History Main / MsRedInk

* Creator/AgathaChristie was fond of playing with and inverting this trope.
** In ''Literature/DeathOnTheNile'' Linette was a very wealthy woman who had been trained by her father in managing her financial and legal affairs, and as such was very clever and capable in business matters. Her husband, on the other hand, had no business sense at all.

... only, there wasn't a spare five grand in the budget for that month, and she's just put the family into serious debt.

This trope assumes that female characters are [[MoneyDumb incapable of handling money]], and will therefore waste it. Or that anything a woman is interested in purchasing ''must'' be frivolous, and/or that women are not capable of distinguishing between "want" and "need." This is loaded with UnfortunateImplications and is fortunately falling into the realm of the DiscreditedTrope. Straight examples will usually be from older media, and/or be set in an era when women were deliberately not taught anything about money management because her father or husband was supposed to take care of such matters for her. (And never mind that given relative ages at marriage in that era, a woman could expect to spend the end of her life as a widow, with no one but herself to balance the checkbook. It was frequently assumed that her son or another male relative would take over from her late husband.)

* This sometimes appears in ''ComicStrip/Blondie1930'' with the title character buying armloads of items for herself at a store, often using Dagwood's money, even if she has her own catering service. The earliest strips showed that Dagwood once belonged to a rich family, and Blondie often forgetting they'd cut him off when Dagwood insisted on marrying her, pushing the shopping into the realm of artifact plot as well as Ms. Red Ink.

* ''Literature/{{Persuasion}}'' inverts the genders with Sir Walter Elliot and his late wife. She was the one who kept the finances in check; after his death, he runs the family into deep debt trying to maintain his over-inflated ideas of a baronet's standing and is forced to rent out his estate.
* In ''Literature/PrideAndPrejudice'', Mrs. Bennet has 'no turn for economy', and it's only her husband's restraining influence that stops her spending outrunning the family's (very generous) income.

* On ''Series/MadMen'' Lane Pryce's wife buys him a brand new Jaguar car as a present. They are in fact completely broke but Lane has kept her in the dark about their dire financial situation. She thinks that they have lots of money and he is just too frugal to spend anything on himself.

* ''Series/MikeAndMolly'': Molly Flynn is in direct line of descent from all those TheFifties and TheSixties sitcom wives who were incapable of handling money. Her cavalier attitude to cash, her maxed-out credit cards and her spendthrift ways are the despair of stolid policeman Mike Biggs.

* ''VideoGame/Persona4'' has a variation where the woman in question isn't in a relationship with the man nor is she making the purchase for herself: Chie helps [[spoiler:newly "human" Teddie]] pick out some rather expensive clothes at Junes, and arranges for them to be charged to Yosuke, as he works there and is the son of the manager. It comes off as particularly callous as his job is one of the few things Yosuke takes really seriously, and Chie just obliviously set him back significantly on his savings and is completely indifferent - and even a little mocking - when it's pointed out.

** In [[Recap/TheSimpsonsS7E14ScenesFromTheClassStruggleInSpringfield "Scenes From The Class Struggle In Springfield"]], when the family are trying to join a country club, Marge ends up spending several thousand dollars on a Chanel ballgown. In this case, it was due to social pressure rather than lack of money knowledge; indeed, Marge is portrayed as being particularly thrifty, and all her fancy outfits are actually a single suit with alterations she makes herself.

* In a ChristmasEpisode of ''Series/MarriedWithChildren'' Peg & the kids steal money from Al's wallet and buy stuff for themselves. When he discovers that he has no money they complain that he didn't buy them any presents.