Ms. Red Ink

"You can have my credit card, baby
But keep your red-hot fingers off of my heart, lady
All I know is what I see
You're getting what you want and girl, it ain't just me"

—Wham!, "Credit Card Baby"

Oh, that dress would look lovely on me. And it's on sale, for only $5,000! Perfect! I'll take it!

...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 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 Unfortunate Implications and is fortunately falling into the realm of the Discredited Trope. 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 their father or husband was supposed to take care of such matters for them. (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.)

Typical variants include store charge cards and a Credit Card Plot, equating "checks left in checkbook" with "money left in checking account", and expecting presents that are more expensive than the husband can afford. The trope normally requires that the money be spent on luxuries or other self-satisfactory goods. If the husband is present when the purchase is made, expect a scene where the wife loads her bags and boxes into his arms.

The trope would be inverted in cultures where women are in charge of the household budget, or in situations where the wife is the wealthy one (or breadwinner) and the husband is the one on an allowance. Whatever the gender involved, "spendthrift" is the word of choice used to refer to these kinds of people.

This can overlap with Henpecked Husband, Trophy Wife, The Ditz, Dumb Blonde, Retail Therapy, Daddy's Girl, Spoiled Brat, Valley Girl, The Baby of the Bunch, and especially Gold Digger. It can also be a case of Most Writers Are Male and venting about this. See also Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense. The polar opposite of this is The Scrooge who will not spend an extra penny even though they have millions, or Affluent Ascetic, who isn't as extreme in saving money as the former but still makes sure not to overspend.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Phantom Quest Corp.: Ayaka Kisaragi is the reason that her company, Phantom Quest, stays in debt, thanks to all the damage claims that get filed against them and her own excessive spending habits. At the end of the third Incident File, she blew their entire commission and then some in a single shopping spree. Even worse, the blank check Mr. Nagasuki had paid them with was rendered invalid due to Nagasuki being found guilty of embezzlement, meaning that Ayaka had racked up a bill they couldn't possibly pay, landing them deep in the red. Again.
• In You Like Me, Not My Daughter?!, Ayako attempts to invoke this to make Takkun stop being in love with her, but her common sense wins out, and she doesn't go through with buying a purse costing hundreds of thousands of yen.

Comic Books

• In Archie Comics Hiram Lodge's chief complaint about daughter Veronica - aside from Archie - is the way she squanders the family fortune on chic clothes and other baubles.
• In the EC Comics ShockSuspenStory "Well-Traveled!", a man whose life's hobby is building a model railroad finds no money to buy the rolling stock, because every time he saves up the money for it, his wife decides to go places. The predictably gory EC conclusion: him taking her dismembered corpse for a ride in his new model train.

Comic Strips

• This sometimes appears in Blondie (1930) 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 forgot 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.
• Dustin: Often happens with the titular character's parents: His mother often splurges a lot of money on clothes and the like (ironically, we rarely see any of these) while his father is described to be the opposite, his credit card being mostly used by his wife... who has her own job and a credit card of her own.
• FoxTrot inverts this trope with Closer to Earth Andy and Bumbling Dad Roger, the latter being usually the one who buys expensive luxury items, usually related to golf, and he's even shown sometimes paying the kids to not tell Andy what he bought. However, this trope is played straight when it comes to Paige and Peter, where Paige is the stereotypical teenage girl who LOVES to shop and she always makes Peter drive her and carry her purchases.
• Used in The Lockhorns every now and then, with Leroy making comments on Loretta's spending habits.
• Toots and Casper had this happen every once in a while. In one occasion, the notoriously stingy Casper tells the squandering Toots to take back the new hat she had just got, also asking her to follow the example of the appropriately-named Mrs. Frugall (case in point, this example is from the 1930s-early '40s). But surprisingly, said hat was mistakenly delivered to them, being actually for the aforementioned Mrs. Frugall. It turned out that Toots had bought a much cheaper hat.

Films — Animation

• The "Rhapsody in Blue" sequence in Fantasia 2000. John's rather...substantial wife drags him to a luxury pet store where she loads him up with packages for her little dog, then hits him with "Le Bill", which gets to be at least five feet long.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Neverending Story 3, Bastian's sister steals the wish-granting auryn from him to go on a shopping spree. The message here (apart from stealing is bad) seems to be that wasting wishes is wrong, although it's never explained why, bordering on Informed Wrongness. (In the 1st movie making wishes was a good thing that helped Fantasia grow, in the 2nd it was bad because it erased memories. Neither seems to be the case here.)
• Priceless: Deliberately invoked and lampshaded. Irene's one-night stand with Jean, which happened in large part because he pretended to be rich, breaks up her relationship with wealthy Jacques and destroys her chance at being a Trophy Wife. Now having to start at square one, Irene the Gold Digger goes to Nice, scrounges around until she finds another rich guy, and wrangles an invitation for dinner...until Jean, who has followed her, shows up at the restaurant and ruins that too. So instead Irene invites Jean to her table at the restaurant and makes him pay for her lavish lifestyle of handbags and dresses and five-star hotel rooms and $300 dinner entrees. When just two days of this exhausts all of Jean's meager bartender's savings, she leaves him.
• Inverted in Thicker than Water, starring Laurel and Hardy. Ollie and Stan repeatedly demonstrate an inability to competently manage their finances. In fact, Ollie's wife actually goes to the bank at one point to instruct the bank to not allow her husband to withdraw any money from their account... after he's already spent all their savings on a grandfather clock that ends up being destroyed anyway.

Jokes

• A successful man makes more than his wife can spend. A successful woman is married to such a man.
• A maid runs into her lady's room, worried to death:
  Maid: Madam, your husband just dropped with a heart attack right in front of the main door! He is clutching some kind of bill in his hand!
  Lady: Great, my new fur coat has finally arrived!
• A businessman discovered his wife's credit card had been stolen... and didn't report it because the thieves spent less than her.

Literature

• The Émile Zola novel Au Bonheur Des Dames features several scenes where the founder of a department store cheerfully talks with several of his female clients, most of which have rich husbands or lovers who can support their massive shopping sprees... and then there's Mme Marty, for whom shopping is portrayed disturbingly like a drug, and whose husband is a schoolteacher who emphatically cannot afford his wife's fancies. In the end, he goes mad, believing himself to be at the head of a colossal fortune, while his wife goes to live with a relative to continue her shopping sprees.
• Jane Austen:
  • 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 Pride and Prejudice, 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.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Barrayar plays with this. Cordelia Naismith, having grown up on egalitarian Beta Colony, is perfectly capable of earning her own living and living within her means; but she's married into a patriarchal culture where upper-class ("Vor") women are expected to be decorative and waste their husbands' money on frivolities. Early in the book, she purchases a sword-stick for one of her husband's retainers, not realizing that non-Vor are not allowed to own weapons; but because she paid for it with her husband's money, it is technically his weapon, which he can allow his servant to carry around. Much later, at the climax of the novel, we get this exchange:
  Aral: Where have you been, woman?
  Cordelia: Shopping. Want to see what I bought?
  ( Cordelia removes the severed head of Vidal Vordarian from her shopping bag and rolls it across the conference table, to everyone's shock)
  Aral: But of course. Every Vor lady goes to the capital to shop.
  Cordelia: I paid too much for it.
  Aral: That, too, is traditional.
• One of the Dear America books from the POV of a young mail-order bride has her unfamiliar with finances, credit specifically. When everyone at the company store tells the clerk to put their purchases "on the book," she assumes that's the end of the transaction. Her furious husband has to explain to her that those purchases come directly out of his paycheck, and they're now several months in debt. In a Pet the Dog moment, he does recognize that it was an honest mistake on her part and an attempt to bond with her stepdaughters.
• Agatha Christie was fond of playing with and inverting this trope. In Death on the Nile 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.
• Family Tree Series has Abby learn this about her husband Zander after his death. He was a well-off writer but spent his money as fast as he got it, including on their very lavish Manhattan life with three kids and sending checks to his parents (who lost their money and business and needed Zander's money to pay for their house). She spends years paying off Zander's many debts without any help from her father Luther (who told her to marry Zander because she'd never have to worry about money again, but it's all she does after Zander's gone).
• King City: One of Wade's corrupt colleagues (who is holding his family hostage during the opening scene) goes on a rant to his wife about how it's all her fault for being such a spendthrift, pointing out how she even had the Home Shopping Network on while they were having sex.
• In Little Women, Meg often spends frivolously on clothing or accessories when with her wealthy friend, Sally because she is ashamed that she cannot spend like Sally. This causes friction in Meg's marriage, as her husband cannot afford for her to spend this way. (It is, of course, resolved by the end of the chapter.)
• Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections:
  • It's revealed that Aahz was from a family that was originally quite wealthy, but once his father died, his mother blew the entire family fortune on a bunch of lousy investments. This was what had caused Aahz to develop such an obsession with making money as quickly as possible. When Skeeve meets Aahz's mother, she's still doing this, having learned absolutely nothing.
  • Averted with Bunny, who looks and acts like a Brainless Beauty most of the time but is actually an accounting genius.
• In Naked Came the Stranger, Marvin's wife Helene is always spending money they don't have on expensive dresses and blaming it on accounting errors. By the time his chapter starts, he has only fifty dollars left. Partly to get revenge on her, he has sex with Gillian, who completely bankrupts him in one day.
• Scarlet Sister Mary: Deacon Andrew complains about his wife Doll, who refuses to save but instead spends all the money he makes, and is pestering him to buy a car.
  "Money burned Doll."
• In the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze", the criminal's motive is that he was being driven bankrupt by the expenses inflicted on him by his Secret Other Family - most notably his second wife's fondness for expensive clothing. Holmes figured this out when he found a milliner's bill for a twenty guinea (roughly 2,500 pounds or 4-5 thousand USD in 2020 money) dress in his effects.
• Beauty and the Werewolf: Isabella's stepmother and father first meet when her stepmother is looking for someone to help her balance the accounts. Averted otherwise in that her stepmother isn't a spendthrift (she wasn't good at bookkeeping, but once she's got help with that she can live within a budget).

Live-Action TV

• Penny of The Big Bang Theory is this, until she gets a better job that enables her to actually afford her tastes. At one point, when her finances are particularly bad, Leonard notes that she's paying for an expensive cable package despite not having access to TV. She also spent a few minutes agonizing over a pair of shoes she knew she couldn't afford, but wound up buying them anyway.
• A variant in Castle, where Roger Masters, a one-time season 8 suspect, says that he’s in debt because of his wife’s excessive spending on a ‘’charity’’ fundraiser (albeit one where she wanted to hear her favorite author make an appearance).
  • One victim appeared to be this. One of the people they interviewed about her was her family's accountant, who noted several irresponsible purchases. Everything he namedropped turned out to be a Chekhov's Gun, a.k.a setup for The Reveal, and then payoff for blackmail to protect the secret.
• Columbo: In the episode "The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case", this is the ultimate cause of the murder. Vivian's extremely expensive tastes led Oliver to first embezzle from the accounting firm and then kill his partner Bertie when he found out. When Vivian reacts to news of Bertie's murder by suggesting they take a trip, she says "I'll buy some clothes!", and a rueful Oliver grumbles "I know you will." Later a panicking Oliver tells her straight up that he's "embezzled funds!" When he shouts "Do you understand?", Vivian looks him straight in the eye and says "No, and I don't think I want to."
• Daredevil (2015) season 3: in a flashback to Karen's past, it's established that Karen only sticks around in Fagan Corners because her father is very irresponsible with his money and the family diner will go bankrupt if she leaves, as shown when he orders a very expensive set of grills for the diner despite them being broke.
• Casey Jones from Decoy was once engaged to another detective, but she broke it off after he gambled away the $200 they'd saved up for a car. They eventually made up, but he was killed shortly afterwards.
• On Desperate Housewives, Gabrielle Solís isn't used to being frugal with money. She spends a good chunk of the series struggling to adapt to a humbler lifestyle. In one episode, she gets a borrowed credit card and promptly runs it into the ground. The bank later calls the card owner for “suspicious activity” due to Gaby’s shopping spree.

• In the Made-for-TV Movie Hostage For A Day the protagonist's wife takes the almost $50,000 he has saved in his credit union account and gives it to a home remodeler/decorator as a down payment. This despite the fact that she had just had the house redone a few years prior. It is strongly suggested that she has hired the remodeler in order to have an affair with him, as have other women in the neighborhood.
• How I Met Your Mother plays this pretty straight with Lily, while also deconstructing her Unlimited Wardrobe: she's a kindergarten teacher, her husband's up to his eyeballs in law school debt; how does she afford the clothes? Charge it!
• Seemed to show up from time to time on I Love Lucy... one that sticks out was Lucy Is Enceinte and Ricky's "Lucy...what did you buy?" when she's trying to tell him she's pregnant.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil", Tom Anderson invokes the stereotype that women are irresponsible with money when he says that Louis de Pointe du Lac has an unorthodox business mind because he "lets a woman count his coin" (referring to the fact that Bricktop Williams, the madam of the Azalea, is also its bookkeeper).
• On Mad Men, 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.
• Married... with Children has a particularly awful example with Peggy Bundy. She constantly spends what little money her husband Al makes on all sorts of useless junk ranging from TV show-themed collector plates to taxidermy heads to old magazines to a $2,000 interior decorator course to a $4,200 fur coat to a $5,000 gold statue. She's also an Entitled Bitch who refuses to get a job to help pay for her ridiculous shopping sprees, instead expecting Al to get a second job alongside his Soul-Sucking Retail Job.
• Mike & Molly: Molly Flynn is in direct line of descent from all those The '50s and The '60s 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.
• Sex and the City plays with the idea that this is a Dead Horse Trope. Carrie has no savings because she has spent literally thousands of dollars on shoes. On the other hand, conservative Charlotte who quits her job when she marries Trey has been careful with the money she made at her gallery and refuses to offer Carrie a loan due to her irresponsibility.

Music

• The woman described in Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" spends down her boyfriend/husband's money. Unlike most examples, it's not because she's irresponsible with money or anything, but because she wants to "punish" him for cheating on her by cleaning him out before she dumps/divorces him.
• Kim Petras: "I Don't Want It at All" is about a Valley Girl who's constantly driving men bankrupt with her constant want for shopping and spending.
• Led Zeppelin's Lemon Song
  Went to sleep last night, worked as hard as I can, Bring home my money, you take my money, give it to another man.
• Two songs from Wham!'s album Make It Big are about women using their lovers' money:
  • "Everything She Wants" is from the point of view of a man who works hard only to have his wife take all of his money, and asking how he can possibly support them both.
  • "Credit Card Baby" is about a girl using her boyfriend for his money while fooling everyone else into thinking they're a happy couple. He admits he should know better, but he can't help himself when she cries cute.

Theater

• Suggested in A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, Torvald Helmer has a pet nickname for his wife Nora: Squanderbird. Ultimately subverted in that Nora is the one who's really on top of the household finances and has been making her own money working behind Torvald's back.
• The play My Lady Friends' and its better-known musical version No, No, Nanette had the explicit moral that the only way for a wife to keep her husband from spending his money on other women was to spend it all on herself. It's Values Dissonance indeed: the line "No good woman has two hundred dollars!" has been bowdlerized in revivals.

Video Games

• In Grand Theft Auto V, Michael De Santa's wife Amanda has spendthrift habits which in part leads to his return to crime; her expensive taste has also led to kleptomania, as Michael can choose whether or not to bail her out when she gets busted for shoplifting.
• Persona 4 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 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 sets him back significantly on his savings and is completely indifferent - and even a little mocking - when it's pointed out.

Visual Novels

• Subverted with Lauren from Double Homework. She is introduced as a girl who dresses in a posh way and spends a fortune on gourmet food, but it’s all a front. She actually makes do on a tight budget for pretty much everything she buys, and sometimes spruces up her clothes herself. If the protagonist takes her on a food run when the class stops on an island for provisions, she explains her motivation for this: she wants her poor family to be treated with more dignity.

Web Animation

• Manga Rabbit HoméNoba: Kasumi always overspent whenever she went out with Kenta on dates.
• Manga-Waido: A rare couple example is found in Kaede and Mao's parents. They use up any money they're given, even to the point of selling their unfavorite daughter Mao to a shady-looking man. Their overspending worsens things even further when they force Kaede into prostitution to bring them money, which drives Akio to take action against the couple.
• Revenge Films: Denise's mom was very careless with money leaving Denise's dad in debt. When he died, Denise worked hard to pay off the debt but when her mom kicked her out, she stopped the payments saddling her mom, brother, and sister-in-law with debt.
• Trouble Busters: Akashi's mother got into debt as a result of her gambling addiction. She stole money from Akashi, her husband, and even borrowed money to do more gambling.

Western Animation

• Quinn from Daria has gotten herself into trouble with her parents with her shopping habits. Most notably, in the series finale, she runs up a $700 credit card bill for a pair of faux alligator shoes, causing Helen to force her to get a job so she can pay off the debt.
• In an episode of Family Guy, Quagmire has gotten himself into an Accidental Marriage with an old, washed-up Streetwalker named Charmise. He's afraid he'll have to give her half of his property if he divorces her, so he decides to suck it up and make it work. He decides she could use some new (and more "respectable") clothes, so he gives her his credit card and tells her she can use it to go buy some. She buys about $5,000 worth of new dresses...which she then takes to a pawn shop to sell for crack money.
• In The Flintstones, Wilma and Betty were often wasting their husbands' money, usually on clothes. "Chaaaaarge it!" was practically their catchphrase.
  • Though one episode showed their husbands aren't much better. Fred and Barney were hiding some money from their wives because they were afraid they'd waste it on something useless like new clothes, while Fred was thinking about getting a new bowling ball and Barney was thinking about getting a new rake.
• The opening of The Jetsons has George handing each family member a bill from his wallet, but when he gets to Jane she takes the wallet and leaves him with the bill.
• Kaeloo is absolutely terrible at handling money, and she normally winds up broke by the end of the episode if she ever gets any.
• In the Robotboy episode "Traffic Slam" Tommy, his friends, and his parents are stuck in a traffic jam. Kamikazi, disguised as a girl scout, tries to sell cookies to Mrs. Turnbull so he can steal Robotboy while they're busy stuffing their faces. Mrs. Turnbull tries one and gets instantly hooked, taking the entire contents of her husband's wallet to buy Kamikazi's entire supply.
• The Simpsons: Inverted, as Homer is usually the one who's a reckless spender, keeping with the show's take on Women Are Wiser. One episode even has Homer and Marge arguing over money, with Homer protesting it's his job that brings in the money while Marge shuts it down by pointing out she's the one who budgets and makes sure they can cover essentials.
  • In one episode, after Homer comes home with yet another expensive useless item, Marge reminds him that they're supposed to discuss unnecessary luxury purchases before making them. He retorts, "You didn't ask me before you bought that new washing machine!"
  • Homer pretty regularly blows money on things that immediately prove worthless: He has lost the family's life savings in the stock market, cashed in Marge's life insurance savings on the down payment to an RV (which he wrecks by the end of the episode), and bought a red SUV that he subsequently couldn't drive because he found out it was "a girl's car".
  • In "Scenes From The Class Struggle In Springfield", when the family is 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.

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