Till Debt Do Us Part: One Woman’s Story of Money Lies, Secrets and Divorce

The financial dominoes continued to fall. In the summer of 2019, she received a notice that the state was garnishing her wages. “I called [David] and asked him about it. He said, ‘It must be a mistake.’ ” In an empty hallway in her office, she huddled in a corner and sobbed.

After Minnesota’s department of revenue confirmed she owed unpaid taxes, Mary, suspecting more bad news, called the IRS. A customer service agent told her that she and David owed $40,000 in back taxes. “How is this possible?” she asked. “We don’t make that much money.”

“Honey,” the rep answered, “someone is lying to you.” David, it turned out, had cashed in his retirement account and an old one of hers, worth $24,000. He had failed to report some of his income. And he’d hidden years of IRS correspondence demanding payment and penalties.

Where was the money going? “We got into a situation where we were spending more than we had on both sides,” David says. “To maintain it, and not draw attention, I made some unwise choices.” As for the timeline of events that Mary recalls, he says, “I have nothing that I’ll dispute. It’s mostly true.” But, he adds, “It’s deeper than just money. There were mistakes. I made some. She made some. We should have had better communication.”

Mary, who was 49 when she learned of all these secret debts, couldn’t bring herself to leave David. One stumbling block was that she didn’t think she could afford it. Another was religion. “I was raised Lutheran,” she says. “To me, divorce was wrong.”

Instead, they agreed to sell their house. The home equity they’d accumulated was enough to pay their back taxes. They’d start all over with a clean slate. And this time, she’d pay meticulous attention to the money. They separated their bank accounts and credit cards. And she started regularly pulling her credit report to make sure nothing was amiss.

Yet living in their rented townhouse, Mary was still miserable — ­married to a man she no longer trusted. She had always been a runner. But when her runs didn’t ease her stress, she started training for an Ironman triathlon — a race comprising a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, then a full 26.2-mile marathon. “People would say to me, ‘Training takes so much time. Don’t you want your time back?’ ” Mary remembers. “But it took my mind off all the other things in my life that weren’t going right.”

Her debut Ironman, in Madison, Wisconsin, in September 2022, ended poorly. Near the end of the cycling segment, heavy rain and a hilly course made braking dangerous. “I didn’t feel safe on the course,” she said, “so I stopped.” Two weeks later, she signed onto the IRS website and saw that she and David were another $16,000 in arrears — this debt dating back to 2019. She picked up the phone and called an attorney. “I can’t live like this anymore,” she said.

The divorce was finalized a few months later, but the couple continued to live together until May 2023, when their lease was up. Mary moved into a studio apartment that she describes as “not New York-small, but small enough.” That September, she suited up once again for the Ironman in Madison. Sixteen hours and 24 minutes later, she crossed the finish line. Though she was near the back of the pack, completing the Ironman felt like victory: “Everything I overcame financially. Everything I had gone through to get there. It was the best thing, ever.”

Mary came away from her divorce with about $200,000 in a 401(k) and a $150,000 inheritance from her late parents, held in accounts that, as things had turned “messy,” she had taken precautions to keep out of David’s reach. Now 58, she doesn’t see retirement in the cards anytime soon. Having left US Bank in 2020, she has a customer service job at an equipment finance company and supplements her income with work for a women’s boutique and a grocery delivery service. She lives modestly, driving a 2018 Buick wagon she bought with cash. Still, she says, it’s a vast improvement over where she was just two years ago. “I don’t have the financial unknowns hanging over my head,” she says. “I know where my money is coming and going.”

And what did she learn? Lesson one: “Don’t trust anyone with your finances,” she says. “You have to stay on top of them yourself.” Lesson two: “If you’re a married couple, you both need to know what’s going on,” she says. “If one says, ‘Everything’s fine,’ that’s not OK. If your gut feeling says something is off, it’s off.” And finally, lesson three: “I’m stronger than I thought I was,” she says. “It was a wild ride.”