If Your Fridge Overflows With Leftovers, If Christmas Specials and Chia Pet Ads Clog the Airwaves, You Know It’s Time to Start Talking Shop : Binge & Splurge : The Sneaky Things We Do to Hide Our Spending Habits

Michelle, a successful writer and editor, fears the day her husband might discover her secret stash of credit cards, her clandestine post office box and a host of other tricks she uses to hide how much money she spends on herself.

“I make as much money as my husband. I’ve worked hard to get where I am today in my career, and if I want a $500 suit from Ann Taylor, I deserve it and I don’t want to be hassled about it. So the easiest thing to do is lie,” she says.

Last year, when her husband forced her to cut up one of her favorite credit cards, Michelle promptly went out and got a new one without his knowledge. To keep it secret, she has all her bills and statements sent to her private post office box and then hides them in a locked file at her office.

“I do live in fear. If he discovers this new VISA, he’ll kill me.”

Despite all the advances women have made in the work force and in their relationships with men, many still feel the need to hide the fruits of their shopping binges from their spouses or significant others.

They juggle the family’s finances, hide credit cards and bills, even sneak new clothes into their houses during the dead of night when their husbands are asleep. Many are professional women who make as much as or more than their husbands. Some are stay-at-home moms. Even college girls are learning how to trick good old dad.

“Men just don’t understand that shopping is our drug of choice,” joked a Los Angeles teacher who admitted that some months her salary goes exclusively to paying the minimum balances on her credit cards. “Walking through the door of South Coast Plaza is like walking through the gates of heaven. God made car trunks for women to hide shopping bags in.”

For some couples, “it’s a power play. It’s a way of saying ‘you aren’t going to control me,’ ” says Claremont psychologist and family therapist Marcia Lasswell. So, if some women believe the men in their lives are too inflexible when it comes to their shopping, they feel perfectly justified in engaging in surreptitious behavior.

“Just because we are married does not give him the right to tell me what to do,” Michelle says.

But like many of their husbands, Lasswell believes the issue of women cheating and lying about their expenditures should not be taken lightly.

“It’s devious behavior,” says Lasswell, president-elect of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy. “If women are responsible and equal partners in a marriage or relationship and are spending money responsibly, there is no reason to hide. But if they really can’t afford to be buying what they buy and are running their family into debt and putting an extra burden on their husbands, then they are being selfish and irresponsible.”

The secret strategies of some of these women can be quite sinister. For obvious reasons, they shared their deceptions on the condition they not be identified:

* One Orange County woman who hides her credit card bills from her husband says she even enlisted the help of her mail carrier. If the bills come on a Saturday when the woman’s husband is at home, the female postal carrier simply postpones delivering them until Monday when he’s at work.

* A Seal Beach woman who is in sales and marketing for an entertainment company and loves to shop--sometimes exceeding her budget--admits she bounces a lot of checks. “She’s bounced so many checks I’m surprised her photo isn’t posted on the walls of our savings and loan and the U.S. Post Office,” says her husband.

* Another woman admits she deceives her husband by telling him she spent money for new clothes for the kids, when the money really bought her a new outfit.

* One woman says she saves plastic dry-cleaning bags and when she buys something new, she puts it in the bag and tells her husband she just picked up the dry cleaning.

* One Chicago woman says she collects thrift shop bags and uses them to cover new purchases. When she gets home she tells her husband she got a great deal. He may think she spent 90 cents, when she probably spent $90.

* Another woman says she’s been lucky that her husband never notices that she pays the gas and electric bills twice each month. She said she actually keeps one of the payments to spend on herself.

Robbie, a Long Beach executive who makes more money than her husband, says she refuses to tolerate any guff about how much she spends on clothes, so she sometimes smuggles purchases into the house in her briefcase and waits until her husband is busy in the garage and then sneaks them up to her closet.

Such sneaky tactics have been the ruin of many a marriage, says Newport Beach divorce lawyer John Schilling. He recalls the time a wife of a Newport Beach businessman and developer went on a monthlong shopping binge at Fashion Island and spent $90,000 on clothes, furs and jewelry.

When her husband discovered what she was doing and put a hold on her credit cards, she took some of the purchases and pawned them for cash, Schilling says.

The marriage was rocky before the shopping spree. Now it’s over. “The shopping binge was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Schilling says.

He points out that men can also be devious when it comes to spending money. In fact, when men enter the game of deception, the stakes and costs go even higher because they usually control the purse strings.

In one divorce case he handled, the husband, a wealthy Newport Beach man who was a film company executive, secretly spent more than $100,000 on a Las Vegas showgirl with whom he was having an extra-marital affair. As a token of his affection for the showgirl, he bought her presents such as a Rolls-Royce, Schilling says.

As evidence of his secret relationship began to emerge, his wife discovered frequent charges to a store in Honolulu for things she never received. Suspicious, she jumped on a plane and flew to Hawaii to check it out. She discovered the store was a boutique that sold sex toys.

If the women’s shopping habits are compulsive, “they are usually trying to fill a void,” Lasswell says. “They may be lonely or have poor self-esteem. Or they feel they don’t get enough love and attention.

“Some women resent that they are working hard outside the home as well as doing the bulk of the housework and child care, yet they still don’t have enough cash earnings. Not only is a good part of their work not recognized by any one, they can’t even buy what they want to,” Lasswell says.

Michelle said when her husband once discovered she had lied about her credit card bills, he said, “You are sick and deceitful. You’ve lied to me. How can I ever trust you again?”

Before one woman’s husband discovered that she had credit cards with just about every major department store at South Coast Plaza and Crystal Court, he was mystified--and somewhat frightened--over where her money went every month.

One day, he asked, only half jokingly, “Are you being blackmailed? Or do you have an expensive drug habit I’m unaware of?” She then had to confess that all her money was going toward paying the minimum balances on all her credit cards.

In fairness to women, Lasswell points out that despite the changing roles of women, society still places an enormous importance on how they look. Unfortunately, she said, “men in society are often judged more by what they do and women by how they look. So women feel they need to look good and take care of themselves.”

And although many men expect their wives or girlfriends to look well-dressed and attractive, they don’t have a clue how much that can cost or don’t want to have to pay for it, Lasswell says. And when women work in a profession where they must project a certain well-groomed look, it’s even costlier.

While the men might get their hair cut for $10, women may not get out of the salon for less than $100. And while men can get by on a few pairs of shoes for work, women need a variety of shoes to match outfits.

Even a single woman who lives with the man in her life struggles over whether to be completely honest about how much money she spends for clothes and other personal accessories.

“Even though I spend my own money, and we don’t pool our finances, I’d still rather not hear him jokingly call me a spendthrift . . . or complain that the money I spend on new clothes could have been used to buy new furniture for our house,” said Mary, a young professional. “I guess I feel guilty spending a lot of money. That’s why I will hide new things and bring them in the house when he’s out running.”

“Men don’t understand the primal pleasure we get from being fashionable,” says a Chicago woman, echoing the feelings of others.

“Shopping is my recreation. It’s my way of pampering myself. When you walk into (a mall) and you see all the stores, it’s like something takes over and you get caught up in it,” Mary says.

“After I go on buying sprees, I leave the price tags on the clothes and look at them for a week to decide if they are worth the guilt. If they aren’t, then I return them.

“I think some of it has to do with being in Southern California or any metropolitan area where there are fashionable stores,” she says. “You see the best and you want the best. Being middle class and going on an expensive shopping spree is like trying to fulfill your dreams of being affluent. Men just don’t understand it.”