Have you ever told your spouse you paid less for something than you actually did? Have you ever lied on your tax return or padded your expense report? You are certainly not alone. Jean Chatzky, “Today” financial contributor and Money magazine editor-at-large,” was invited on the show to discuss money secrets.

In a new Money magazine survey conducted by Matthew Greenwald & Associates, more than half of the adults surveyed with household incomes of $50,000 owned up to at least one kind of money secret or lie.

Why do we tell these lies?

When we looked over the data, we could see that these deceptions had less to do with greed than simple insecurity. We want people to see us as we wish we were — richer, smarter, more competent and more secure. And money, because it is such a sensitive issue, is one of the ways we are judged on all of these things. More than half the people who took our survey told us that money is a sensitive issue in their household, just slightly less sensitive then sex, but much more sensitive than politics and religion.


Let’s look at some of the most common secrets and lies, what they say about us, and what we can learn from them:

Here's a dozy, 44 percent of people believe that it's okay to keep financial secrets from their spouse, at least under certain circumstances. Read the entire article. "