She knew her husband liked to gamble, she told me. But she didn’t know how much, nor that he had been draining his retirement account for years to pay for his habit. The overwhelmed wife of many years found these things out when her husband landed in the hospital, and she discovered the statements and tax bills in papers in his desk.
It was a familiar story. Sometimes, the details changed a little—a husband instead of a wife, an addiction to drugs or alcohol instead of gambling, or a legal/business development instead of a medical emergency—but the outcome was inevitably ...