The Financial Abuse Tactic Narcissists Use When They 'Have No Money

They said they were managing the finances — because you weren't good with money.

That every purchase had to go through them. But somehow, there was always money for what they wanted.

They made you feel like a child asking for an allowance — in your own home. And the moment you tried to leave, you realized you had nothing. Because they had made sure of it. That wasn't financial stress. That was financial control.

This Thursday episode, Kerry reads from real accounts from people who lived inside financially controlling relationships. Learn what the 'broke' narcissist tactic looks like from the inside.

In this episode:

• Why narcissists use money as a tool of surveillance and control
• The 'broke' performance: how narcissists claim poverty while draining your resources
• How financial abuse creates a dependency trap designed to make leaving feel impossible
• Why survivors so often exit these relationships starting over — in debt, isolated, and exhausted
• What financial recovery really requires

Resources

• The Complete Recovery Collection: Narcissistic abuse resources
• First Steps to Leaving: Online self-paced digital course
• Toxic-Free Relationship Club: Live coaching & community support

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D., an author and educator, helps listeners decode toxic dynamics, recognize manipulation, and rebuild self-trust.

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This podcast/video is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, counseling, or professional mental health advice, nor does listening create a doctor-patient or therapist-client relationship. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 911 or contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 (US/Canada).

Transcript

Dr. Kerry McAvoy: 0:00

They will claim to be broke, make impulsive spending, and expect you to pay the bills. They'll encourage you to max out your credit card for their benefit with false promises they'll pay you back. The narcissist is not a poor financial partner. They're actually a skilled financial extractor. It doesn't look like theft. It looks like love. This week we've been talking about financial control. Ninety-nine percent of all narcissistic relationships have an element of financial control. Narcissists often use money to trap you, surveil you, and slowly dismantle your independence until leaving feels impossible. But there's a part of this conversation that that description doesn't capture: the shame. The shame of being an adult, working, capable, intelligent adult who somehow ends up broke, in debt, or starting over from nothing after years of being with someone who was supposed to be your partner, someone you loved and trusted. Here's a question beneath the shame, one that I and maybe you felt too

embarrassed to say out loud: 1:09

"How could I have let this happen to me?" Today, I want to answer that question by sharing what other fellow survivors have to say on the subject. On Monday, my co-host and I talked about the psychology behind financial control, where it comes from, how childhood wiring creates it in some patterns and partners, and a critical distinction that doesn't get discussed enough, the difference between someone whose financial behavior comes from fear and can actually change with the right intervention versus someone who's using money as a deliberate instrument of power. Then this upcoming Tuesday live, I'm going to go deeper into the architecture of financial control, the trap itself, how love bombing phase is used to create financial dependency long before you're ever aware of the underlying dynamic of control, and why so many survivors look back and say,"I didn't even see it coming until it was already too late." So today I'm going to sit with what comes after. Not the trap being set, not the mechanism being named, the aftermath from survivors who got out or who are still trying to get out, from survivors embroiled in some source of control that no one prepared them for. Because the financial damage of narcissistic abuse is real, and the consequences of it outlasts the relationship by years. Most of us get caught in these relationships. Never understood that it was never about the money. I want you to please hear that because this truth reframes the whole picture. The underlying foundation of what you experienced was never about the money. One viewer wrote in and said,"It's not the narcissist's money you have to worry about, it's your own. They will claim to be broke, make impulsive spending, and expect you to pay the bills. They'll encourage you to max out your credit card for their benefit with false promises they'll pay you back. And in reality, it's as if the narcissist is charging you to be in a manipulationship with them." Now, nearly 4,000 people liked that comment. And think about it. You're being charged to be in that relationship. That observation changes everything because it explains something that pure financial analysis can't. It explains why so many survivors exit these relationships with less than they came in with. Despite working, despite making contributions, despite everything being right, they come out of it with less. Think of it this way. The narcissist is not a poor financial partner. They're actually a skilled financial extractor. And unfortunately, that extraction rarely is visible while it's happening because here's the problem. It doesn't look like theft. It looks like love. It looks like shared expenses, having joint accounts, helping someone out, and investing in your future together. Another viewer put it this way,"When you're with a narcissist, you leave with less money than you came in with. And while they leave with the money they saved from you behind your back and all the gifts that you gave them." That comment got over 2,000 likes. That's not a financial accident. That's by design. For many survivors, financial control didn't look like grand theft. It looked like a fight on an average Tuesday evening where there's questions over the grocery receipt or a fight over a new coffee mug that shows up in a cupboard. Some ordinary moment that becomes explosive. One viewer described her experience this way, "My ex used to rage every time I came home from the grocery store like I had stolen money from him. So I started sticking receipts on the refrigerator every time just to satisfy his curiosity. Mind you, I was working two jobs and barely spent anything on myself. Meanwhile, he didn't think twice about spending huge amounts of money on alcohol and on other people just to feed his ego." That's the surveillance. You're expected to perform accountability. That woman was working two jobs and still had to prove that she hadn't stolen from the household's income. And it's also a double standard where they're policing every dollar you spend while your partner is freely spending on themselves or on maintaining their image or on other people. It's not inconsistency. It's actually a system they built that's working exactly as intended. Another survivor shared,"I was shamed on a birthday weekend trip for buying a coffee mug from a café. I was humiliated for spending $30 and even offered to return it. Mind you, I got no birthday gift, and that trip was actually for the narcissist to flash his money by paying for rounds of drinks for the group." Her $30 coffee mug became a problem while her partner buying rounds of drinks for the table was seen as generosity. It's not okay for you to do something for yourself in these relationships, and yet they will lavishly spend on themselves when it's about them making themselves better or being seen, and that's the difference. It was never about the money. It was about whether you had permission to exist outside of your partner's approval. What these survivors are describing is that financial abuse operates through a specific psychological pathway. We think it's about the money, but it's not. It's about making you dependent on another person for your survival. When a partner controls your access to money, monitors your spending, limits your income, creates debt in your name, sabotages your career, they're threatening your ability to survive without them. This kind of control cuts off your access to resources and options. It leaves you with nowhere to go. Now you're genuinely trapped. What's so extraordinary about this mechanism is that it doesn't require any dramatic action. A narcissistic partner can create profound financial dependency through entirely ordinary-seeming behavior, like managing the joint account, encouraging you to leave your job to raise the kids, putting purchases on your credit while promising to pay it back, and slowly positioning themselves as the financial decision-maker in order to be helpful. By the time the control is firmly entrenched, your autonomy has already been lost. So this ties back to what we talked about on Monday, the shame. We partly do it to ourselves, blaming ourselves for failing to see the loss of control, but it's being done to us. The narcissist constantly tells, directly and indirectly, that you have poor judgment, that you're impulsive, that you'd be lost without their management, that you don't understand money. And over time, you begin to believe the story, or you get so worn down that you finally give up fighting the story. But the problem is this, that when you finally exit, you leave with a depleted savings, a credit card debt that you didn't accumulate, and years lost of career momentum that you should have had. But you don't experience it as something done to you. You instead use it, unfortunately, as proof that the narcissist was right. That's the greatest tragedy of this trap. It doesn't just take your money. It makes you complicit in your own financial diminishment and then hands you the blame for the outcome. I want to read three comments that describe the aftermath, not the relationship, but the years that follow. The first wrote and said,"The financial abuse is the one thing that still haunts me decades after the divorce. It's hard." That person is still being affected years after they've left that other person. The financial trauma recovery has no deadline, and the reason it lingers so long is precisely because it wasn't processed as abuse. You viewed it from the lens of personal failure, and personal failure is much harder to heal from than something was done to you. The second writes, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine." That's what the narcissist believes. It's not a financial arrangement. It's their worldview. And then the third comment, and this is the one I want to spend a moment on because it connects directly to what we talked about with Lynn in Monday's conversation."The narcissist parents spoiled us, never taught us financial independence, and that has been used against us ever since. In the narcissist world, their income is supposed to distract you from their awful personality. They give you money so you'll tolerate everything." This is an example of how money was used as a silencer, as a payment for compliance. This is the childhood origin that Lynn and I talked about. The version where financial control isn't learned in adulthood but can be the very water a growing child learns to swim in, where money isn't something neutral, it's leverage, conditioning, and it's always attached to a debt that could be called at any moment. When someone grows up in that environment, they often don't recognize they've met a partner who's implementing the same dynamic because it's so familiar. And because it's familiar, no matter how painful it is, it registers in the nervous system as safe. I want to close with this story. One survivor wrote in and said,"I ended up homeless and in significant amount of debt due to a four-year relationship with a narcissist. However, I've turned my life around, and I've met some kind, decent human beings, and this has restored my faith in human nature. Good people do exist." This person walked out homeless with significant debt, but she turned her life around, restored faith, and still believes that good people exist. That's an act of profound determination. She's rebuilt her life from ashes into something beautiful. So if you're at the beginning of that journey right now, if you're looking at your bank account that doesn't reflect the years that you've worked, the credit score is really based on someone else's decisions, not yours, I want you to hear that where you are right now is not where this story ends. And if you're still in a financially controlling relationship, here's what to watch out for. First, the double standard is the signal. If money spent on you or by you is scrutinized while money spent on your partner's image, pleasures, and other people to improve their social standing is not, that's not a budget disagreement. That's a control system. See it and name it. Two, manufactured incompetence is a tactic. If you've gradually come to believe that you're bad at money, that you can't be trusted with financial decisions, that you need oversight to financially function, ask yourself when you started to believe that and who told you that was true. Competence doesn't evaporate in a relationship. It gets trained out of you. Three, your name on any joint debt is real. Whatever the story around how it got there, start knowing what exists in your name. Not to confront, just to know. Financial awareness is not provocation, it's a survival tool. And here are some tips if you've left and are rebuilding. One, reclassify the damage. Debt you accumulated for someone else's benefit under financial coercion is not evidence of poor judgment. It's evidence of what was done to you. Turning this perspective around is not just psychological, it's an accurate version of what happened, and understanding this will help you move forward. Two, separate the financial recovery from the emotional recovery. They're related, but they're not actually the same thing. You can rebuild credit while you're still grieving. You can build a budget while you're still angry, and you don't have to be fully healed to take up the first practical financial steps. In fact, the practical step often will help your healing. Three, you're allowed to want things. This sounds simple. For survivors of financial abuse, it's not simple at all. The habit of asking permission to spend even small amounts, even on necessities, can outlast the relationship by years. That's why we talk about the Starbucks coffee that a lot of us got chastised for buying. Notice when you feel the reflexive guilt for buying something for yourself. That guilt is not you being savvy or careful. It's leftover residue, and you can put it down. And if you're watching this and you haven't named what's happened to you as financial abuse yet, here's a clear definition. If your access to money was used to control your behavior, limit your choices, or make leaving feel impossible, then you were financially abused. You don't have to be penniless to qualify, and you don't have to have every dollar taken. The control itself is the abuse, not just the outcome. Naming it accurately is the first step to understanding it wasn't your fault. If any part of what you heard today sounds like your story, please consider leaving a comment because your words could become the evidence that someone else needs to finally see what's happening to them clearly. And if you missed Monday's conversation with Lynn about the psychology behind financial control, and specifically to the question of when this behavior is actually changeable, go back and watch it. It may help reframe a lot of what you've been trying to make sense of. And if you're rebuilding right now, I see you. The fact that you're here asking these questions, trying to understand, that's not weakness. That's the work. And if you'd like me to address your question or situation on air, please email me at clients@kerrymcavoyphd.com. And thank you so much for the trust, and I hope to see you back here on Monday.