rebecca Glenn, founder and CEO of CWES.
In the first four months of 2024, the Money Clinic helped 191 women through 328 sessions.
It is estimated that between 79% and 99% of cases of domestic and family violence include economic abuse. Across Australia, 16% of women and 7.8% of men will experience economic abuse by a partner in their lifetime.
Glenn says that for women, a session with a financial counselor is often the first time they acknowledge that they may be a victim of financial abuse.
This may have to do with shame, not understanding what financial abuse looks like, or the “sneaky” nature of financial abuse, Glenn says. While it may seem like normal behavior in a healthy, loving relationship (for example, one partner filing both tax returns or sharing bank accounts), when abuse is present it can be used to control or exploit the other person.
“I think there has been a lot of progress and change in the public discussion about economic abuse over the past three years. People are starting to recognize it, but it’s still less well known than more typical concepts like domestic violence or physical violence.”
Navigating the Web of Problems “One Step at a Time”
Sally’s second client of the day cancelled due to contracting COVID-19, so after lunch she went out to see Penelope*, a client she’s been working with for over a year.
Penelope’s case is one of the most complicated Sally has ever worked on, and it took them an hour, sitting next to each other in a cafe and talking at breakneck speed, to finally unravel the whole thing. Penelope’s partner left her for complicated financial circumstances.
Long story short, Penelope’s partner was in financial difficulty and appointed her as a director of the company. She says she was intimidated into signing the documents. Her husband then took out tens of thousands of dollars in business loans, spent the money on himself, and left Penelope, the company director, in debt. The lenders began pressuring her for the money.
Penelope’s husband hasn’t filed tax returns for the business and, as a director, she now waits in dread to find out how much tax the business owes. Penelope says the wait to find out how much the ATO owes her is “terrifying”. “We don’t know if it’s going to be $50 or $50,000.”
In recent years, her husband had relapsed into drug addiction, become physically violent, and stolen a car that was insured by her and crashed it, destroying it and several other vehicles. The insurance company demanded he repay the debt. Penelope also had traffic fines to her name from when her husband stole her car.
All this made her Centrelink application so complicated that she was unable to receive benefits or income for months.
She hasn’t worked for many years, partly due to child-rearing responsibilities, but also because “my ex-husband was very controlling and would tell me it would be better if I didn’t work.” This gap in her employment history, which she feels unable to explain honestly to potential employers, makes it harder for her to find employment.
“Someone who has experienced domestic violence should be able to go to an employer and say, ‘I haven’t had a job in almost 10 years because of what I’ve been through, please give me a chance,’ but they can’t because no one will hire them.”
Unable to make mortgage payments, she was on the verge of losing her apartment, which is when she got in touch with Sally last April.
Sally recalls their first meeting: “The first thing you said was, ‘I’ve been told I have to file bankruptcy. I have no other choice. It’s really hard, it’s too much.’ And do you remember what I said? ‘We’re going to take everything step by step.'”
So far, those steps have included Sally’s repeated interactions with the loan company over a business loan taken out in Penelope’s name over many months (Sally eventually escalated the matter to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, and the insurer discharged the debt just days before mediation was scheduled to begin), a protracted battle to get the insurer to discharge Penelope’s car claim (which was successful), and negotiations with the bank to make Penelope’s mortgage repayment schedule more manageable (Sally praised the bank’s case manager, saying they “really went out of their way to help us”).
They are now trying to address tax issues and Sally has referred Penelope to one of the government-funded tax advice centres at the university.
Sally estimates that she and Penelope have had about six formal counseling sessions and dozens of phone calls and emails. Sally is so familiar with Penelope’s case that she even knows when her monthly mortgage payments are due.
For Penelope, things aren’t resolved and the financial struggles feel relentless – she describes it as “quicksand” – but it’s important to note that she’s not going through it alone.
“My world was suddenly turned upside down, and when I met Sally it was like she gave me a lifeline… Nobody knows the core of it except Sally.”
