FSR Season 2 - Kasey Rogers

Welcome to the Financial Secrets Revealed Series 2 podcast episode where Amanda Cassar meets Kasey Rogers, a veteran of the US entertainment industry and late to understand that she was within a financially abusive marriage once her own earnings reduced.  Kasey is based in the USA.

She shares her story of emotional and financial abuse during her marriage, when it was time to start a family and she stopped being the breadwinner.  Then surviving the guilt and trauma of losing her partner to cancer and being left in poverty due to his personal beliefs on insurance.

Kasey started trying to understand how she ended up where she did and penned Our Better Selves and The Color of Frost.  Today, she’s started the ‘I Know Why She Stayed’ initiative to help others who are victims of domestic and financial abuse.  

Amanda enjoys Lifting the Lid on Financial Abuse with Kasey.  It’s a dark topic, but one that needs exploring, to help all victims become survivors.

We hope you’ve gained lots of insights and can help others see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Financial Secrets Revealed: Cassar, Amanda: Amazon.com.au: Books

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Financial Secrets Revealed, Collective Wisdom from Business Gurus, Financial Geniuses and Everyday Heroes by Amanda Cassar | 9781925648546 | Booktopia

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Connect with Kasey

https://kaseyrogers.com

https://kaseyrogers.com/i-know-why-she-stayed-initiative/

https://twitter.com/KaseyJRogers

https://www.facebook.com/kaseyrogerscom

https://www.instagram.com/kaseyalamode/

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Websites: 

• https://amandacassar.com.au/ 
• https://www.wealthplanningpartners.com.au/ (company website)
• https://trustedagedcare.com.au/ (company website)

Transcript

0:06

Hi, I am Amanda Casser and welcome to the Financial Secrets Revealed podcast where I have collected the wisdom from some amazing people around the world to understand better their money story. I have financial advisors, multimillion dollar corporate executives and those surviving on Centrelink, even running global charity. I hope you enjoy listening to the episodes as I speak with these incredible people about their stories. Hello. I am Amanda Casser. And welcome back to the Financial Secrets Revealed podcast. We have a late entry for season two with the interview of the lovely Casey Rogers. Now, Casey has been involved in nearly every aspect of the entertainment industry from the sound of it and she's currently based in the Berkshires in West Massachusetts. Welcome along, Casey. Thank you. Lovely to have you on board. Likewise. Now, I understand that you were in a financially abusive marriage. You didn't probably realize it at the start but went on to understand this more after the death of your husband and wrote a book about it that started as, I guess, just a catharsis for you but sort of took on its own life. Can you tell us about your story and how that happened? Oh, absolutely. I was probably as surprised as anyone else when I finally realized that I was in a financially abusive marriage. I was married for twelve years before we had children. And although my husband worked, he had his own business. He was a director producer in the film industry. But I worked in New York City at a number of very, very high profile production companies first and then I moved on to various ad agencies. And my salary basically guaranteed us things like healthcare and mortgage payments and everything else. And I was happy to do it initially because I was trying to be supportive. He was very talented and there was always that promise, well, someday you'll get your turn. Well, they never happened. That's when it happened. Yeah, it never quite happened. And when I was approaching my forty s I started to get really antsy because I wanted to start a family. And at that point I had been commuting two and a half hours each way into work every day and life was just getting really old very quickly. That's difficult, is it? A lot of time out? Yeah, I made the best of it because I did a lot of writing. It sounds really crazy, but I actually rode on the bus when I was traveling into New York and this was before there were like little laptops and things of that nature. But I was actually working on my own project. I wrote a musical. And when I started realizing that life was kind of passing me by I forced my husband's hand in some ways and finally he decided, all right, now is the time to start a family. And when I was 42, I actually had girl, boy, twin. Yeah, it was wonderful. Except for the part where people used to say, oh, your grandchildren are so cute. Thanks for nothing. I didn't like that so much. He was working for the first time in a full time job, and I stayed working for a couple of years, but because I was working so far away, even though I had cut back my hours, there was such a disconnect between the children and their care and me. And he was never really home because he had to leave early in the morning to get into work. So a kind of, like, mini crisis prompted me to just quit. I'd had enough. And it wasn't until I was not the main breadwinner that I realized how restricted I was financially. I mean, he had always kind of pulled these things on me. Like, it was okay to spend money he earned on film equipment or doing a music video or whatever he could to promote his work. But when I needed to do something or wanted to do something, the money was always scrutinized, even though I was the one that was earning it. And a couple years actually, it wasn't even a couple of years shortly after I quit my job, I also was fighting, like, extreme fatigue. And we found out that I actually had tumors on my parathyroid gland that were causing this immense exhaustion. I thought it was just twins and running away from that. I was going to say I would have thought immediately, yeah, twin babies at 42. There's there's got to be some tiredness coming in here. But on top of that, health issues as well. Wow. Yeah. So I kind of assumed that's what it was. But then I started to get really scared because there were times that I was just so exhausted, I literally could not push the stroller home from a park that was like a block and a half away. So I got help and I was diagnosed with the tumors on my parathyroid glands. I was operated on, but during that time, my husband was always belittling me, berating me, you're lazy, you're inept. I mean, all these things started to come out and it started to really impact my self esteem because even though I was working, I was working as a teacher, but I was making a fraction of what I used to make. And as time went on, he started doing things that really alarmed me, like just these power trips. Like one time we were scheduled to go back and visit some relatives and we stayed in a hotel at night, and I wanted to shower in the morning instead of showering at night so I wouldn't disturb the kids. And in the morning, he threw a fit because he was ready to leave. And I wanted to hop in the shower and it was like, well, if you go in the shower, I'm going to take your purse and I'm going to pack the car and leave you with no money, and he started doing things like that more and more often. So now I had no money. I mean, we spent an enormous amount on fertility treatments and that all came out of my pocket. So I always say, the kids are mine, I paid for them. Donate the sperm. So the first for you then was the power imbalance sort of tilted more in his favor after you weren't the breadwinner. Now we've got the emotional abuse starting and the lowering of your self esteem because of the constant taunts. So there wasn't too much of the financial abuse at this stage or looking back, it all sort of was interconnected. It was all interconnected because he started scrutinizing things even more and more. Like, if I went to the grocery store and again, this is going back, like, 25 years ago, but if I went to the grocery store and I bought what we normally would have bought for groceries when it was just the two of us and I was using my money, when we were using his money, it was always too much. I was always spending too much. I was always questioned about where the money was coming from, where was it going, and those were never things that were questioned. When I was the one that was bringing in the lion's share of the income, he had full access to all monies that I earned. But once I started working less and making less, suddenly everything was scrutinized. But I still didn't connect it because back then the word financial abuse really wasn't resonating. Yeah, wasn't probably even invented as a style of abuse then, was it? It was all part of the I guess now it would fall under the. Domestic violence and possibly emotional abuse. What happens with us. It was a lot of fate kind of intervened. My husband got laid off from his job, and he had always wanted to move to Canada because at one point we had a vacation property there and we had sold it so he could buy some investment properties and we could have a rental income, which also didn't work. But we opened up a business up there, or we decided we had a property, we were going to turn it into a business and a residence and have rental income, and we decided to open up a little cafe. And four months after we moved up there, he came downstairs from the office one day and he said he got a call from his old boss and he had, without even asking me, taken a job back in the US. So he left me in Canada with nine year old twins and a new business. And I think in some ways he kind of just I'm not really sure what he expected, whether he wanted me to fail or what it was. But with him gone, I suddenly started to realize that I could breathe again. I started to be confident, like as people used to come into the cafe and they loved our food. And I started getting involved in artistic events and I did like spoken word up there. And as he was gone, I just started to really realize the impact that he had on my life and my sense of self esteem. So I was up there for almost four years before he started doing things like he said he wanted me to move back to the States. He was missing too much of the children's life, which was really kind of hard to take because he only saw them every two weeks. And he forced my hands by stopping. Like he wouldn't support the children, he wouldn't pay any of the bills that we had in common. He had run up a lot of credit card debt. And after consulting an attorney, she convinced me that the only way to deal with the situation, because I felt we were headed for divorce, was to go back and deal with it. So I closed my business. Very sadly. I was really sorry to leave. And when I got down there, that's when everything became very obvious in terms of his desire to control me by using finances against me. I was driving a vehicle that had no, like it had an instrument panel, but it was faulty, so I could never tell whether I had gas in the car, how fast I was going, any of those things. He refused to get a cell phone for me, or even a landline, like a $12 landline, so that I could contact the school in case of an emergency. I had a computer that had a faulty input jack, so a lot of times I couldn't even use the internet. And yet he wanted me to look for a job. And he wanted me to contribute to the household income and find work at a time whether the economy was really bad. This is when the US was going through a recession. And anytime he gave me money, he wanted receipts. He wanted to know if he gave me $20, did that go in the gas tank? If he gave me money for groceries, did I buy groceries with it? And that kind of forced me to really evaluate our relationship even more than I had been. And I tried to figure out a way to leave and I did leave once. So the kids are young teenagers about now, I'm guessing. Yeah. At that point they were twelve, which is a really hard age. And they were very devastated about leaving Canada. They loved it there. I loved it. It was our home. We considered it our home. They really regressed socially and emotionally. My son started really exhibiting anxiety about going to school. They were always a students and their grades started decline. My husband and I fought constantly. Nothing I did satisfied him. If I moved a piece of furniture, he wanted it moved back like everything was about his ability to control every element of my life. So I took refuge at my brother's house for about a week, and then he begged me to come back, and I did. And primarily because the kids really missed star pets. We had a dog and three cats and they were like and they didn't really like staying with my brother and his wife. They were very strict. So we went back and six months later we found out that he was dying. He had cancer and he was very ill. Like, the doctors that we first saw gave him literally a couple of weeks to live because he had a tumor on his vertebrae that had compromised his neck. So when you think of a broken neck, you think of somebody stumbling and falling and breaking their neck. But he was actually walking around with a clinical broken neck. So the prognosis was very grim. And he passed away about six months after the diagnosis of Esophageal geocancer. So had there been any plans made for the family? Was there insurances in place or anything along those lines to look after you? He refused during our relationship, especially towards the end when things started to get really hostile, when he would have had an opportunity, because he didn't have a diagnosis. His words were, I do not want you to profit from my death. So he refused to get out insurance. And when he passed away, I was left with not only medical debt, I was left with tons of credit card debt. I had no income, and he basically left us in poverty. So it was a tough couple of years after he passed away. Wow. Yeah. So all this perfect storm. And I'm guessing there's also very mixed emotions about his illness and death. There must have been some relief there that he's no longer suffering, but also that he's no longer torturing and abusing you as well, which must be very conflicting. It was very conflicting. And I have to say, I really slid into a depression because I had no support system. We were living in the town he grew up with, and we had been living with his relatives for a while, so of course they were mourning the passing of the brother and the son, and I was mourning the passing of my children's father. And he was a man that I loved for so long. When I started writing the memoir, one of the phrases that I used quite frequently is I needed to untangle all of these emotions because I hated him and I loved him and I didn't want him to die. I mean, that was the last thing that I wanted. I just didn't want him to continually spew these words of resentment and condemnation over just about everything about me. It wasn't that I did things. It was like he resented who I was as a human being. So when you look back now, and the emotional abuse sort of starting when you were no longer main breadwinner. Do you look back and see if there were triggers that brought this on? Were there any changes for him? Because it doesn't sound like this was the beautiful man you married and wanted to start a family with. It sounds like. Did it sneak up or was it a snap? How did you find it in your relationship? I think because we had such an unusual marriage,

I left at 04: 19:10

00 every morning. I didn't get home sometimes until eight or nine. I was either in the city, sometimes I slept over in the city. I was very active with the play that I was working on, so I was home mostly on the weekends. And it was kind of that honeymoon thing, like, oh, my God, I'm getting to spend time with the man that I love. And we'd go out for dinner and we'd go antiquing, and we'd go rafting, and everything was about the pleasures in life. There were none of the conflicts because we weren't together. We were always on opposite ends of jobs and stuff. Twelve year honeymoon. Most people don't get that, do they? Exactly. Twelve year dating honeymoon. Yeah. But I think that that created like, a false security because we didn't have to deal with some of the bigger questions. Real life. Yeah. It's like usually when you spend time together is when you discover those little things about one another. I mean, there were definitely signs. When I started to look back, one of the things that became very apparent was that he not only tried to control me financially, he always wanted to control my time. So if I got on the phone with a friend or it never happened with a relative, but it was only like my girlfriends. It was always like when I got off the phone, well, they're just using you. They just think that you're going to become this big Broadway person, and they're just snuggling up to you to be good friends with you. Any friendship that I had wasn't authentic because he believed that they were just trying to use me and benefit from my talent and connections. And that was really hard to take because, again, I started to believe it. I started to question, oh, well, maybe. Projection much? Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it was. But I didn't know that at the time, of course. Yeah. So when you look back now with the beautiful benefit of hindsight, do you see some signs that you wish you'd taken a bit more notice of or trusted your gut a little more? Are there things you look back and went, yeah, should have stopped that in its tracks, or made different decisions? So what are some of those? Casey I was always afraid to confront him after I stopped working about some of his behavior, because at that point, I really didn't have the means to leave and there were times that alarm bells went off, like that time that he threatened to leave me in the hotel room with no money. That's just, like a drop in the bucket for things that occurred between the two of us. And they were all always, like, these threats. And at that point, I remember on numerous occasions being completely beside myself and just crying hysterically to various girlfriends. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle this. It seemed to be coming out of left field, but it wasn't. It wasn't coming out of left field because I should have seen the imbalance of our relationship, where, again, whenever he needed to buy a piece of equipment or he wanted to produce a music video, his money was never called into question. Mine always was. And I think that some of the mistakes that I made were really not protecting myself financially by having some investments and things of that nature that would have protected me if something happened to him, even if he didn't act out the way that he ended up acting out. I just really wish that some of the things that I was leery of in the very beginning of our marriage by kind of almost ignoring my instincts towards financial survival. And again, it wasn't about, like, him thinking about abusing me. It was always kind of, well, what would happen if he died? What would I do? Would I be able to survive on my own financially? I didn't heed any of those precautions. I just threw them to the wind and just went along with whatever he had to say. Did any girlfriends or family members or anyone say to you, look, Casey, I'm a bit uncomfortable with things, or, when you're pouring your heart out, was there good advice or anything? Not really. I think some of my girlfriends just got tired of me being a wimp and just not standing up to him. It was kind of like, you've got to stand up to him. And I was just so brow beaten by that point. And again, when I was sick, some of the things that he said to me in terms of my character, really, it impacted me in ways that I can't even describe. I mean, I was always very confident. I I took on jobs that I had absolutely no reason to be qualified for, but I would just take it. It's like, okay, yeah, I could do this, and I did it. Exactly. And here I was in a marriage where suddenly he had control of all the the purse strings. And I I just it finally occurred to me, well, if he wanted to walk away or he wanted to divorce me, he would just say things that just kind of scorched me in ways we were far enough away from family and most of my lifelong friends because we lived in Pennsylvania, but I worked in New York. So once I stopped working there, most of my friend group kind of, like, shriveled up and died. I had very, very few friends, except for the friends that I had when I met them working at the school. A couple of teachers, a couple of students, moms. But no one really knew the insides of my marriage. So for the people who sit back and go, oh, look, I've listened to all this terrible thing. For goodness sake, Casey, even like your friends, why did you stay? I mean, it's such a big question that everybody has, look, if it's that bad, why don't you walk? So the victim blaming continues. And I know you've started a fabulous initiative. Do you want to talk us through how that came to be? In answer to that why did you stay? Question. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Because it wasn't until I started to write my memoir and again, untangle things that I realized all of the misconceptions I had about abuse. I always thought of abuse as being someone like my neighbor. When I was twelve, we had a neighbor whose husband beat her every single night. We could hear her screams coming through the wall. And she was this very petite Korean woman. She spoke no English, she never worked. She had five children under the age of ten. And my twelve year old brain was like, well, why doesn't she just leave him if things are so bad? And it wasn't until I had moved back from Canada and had to answer to my husband for every dime he gave me that I realized she couldn't leave. Where was she going to go? And that is the biggest obstacle to so many women. These barriers are more financial. They're about like when somebody he ruined our credit. We had no credit anymore because he had ran up credit card debt. I had no job. The economy was horrible at that point. Where was I going to go? It's very hard to make it as a single mother working at a place like Walmart, and I didn't even have a reliable car or a way to submit applications for jobs. So I started thinking back when I was writing the memoir about all of these times that I was very judgmental of other women until I got into that situation. And so after I wrote the memoir and I started talking to a lot of women who had read it, and they were like, oh my God, you have no idea. I went through the same thing. And so many people identified with what I had experienced with and maybe it's because I have boy, girl, twins, and I see the obstacles my daughter faces that my son never has to. I just wanted to do more. I wanted to do something that took advantage of the lessons that I learned and things that I had experienced so that I could heal and say, look, it's all behind me. I can give you the benefit of my experiences and maybe prevent somebody else from experiencing what I did. So I started the initiative. It launched on April 15 and it's called I know Why she stayed. And the goal of the initiative is basically to allow people to understand the connection between financial abuse and domestic abuse. But there's another component that really weighs on the impact of financial abuse, and that is the gender pay gap. Because we are paid less than men for the same work. And here in the US, I've heard two different figures. One is like $0.78 on a dollar. Another one is $0.82 on a dollar. I know women of color sometimes make$0.50 on a dollar. Yeah. By the way, none of them are acceptable. Whatever the figure is, it should be dollar for dollar for work done. Absolutely, exactly. And right now, there's a Congresswoman that has written a bill to promote paycheck transparency. And we are almost 60 years. As of June 10, it will be 60 years since the US passed the Equal Pay Act, and very little has happened. So my goal with the initiative is to really speak out about the connection between these three things, but also the ripple effect that the gender pay gap has, and how if women had that $12,000 a year in their pocket that they should have had because they were being paid equally, they could possibly get their own apartment. Maybe it would give them a way to deal with an emergency. There's just so many things that you could do with that extra $1,000 a month. And women would also be reinvesting in their children and their communities as well. So it would make neighborhoods stronger. And from an outsider looking in at what's happening in the States at the moment, it's really distressing to see what's happening in the country with, obviously the gun violence to start with, but the breakdown of families and the mental health issues when we visit. It's terribly sad to witness what's happening over there. The homelessness and the panhandling when you walk out of any hotel in a major city. You can't not see it when you're in the States now. So it is very distressing. It is. And it's not what I want for my children. I feel like at my age, I don't have a lot to offer them because I still struggle financially. And it's been twelve years since he passed away, and it took me a long, long time to kind of even get to the point where I'm living paycheck to paycheck, which is really good now. But, I mean, there's plenty who aren't even covering. So I understand where you're coming from. So the book, Casey, for anyone who'd like to have a read of it, what was the name of your memoir? It's called our better selves. From secrets to lies to healing and forgiveness. And it's available on my website. I just happen to have it on sale if anybody's interested. Brilliant. I will make sure that those links are in the show notes. And you've also written a work of fiction, I believe, that incorporates the tenets of financial and domestic abuse in that. So that was the color of frost, I believe. Yes, it is. And it's a work that I'm really proud of because it does deal with a lot of the same themes that I've dealt with personally. But it also is kind of a love letter to my children in a lot of ways because I try to show them through the main character who's kind of a quirky, difficult person with a lot of issues, but how to lead a life that is about more than just yourself, that developing a sense of community is so important and giving back and rising above the hatred and the bigotry that we see so prominently in this country right now. So The Color of Frost is really I mean, I'm proud of my memoir, but I had to make up the entire The Color of Frost. But lived experience thrown in and for anybody else, the initiative that you started. I know whyshayed.org. Have I got that correctly? Yes. And it's all linked with my website, Caseyrogers.com. So if you forget, I know why she stayed.org. You could always just caseyrogers. It's Casey with a K. Any final. Parting wisdom for Casey, for someone who's listening to this going, oh, my goodness, that's me. I don't know where to go next, where to turn, how to get out of this, what to do. Do you have some words of advice from someone who's lived it and come out the other side? I think my first piece of advice is to stay safe, because women are most vulnerable when they're leaving a relationship. That's when things escalate. And I know that from personal experience. So there are organizations out there and most websites that you would look into that have information about how you could leave, have buttons on there so that you can click the button and get out of the browser really quickly. But trust your instincts but stay safe. Because if you're compromised in a way, it might not just be you, it might also be your children that end up in harm's way, and then you never get a chance to leave. It usually takes very often overlooked. Yeah, it's a process. Seven times is usually what it takes before a woman successfully leaves. And that's just tragic in its own right, isn't it? Trying to do that. And then when you do it's, the promises and the lies that get you back, because you do want to believe that this person you are completely in love with and shared a life with isn't the person they've become. Yeah. Understandable? No. Thank you so much for sharing your story with Casey. Really appreciate it. Any final words to wrap up? One more thing I would like to say is that. If you know of somebody that is in a situation and you can see it, and they can't understand that abuse is traumatic and they're not in their right minds right now and you just said it perfectly. It's like you're fighting instincts against somebody that you love and care for, and you have a very hard time understanding why they would be treating you that way. And it causes a lot of trauma. So don't judge them harshly. Give them your love and support. And you might not understand why they're still there, but be there for them and don't ask them the question, well, why don't you just leave? I think that's beautiful, actually, to wrap up on that. If you are that friend and you can see it knowing that even you're just a safe person to be able to download and vent to, and sometimes it takes a terrible incident to go, you know what? I'm done. I've now put that nail in the coffin. I'm ready to do something. And not everybody's got their go bag packed or has the ability to even have one ready to. Some walk out with the clothes on their back and their kids in their arms. It's that way to start over. So that's really beautiful advice for those who are looking on wondering, to not be judgmental. I think the world we live in now just needs more kindness from everybody. So beautiful advice to finish with. Casey, thank you so much for sharing with us. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Amanda. And that was another episode of Financial Secrets Revealed. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you got some nuggets of wisdom out of that guest and enjoyed. Listening to their story. If you'd like to know more, please reach out to me. My contact details are in the show notes or hunt down your favorite bookstore to find Financial secrets Revealed and learn more for yourself. I look forward to hearing from.