Uncovering Financial Infidelity with a Forensic Accountant and Brandi Glanville's Real Story

0:00I once interviewed the CEO of a credit bureau and he confessed that his assistant has a better credit score than he does. Why? Because she's more organized. Yep, even the head of the credit bureau can use a little help in the credit score department. If you can too, then listen up because Chime has a card that can help you do just that. Chime turns everyday spending into real rewards and progress. Not like old school banks that charge you overdraft and monthly fees. Built for you, not the 1%. Imagine cash back and credit building with your own money finally on the same card. No annual fees, no interest, and no strings attached.

0:34And when you get qualifying direct deposits, you get 1.5 % cash back on eligible Chime card purchases. Chime is not just smarter banking. It is the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to Chime.com slash MNN. That is Chime.com slash MNN. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services, a secured Chime Visa credit card, and MyPay line of credit provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. MyPay eligibility requirements apply, and credit limit ranges$20 to$500. Optional services and products may have fees or charges.

1:05See chime.com slash fees info. Advertised annual percentage yield with chime plus status only. Otherwise, 1.00 % APY applies. No min balance required. Chime card on time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. I recently went on a quick beach trip with my husband for a little couple's time, and it was perfect. We sat in the sun, swam in the ocean, and generally just tried to get to that place of deep relaxation where your shoulders actually drop a few inches. Do you know what else can give you that feeling?

1:31Co-hosting with Airbnb. Trust me on this one. Hosting your home on Airbnb while you're away from home is a great way to make some extra cash and make sure your home is working as hard as you do. But knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. That's where co-hosts come in. These are local experts who can help make hosting even easier by taking care of all the little details back home while you're off enjoying yourself. Co-hosts can handle everything from staging your space to communicating with guests to offering on-site support so nothing interferes with your time away from home. Whether you're living the digital nomad life or just taking a well-deserved reset, I love this for you.

2:11Looking to get started? Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. Your financial journey shouldn't be a solo mission. Am I right? I am. You need a banking partner who's genuinely invested in your success story. U.S. Bank gets it. They don't just show up for your account opening and then ghost you. If you're saving for that engagement ring, they're cheering you on. If you're buying your first home, they're right there with you. If you're planning for retirement, they're still your biggest supporter. It's about having a financial teammate who believes in your potential and backs it up with real tools and real people who actually care.

2:46See what genuine partnership looks like at usbank.com because together we're unstoppable. That's the power of us. Equal housing lender. Member FDIC. Trademark 2025 U.S. Bank. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab.

3:14A little over a year ago, I had Brandi Glenville of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on the show to talk about splitting up relationships and splitting up assets. Brandi was a married to an actor who had an affair with another married actor, but I'm not here for the gossip. I'm here to talk financial infidelity. The definition of financial infidelity is simple. It happens when one spouse lies to another spouse about money in a significant and or harmful way. This can be particularly nasty and damaging in a divorce when couples need to look at each other financially naked, so to speak, to divvy up assets.

3:48When one person suspects their spouse of financial infidelity during the divorce process, they might call up a forensic accountant, an accountant who specializes in following money trails that have been intentionally obscured. Today, you're going to be hearing from a forensic accountant, Cheryl Hines, to talk about what she actually does, the red flags that could mean financial infidelity, and ways spouses hide assets from the other during a separation. And I know what you might be thinking, any type of accountant, even if it's a forensic accountant, is boring. Cheryl is certainly not that. She even told me about some of the wildest cases she's worked on, and they are wild, which you'll hear about later.

4:32But first, I want to stick with Brandy. Brandy alleges that there was not just romantic infidelity, but financial infidelity that happened throughout the divorce process. Here she is. So my divorce is extremely public and I still worry, you know. All of our bills went to another address. So even if I wanted to, and at a point I wanted to check his phone bill, I couldn't. And for some reason, I was okay with it. I just was madly, blindly in love. Do you feel like that's financial infidelity? Yes, absolutely.

5:11It's wrong on so many levels. And it's almost like it's preconceived. Like they know that at a point they may be getting out and they're protecting themselves. And that to me, that's worse than a prenup. Honestly, like I would rather have a prenup and know what I get at the end of it than having someone always planning for when it's over. That hurts. and then you know when I left the situation I had to ask my dad to co-sign on a car for me at 36 years old I was so embarrassed I couldn't even lease the house without my parents co-signing and it was horrible and embarrassing and I at that moment I'm like I am working on my credit like I did I went and saw like a credit counselor and like I started doing everything I was supposed to do to get my credit better.

6:00And right now I have great credit, but it's still very expensive to live here and it's still a struggle. I got alimony for four years because we were married for eight and it sucked actually because if he was working, I would get it based on what he was making. And for a lot of the four years he wasn't working, so I wouldn't get anything for my alimony. Child support was different. It was always varying. Never great. And even now when he told me he was taking, you know, cutting it in half, I was like, all right. Like, I got this. But it's also just kind of like, ladies out there, no, they will not take care of you forever.

6:41Even if you're the mother of their children, you have to take care of yourself. Would you tell other women to get a prenup or a post-nup? Do you advocate for those? I do. I mean, I know a lot of women that have, they were upset about it. And I told them my story. I said, listen, I didn't have one. And everyone thought I was going to be great. And I left with nothing. No credit, no money. Like, we were living out of my range over the back of my car for, like, couch surfing on my friends' couches. Me and two little babies. It was, I can't even tell you. I'll cry about it if I think about it. But what was the question?

7:18I'm thinking, what was the question again? There is an actual term for this, divorce planning. To explain, you're going to hear from Cheryl Hines, a forensic accountant. Here she is. When I hear divorce planning, I think about somebody whose marriage has been on the rocks for multiple years. And you have no idea why these people are staying together. Well, it could be that one person is trying to restructure their finances so that when they do file for divorce, typically that would be like a second or a third marriage. Not so often on the first one, unless they have a family history where they've seen divorce over and over and over.

7:58But they structure their finances and financial planning and everything else so that the picture they paint when they ultimately do file or when the other spouse files is not a favorable one. So, you know, that way they get to keep whatever it is that they're trying to hide. There's also another couple of terms that are related to divorce planning I'm going to throw at you. One is sudden income deficiency, SIDS. And the other one is SADS, sudden asset deficiency syndrome. And they kind of go with it. There's probably no end, though, to the possibilities for divorce planning if somebody really wants to hide it.

8:40And there are ways to counteract it, which in my case, I try to find out when things started going bad in the marriage. And I assume at that point that one of the spouses or possibly both started moving assets around. Of course, I had to ask. WTF is sudden asset deficiency syndrome. It sounds like something I would definitely take a sick day from. There's another word, though, for this genre of phenomenon called intentional impoverishment that you might recognize from Brandy's story. Here's Cheryl's description. Intentional impoverishment is something that you're going to see. and it really is a shame when it comes up where one of the parties is so bitter toward the other that they would rather intentionally take some action or inaction that's going to result in them having less income than they normally would have available just because they don't want to share it and it's it's really a shame when you see it fortunately for me i don't have to do anything when I do see it other than flag it to the attorney and say, hey, you may want to find out what's happening here.

9:54Possibly bring in a vocational expert and let them determine what this fellow or lady's income really should be based on their level of experience and education and so forth. In cases of intentional impoverishment, there is some recourse for the spouse who's trying to prove the financial hardship is by design. In that scenario, a judge could impute income to the spouse who is making that case, Meaning that spouse would get money that is equal to what they could have earned if the other spouse hadn't chosen to not act to realize potential income. Meaning that spouse could get money that is equal to what they could have earned if the other spouse hadn't chosen to not act to realize potential income.

10:37Brandy did actually hire a forensic accountant through her process, but it didn't provide the answer she was looking for. So I thought it was going to be great for me not to have a prenup. Um, unfortunately when I didn't know about our finances and we were pretty much mortgaged to, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Extreme. So there was nothing to even get, which I, of course I didn't know. So, and I thought everyone's like, you're so lucky. I'm like, what to, I'm going to get part of his debt. Great. You unfortunately get debt too. You can. Yes. Did you take on any of that? We did not. We had an apartment building I didn't even know about that we sold, and it covered the divorce expenses and lots of secrets.

11:21Lots of secrets. Tell me more about those secrets. Did you find out through the divorce proceedings? Yes. So I hired a forensic accountant, which was very expensive, because I really thought there was a lot of money. I did. I'm like, he's hiding it. We live this lifestyle. We have this house. We have these cars. You know, I'm driving my Range Rover everywhere and like living the life like there's no way we don't have any money. And, you know,$12 ,000 later, we don't have any money and I still have to pay the forensic accountant. Beyond getting a forensic accountant, there are other ways you can accomplish what Brandy was trying to do, which was to disprove lowball estimates of income and net worth.

12:05One of Cheryl's favorites is to look at other places spouses have had to talk up their income that have nothing to do with the divorce. Here's an example. This is great. Say, for example, loan application. And I'm not trying to rip this out of the headlines. Absolutely not. This is one of my favorite tools is the loan application. Because in that case, you're looking for, you know, how much income are you telling the bank that you make? What's it substantiated by? And for the business owner, what are you saying the business is worth? I've had cases forever where, you know, they're doing what's called puffing, where you're inflating the numbers because you want to get that good loan, right, that you can't really afford.

12:53I've also had cases where, for some reason, they're diminishing what their assets and their net worth is on a loan application. Still never figured out why, but I have seen that. So that's probably the best example of third-party documentation. Hold onto your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more Money Rehab. Listening to Brandi describe her situation and then hearing the most common red flag Cheryl sees in her work was really eerie. For me, the big one is always when I hear from somebody that you don't need to worry about that. Or even better yet, it's complicated. It'll be too hard to explain to you.

13:40Let me just take care of it. So why are you not willing to share with me something that may affect both of us? And if the answer seems complicated and it doesn't inherently feel like it should be complicated, it's because there's a layer there that they're inserting as a barrier and the barrier shouldn't be there i'd never saved money before i had modeled and basically what i made i spent um and then i met my ex-husband and i had a credit card with my name on it and i put everything on that credit card and i was i trusted him i was madly in love and um i never questioned anything and i signed everything that was put in front of me.

14:23And I think that happens to a lot of trusting wives and partners. And I came out of the divorce with nothing. What kind of papers did you sign? I wish I knew. No, I signed my name off of our house right before he filed for divorce, like six months prior. It was like Christmas. He's like putting all these things in front of me. And I trusted him. And I think that happens like in the Teresa-Judai situation. And a lot of these things that we're seeing play out in the media. I think a lot of times we can be, women can be naive because we have love goggles on and trust goggles on. Not that we're stupid by any means, but we're fooled by love.

15:07It simultaneously breaks my heart and boils my blood to see people take advantage of the trust their partners have in them. But of course, trust isn't inherently bad. It's the foundation of any healthy relationship. But you do need the tools to be able to fact check the information you've been given. And if something isn't feeling right, you need to know where to look to validate or override that feeling. Because in some relationships, financial infidelity is premeditated, right? It's called divorce planning. That means there will be money moves that happen pre-divorce. If alarm bells are ringing, here are some things to look out for.

15:44Is there, isn't there a change in how the financial assets are being accumulated? Did we suddenly go from having direct deposits and now we're receiving checks? Another fan favorite, because it's really not that creative, what people think it is, is they're going to switch from either having minimal federal tax withholding to maximizing the federal tax withholding, thinking that they're going to file a separate return from their soon-to-be ex and they're going to get to hide all that money and keep that tax refund for themselves. Nope, not going to happen. You know, so we just have to look at what's changed.

16:23He's bringing home less money. Let's look at a pay stub. Let's see if maybe he's putting more into a 401k. It could be anything. I mentioned that Cheryl had told me some of her wildest stories from her years as a forensic accountant. Here was one that blew my mind. I had a business owner who sold his business to his CPA. And we knew the transaction was bogus. Spouse knew it was bogus. All the paperwork lined up and we couldn't prove it. And it was really super frustrating. So karma caught up to him, though, because what happened was after the divorce was settled, et cetera, the business owner went back to his CPA and said, Hey, um, I'm going to give you back your check.

17:14And, you know, let me have my business back. And the accountant got a really bad case of amnesia and said, what? No, that was a real transaction. So business owner and his spouse got back together ultimately over this and they sued him and they did eventually get their business back. Wow. Karma, baby. And it actually got crazier. And I've got three cases that were pretty epic. I hired a hitman to kill his wife. Oh my God. Hitman was a cop, as it always is. And when he did that, then she files for divorce, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. While he's in jail, he hires another hitman, not to kill just her, but to kill the attorney the forensic accountant that's me who's oh yeah who's coming up with all the crazy you know all the stuff that she's going to be able to take away from him if this divorce goes through dude you're in jail for like 25 years you wave a goodbye right and uh he was actually caught a second time for soliciting the hitman from jail so the craziest part of that is he wanted uh proof that the attorney was dead because he wanted the hitman to bring him um the attorney's uh what's the technical word gonads excuse me gonads his nuts i don't think i've ever been specialist on this show and the craziest this one is a former retired pro athlete before a former pro athlete now retired uh divorcing his uh his wife in favor of the much younger model starts three businesses each of which is a fraud built upon the last one uh all of his frauds were uncovered and it got to the point where we chased him out of the country and at the time he was chased out of the country he had already committed bankruptcy fraud uh homeowner's insurance fraud workers comp insurance fraud uh what else did you do a couple instances of bank fraud a little bit of wire fraud in there for good measure sure yeah yes why not you know and uh while he was i mean this guy was the typical stereotypical spousal abuser and emotionally he abused his kids promised the one kid you'll get a car when this divorce is over stay with me hang in there as soon as you know the kid was this poor kid had to testify at one of the hearings and he said you know what screw you you're not getting the car it gets even worse though he um i mean the car is a thing right so he's now he's now wanted on federal charges and this dude was also in um america's most wanted okay um flees the country no one knows where to find him the girl his daughter who had the bar taken away from her the car she never had that she would now knock at one of her best friends was on vacation in a foreign country and actually saw him on a train like literally sitting in that same passenger car of the train that she was and she texted her friend real quick she took a like surreptitious picture of the dude sent it and said i think your dad's here so people find him and uh he goes on the run and the story does not have a good ending he wound up wrapping his car around the pole oh my god you know high speed one car accident and he died instantly um the depth of deception that this guy went to though neither his criminal attorney nor his divorce attorney were willing to believe it was him until they saw the dental records so was this a famous guy like pro athlete do we know who this is probably maybe from what i've said if you really wanted to you could figure out who it was but i'm not dropping names regardless of how long ago it was i know and i'm not pushing because yeah that's okay you scare me cheryl now don't get me wrong i don't want to scare you this isn't a who did I marry rerun.

21:53Financial infidelity does not happen in every relationship, but it does happen. And no matter what, it's always smart to have your own back. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. Forensic accountants, of course, are not free. William Kirby Law puts the cost of a forensic accountant at around$300 to$500 an hour and on average over$3 ,000 for a divorce case. Unlike some other types of lawyering, where a person who loses the case has to pay for everyone's legal fees. The person who foots the bill for a forensic accountant is simply the person who wants to hire them. However, you can stipulate in a prenup the terms of payment around a forensic accountant if you do want to adopt a clause that says something like, whoever in the relationship does some sketchy financial shit, they have to pay for the forensic accountant.

22:37You'll need to translate that into legalese, but you get the gist. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram at moneynews and TikTok at moneynewsnetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you.

23:13Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.