Paulina Porizkova’s Biggest Regret

Like many women, the supermodel let her husband handle their finances, at a huge cost to her when she was widowed at midlife

Former supermodel Paulina Porizkova has just come out with a memoir, No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, a series of essays that range from her childhood in Sweden, to which her family had fled from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, to beauty and aging, to her marriage to the late Ric Ocasek, frontman of the Cars, to money.

I already wrote about her thoughts on beauty and aging, something many women can probably relate to. Her experience with managing money, however, is one that should resonate with every woman.

Paulina writes that when she met Ric at age 19, she had been living on her own for four years when her modeling career began. She was making big bucks then, but she let others manage her finances. Eventually, she let Ric’s business manager and accountants manage her money, too.

When they began talking about marriage when she was 24 and he was 45, all their advisors told them to get a prenup. Ric would have nothing to do with it. She went along with it although she admits, “That his first two marriages had ended in divorces did not even occur to me” — easy for a young, inexperienced woman to not pay much attention to.

She was bringing in $6 million a year at the time, an income that surely could support a very good life for decades.

Like many women, she let her husband take care of the financial things — it was that older, wiser man thing. She had no idea what happened to it — saved? spent? invested? — but she admits that it felt good at the time to not have to worry about it.

They separated after 28 years of marriage and were on their way to a divorce when Ric suddenly died at age 75. That’s when she discovered he’d cut her out of his will, leaving her without any access to their money, even her own earnings. She was 56 at the time and a former model who had aged out of work and had no job prospects. As she writes,

“It took two years for the estate to propose a settlement. During those two years, I learned more about money than I had in my entire life up to that point. My complete inattention to the money I had earned left me scrambling. The only cash I had between the two years after Ric’s death and the settlement from his estate — the only money I had access to for living expenses — was from a cash-out mortgage on the house, which I was trying to sell.”

They had been warned in 2010 that they were living beyond their means, and so they amassed a lot of debt.

Does she blame him? No, she blames herself (although she admits to being a bit pissed off at him, and rightfully so).

She has regrets.

“Yes, I wish I had signed a prenup, I wish I had kept my money separate, I wish I had kept working more, but most of all, I wish I hadn’t handed over the purview of me to someone else. I trusted my husband. I trusted him to steer me in the right direction in every way to the point of self-abnegation: I gave up work, friends, and even my likes and dislikes for his love. And I learned the hard way that to nullify yourself means that when you most need yourself, you may not even know who you are or how to find yourself. I had made choices, and now I was seeing the consequences.”

Of course, Paulina is not alone in this dilemma.

In a new survey of more than 1,800 married couples, mostly hetero but a few dozen same-sex, nearly half of the wives — mostly millennials — say they leave the major financial and investment decisions to their spouses.

Why? They wanted to avoid arguing, they had “no idea where to begin,” they thought their spouse was financially savvier, and — here’s the kicker — nearly 60 percent said they wanted to be “taken care of.”

As I wrote before, marriage is not a financial plan. Just because you have a spouse today does not mean you will have one forever, either through divorce or death. And sometimes a spouse becomes disabled or ill and can’t work. Then what?

Paulina learned the hard way.

“It’s taken three very painful years to learn lessons I would rather not have had to learn. But I have learned my worth. And I will never again settle for less.”

If you’re a woman of any age, you would be wise to follow Paulina’s lead: Know what’s happening to your money, learn your worth and for goddess sake, never settle for less.

Hey, I’ve written a book on changing the narrative about aging as a woman, “Not Too Old For That: How Women Are Changing the Story of Aging” (April 2022). Order it here and follow me on Medium, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you want to support my work and have unlimited access to my writing and the writing of all Medium writers, please become a member here. And if you’re interested in individualizing your marriage, please check out the book I co-authored, The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels. You can support your local indie bookstore (please do) or order it on Amazon. We’re also on Audible.