When In-Laws Control Money in a Marriage: Recognising Financial Abuse
It was called family. It was called collective responsibility. In my clinic, I call it what it is.
The first thing he said when he sat down was: "I don't think this is abuse. My family is just very traditional."
He and his wife were both professionals. Both employed. Both drawing salaries at the end of every month. And yet neither of them had ever held their own money. From the day they were married and moved into the joint family home, both salaries went directly to the father-in-law. In return, he gave them pocket money — a modest amount for haircuts, personal items, small expenses. The rest, he explained, belonged to the family. They lived in the family home. They ate the family food. Their income was no different from the income of anyone working in a family business. It went into the common pool.
He had sat across from me and used the word "traditional." What he had not yet found the word for was what it felt like to ask his father for money to buy his wife a birthday gift. What it felt like to have no savings of his own after three years of professional employment. What it felt like to be an adult — educated, capable, earning — and to have no financial autonomy whatsoever.
His wife had found a different word for it. She had found it before he did, which is perhaps why she had made the appointment.
She called it a cage.
Why Listen to Dr. Prerna Kohli?
What the Research Tells Us
Financial abuse — also called economic abuse — is recognised globally as one of the most common and least reported forms of domestic abuse. Unlike physical violence, it leaves no visible marks. Unlike emotional abuse, it is often rationalised as practicality, tradition, or family love. And unlike both, it is particularly effective at trapping people in situations they cannot leave — because leaving requires money, and the money is not theirs.
Those figures come from the National Network to End Domestic Violence and India's National Family Health Survey. In India, the picture is made considerably more complex by the joint family system — a structure with genuine cultural value and genuine potential for misuse. As a clinical psychologist working with Indian couples for over 30 years, I want to make a distinction that I believe is essential: a joint family is not inherently financially abusive. Financial abuse within a joint family is. The difference lies not in the structure, but in whether earning members have genuine autonomy — or whether that autonomy has been quietly, systematically removed.
The most effective financial cage is the one built with love as the bars. In Indian joint families, control over money is rarely presented as control. It is presented as belonging, as family, as the natural order of things. That framing is precisely what makes it so hard to name — and so hard to leave.
— Dr. Prerna Kohli, Clinical Psychologist, Gurugram
Two Real Cases: The Same Trap, Two Different Doors
Financial abuse in Indian marriages does not arrive in a single form. In my clinical practice in Gurugram, I have seen it operate from above — through in-laws who control a couple's income — and from below, through a spouse's family of origin whose financial needs consume the marriage before it has properly begun. Both cases below are drawn from my practice, shared with permission, with all identifying details changed.
The joint family home contained eight people: the father-in-law, the mother-in-law, the elder brother-in-law, his wife, their two children, and this young couple. Of the eight, three earned income: the father-in-law and the elder brother-in-law from the family business, and this young couple from their professional employment. The mother-in-law and the elder sister-in-law were housewives.
The arrangement, as explained by the father-in-law when the couple moved in, was straightforward. All income belonged to the family. The young couple's salaries were to be transferred to the father-in-law each month. He would manage household expenses and return to them a monthly allowance for personal needs — haircuts, clothing, small purchases. Room and board were provided. What more, he asked, did they need?
The father-in-law's framing was internally consistent and — this is what made it so effective — almost impossible to argue with in isolation. Their employment, he explained, was no different from working in a family business. Employees in a family business did not pocket their salaries independently; the money went back into the enterprise. The family home was the enterprise. Their food, housing, and security were their compensation. Keeping their full salaries for themselves would be, in this framing, equivalent to an employee stealing from the till.
The genius of this argument was its surface reasonableness. Taken one sentence at a time, it was almost defensible. Taken as a whole — applied to two professional adults who had not joined a family business but had simply married into a family — it was a mechanism for total financial control dressed as economic logic.
The couple had accepted it. They were newly married, grateful for the home, reluctant to cause conflict. By the time they came to see me — three years later — neither of them had a personal bank account with meaningful savings. Neither had been able to plan financially for their own future. Neither had been able to make a significant purchase, take a holiday, or make a financial decision without the father-in-law's approval.
The wife had reached the limit first. She came to me not because she had identified what was happening as financial abuse. She came because she had begun to feel, in her own words, that she did not exist as a person — only as a function. She earned money she never saw. She lived in a home she had no authority in. She had no financial identity of her own.
When I said — gently, carefully — that what she was describing had a clinical name, she looked at me with the expression I have seen many times in 30+ years of practice: the expression of someone who has finally been given permission to say what they already knew.
It was an arranged marriage. Both families had met, approved, and proceeded through the rituals of negotiation and celebration with apparent goodwill. It was only after the wedding — once the celebrations were over and real life began — that he understood what he had actually entered.
His wife's family was considerably less financially secure than his own. They had taken significant loans to fund their share of the wedding expenses. His wife — their daughter, their primary earning child — had agreed, before the marriage, to pay the EMI on those loans every month until they were cleared. She had also agreed to provide her parents with monthly financial support, as they had no retirement savings and no other reliable income.
He had not known any of this before the wedding. She had not told him — not because she was dishonest, but because she had not known how, and because, in her family's understanding, this was simply what a dutiful daughter did. It was not a matter that required disclosure. It was a matter of love.
When he finally understood the full picture, he sat down and calculated it. Seventy to eighty percent of his wife's monthly take-home pay was leaving her account before she had any opportunity to direct it elsewhere: a significant portion to the wedding loan EMI, the remainder to her parents' monthly expenses. What was left barely covered her personal needs.
Where her salary went — every month
The practical consequence was that this marriage — between two employed professionals — was, in financial terms, a single-income household. His salary had to cover everything they built together: their home, their future, their children, their savings, their emergencies. Her salary was committed, in full, to a family debt and a family of origin she had not consulted him about.
He came to me angry — but his anger, when we examined it carefully, was not about money. It was about transparency. About partnership. About the fact that he had married someone whose financial reality had been kept from him, and who was now, by necessity, financially dependent on him for everything they shared — while her own income went elsewhere.
She came defensive — and her defensiveness, when we examined it carefully, was not about protecting her family. It was about shame. She had known, on some level, that this arrangement was not something she could have disclosed before the wedding without risking the match. She had made a calculation — not a dishonest one, but a desperate one. And now she was living inside the consequences of it.
This was not a case of a bad wife or a controlling family. It was a case of a young woman so financially entangled with her family of origin that she had no independent financial identity to bring into a marriage. What she had been left with — as an earning professional — was almost no financial autonomy, and an arrangement she had never genuinely consented to. In my clinical view, that loss of autonomy is itself a form of financial harm, even when no one sets out to cause it.
In my clinical practice, I see this second pattern with increasing frequency in urban India — particularly as more women earn well and are therefore expected, by families without other financial resources, to be the primary support. The woman in this situation is not a villain. She is often herself a victim of a financial dependency that was established long before she had the language or the power to refuse it.
Joint Family Finance vs. Financial Abuse: The Difference
I want to be careful here. Joint family financial arrangements are not inherently abusive. Families that pool resources transparently, with genuine participation and consent from all earning members, can and do function well. The question is never whether money is shared. The question is whether the sharing is chosen — or enforced.
If you recognise your situation in either column — WhatsApp Dr. Prerna Kohli for a confidential conversation. In-clinic in Gurugram and online globally.
The Warning Signs: When Financial Control Has Become Financial Abuse
In my 30+ years of counselling Indian couples, I have identified a consistent set of warning signs that a financial arrangement has crossed from family culture into financial abuse. None of these, in isolation, is definitive. Taken together — particularly when the person experiencing them feels unable to raise them without fear — they constitute a clinical picture that deserves to be taken seriously.
Your salary enters an account and exits as someone else's decision. You receive back a portion — an allowance — for personal use. You have no meaningful say in how the rest is spent, saved, or invested. This is the most direct form of financial control I see in Indian joint families, and it is also the most normalised. The fact that it is common does not make it acceptable.
You do not know the total household income. You do not know what the family owns, owes, or saves. You are not included in financial decisions that directly affect you. Financial transparency in marriage — including in joint family marriages — is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for genuine partnership. When information is withheld, power follows the information.
You have considered raising a concern about the financial arrangement and decided not to — because you fear the response. This fear may be fear of anger, of being labelled ungrateful or disloyal, of being accused of breaking the family apart. In my clinical practice, this fear — the inability to question without cost — is one of the clearest markers that an arrangement has become coercive rather than consensual.
Significant financial commitments — loans, family support obligations, ongoing transfers — that were established before the marriage and not disclosed to your spouse are a form of financial non-transparency that damages the foundation of a marriage. This applies regardless of which family of origin created the obligation. A marriage cannot be a genuine partnership if one partner enters it financially committed to arrangements the other does not know about.
This is the most serious sign — and the one that most clearly distinguishes financial abuse from financial inconvenience. If you have no savings, no independent account, no financial resources that are genuinely yours, and no ability to make a significant financial decision without another person's approval — then your financial dependency is not incidental. It is structural. And structural dependency is, by definition, a form of control. Research consistently shows that financial abuse is the single biggest barrier to leaving abusive relationships. As a clinical psychologist, I take this very seriously.
Your Legal Rights
⚖️ Financial Abuse Is Recognised Under Indian Law
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 explicitly includes economic abuse in its definition of domestic violence. Economic abuse includes: depriving a person of economic or financial resources to which they are entitled; disposing of household effects or assets without consent; prohibiting or restricting a person from accessing their own bank accounts; and forcing a person to execute financial documents.
What this means: if your salary is being controlled by your in-laws, if you are being denied access to your own bank account, or if significant financial decisions are being made without your participation — this may constitute economic abuse under Indian law, regardless of how it has been framed by your family.
Practical steps: open a personal bank account if you do not have one, in your name alone. Request that your salary be deposited there. Document any financial controls or restrictions you have experienced — dates, amounts, who imposed them. Speak to a lawyer who specialises in family law before making any major decisions. And speak to a mental health professional, because the psychological impact of financial control is real and deserves to be addressed alongside the practical and legal dimensions.
What I Have Learned From 30 Years of Counselling Indian Couples
Financial abuse is almost never recognised as abuse by the person experiencing it. In my 30+ years of clinical practice, I have rarely had a client come to me saying: I am experiencing financial abuse. They come saying: I feel trapped. I feel like I don't exist. I feel like I am working for someone else's life. The naming — careful, compassionate, honest — is often the first intervention. And it is, almost always, a relief.
The controller rarely sees themselves as controlling. The father-in-law in Case 1 believed, genuinely, that he was managing the family's resources responsibly. He had a framework — family as enterprise, income as collective — that made his behaviour feel not only acceptable but virtuous. Challenging financial control in Indian families requires challenging the framework, not just the behaviour. This is delicate work, and it almost always requires a skilled third party.
The spouse's complicity is often the deepest wound. In both cases above, the husband's response to the financial dynamic was one of the most painful parts of the experience for the wife. In Case 1, he had accepted the arrangement as normal. In Case 2, he had not disclosed the full picture before the marriage. A partner who does not stand beside you when your financial autonomy is being taken — whether by their family or by circumstances — is communicating something important about the power structure of the marriage. I have written more about this in my article on in-law interference in Indian marriages.
Financial abuse and emotional neglect almost always travel together. In every case of financial control I have encountered, there is a parallel story of emotional invisibility. The person whose money is controlled is also the person whose voice is not heard, whose preferences are not considered, whose sense of self has been slowly, systematically diminished. The money is never just money. It is power. And when power is taken, personhood follows.
Recovery is possible — but it requires rebuilding from the ground up. Reclaiming financial autonomy after years of control is not simply a practical process. It is a psychological one. People who have lived without financial agency often do not trust their own financial judgement. They have been taught, implicitly, that they cannot be trusted with money — or that money is not theirs to think about. Rebuilding that confidence, that sense of financial selfhood, is real work. And it is entirely possible.
Financial Control Is Not Family. It Is Abuse. And Help Exists.
As a clinical psychologist with 30+ years of experience in Gurugram and Delhi NCR, I work with individuals and couples experiencing financial control, economic abuse, and the psychological damage that follows. In-clinic and online globally. Always accepting new clients.
WhatsApp Dr. Prerna Kohli +91 9811862338 · hello@drprernakohli.in · Strictly Confidential · Gurugram & Online