Woman Says Husband Was Always Broke—Then She Found He Blew 3 Years Of ‘Fun Money’ On Prison Pen Pal After Pulling Phone Records. ‘It’s Just So Dark’

A hole in the marriage and a literal hole in the house. That’s how one woman described the storm she’s living through—financial, emotional, and structural—after discovering her husband was secretly funneling his “fun money” into conversations with a woman behind bars.

The story unraveled during a recent episode of “The Ramsey Show,” where co-hosts Rachel Cruze and George Kamel took a call from a woman named Caroline. Four months earlier, she checked their phone bill and spotted some unfamiliar numbers. Her husband, who always claimed to be broke and anxiously awaited his next cash allowance, had apparently been in contact with a prison pen pal. Not for a few weeks. For three years.

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“I couldn’t figure things out,” Caroline explained. “He had nothing to show for the money, but he was always out of it.”

The communication started, she said, after her husband saw an ad online. While he initially claimed he was “trapped,” Kamel pushed back hard: “No, he wasn’t trapped. He was willfully doing this on his own volition.”

Cruze confirmed the obvious question: yes, it was the same incarcerated woman the entire time. The money, Caroline later learned, was used to fund commissary accounts or similar prison expenses.

“He just got caught up in it,” she said. “But he never told me—he just kept hiding it.”

And for Caroline, the emotional betrayal wasn’t the only wreckage to deal with. Shortly after uncovering the truth, a tree fell on their home. “So we were dealing with a hole in our marriage and a hole in our house,” she said. Even if she wanted to leave, the practical issues of divorce and selling the house were off the table.

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When asked if they were actively working on their marriage, Caroline said she’d been attending therapy, while her husband—though hesitant—had agreed to join her at church and planned to attend a marriage retreat. But she admitted she doesn’t feel like she has the whole story.

“He said it won’t be good. It’s just so dark,” she recalled, referring to her husband’s response when she asked him to go to counseling.

“You can’t move forward with half the truth,” Cruze told her. “There’s no way.”