How A Credit Card Company Knows You're Heading For Divorce Before You Do
Your credit card knows your marriage trouble before you do. Creepy or genius?
Ahtziri Lagarde | Unsplash Remember when Visa's big promise was simply being "everywhere you want to be"? Now it feels like they're everywhere you don't want them — including inside your marriage. Credit card companies quietly collect mountains of data about your spending and payment habits, and according to tech insiders, they can predict you're heading for divorce long before you notice the cracks. Former Google analyst Marissa Mayer once said credit card companies can forecast divorce with nearly perfect accuracy — up to two years in advance. That's not just unsettling. That's personal.
Therapists have always known financial stress can chip away at a relationship from the inside. Missed payments, sudden spending shifts, secret purchases — they're not just money problems, they're emotional ones. So while Visa insists they're not snooping into your love life, experts say the data doesn't lie. As one Yale professor explains, it isn’t about heartbreak — it’s about risk, control, and making sure you still spend. Creepy? Kind of. Helpful? Depends on who you ask. But one thing's for sure: your card knows more about your marriage than you think.
How a credit card company knows you’re heading for divorce before you do:
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Visa (and, potentially, its competitors) can predict whether you and your significant other are likely to call it quits based on your buying and credit history. Missed payments are a red flag that something may be, excuse the pun, amiss.
Why should they care, you wonder? Because they want to know how to get you to keep buying stuff, even if your life takes a sudden U-turn.
"Credit card companies don't really care about divorce in and of itself," Yale University law professor Ian Ayres, the author of Super Crunchers, said. "They care whether you're going to pay your card off."
In his 2008 book, Ayres writes about what he dubs the rise of the "number-crunching revolution" orchestrated by a growing pool of statistical wizards he calls "Super Crunchers."
Among the many examples he uses, Visa tracks its customers' marital statuses. "Business and government professionals are relying more and more on government databases to guide their decisions," he writes.
"Decision-makers in and outside of business are using statistical analysis in ways you'd never imagine to drive all kinds of choices."
Marriage therapist Marni Feuerman, drawing on the extensive research of renowned marriage experts Drs. John and Julie Gottman explain that professionals have identified specific behavioral patterns with striking accuracy. What the Gottmans identified through decades of clinical observation, credit card algorithms are now detecting through transaction data.
But that doesn't mean credit firms are willing to "fess up to the practice of mining for data to learn about cardholders' relationship woes and other details about their personal lives. This strategy is under the radar, to put it mildly—way under.
"Visa does not track or monitor cardholder marital status, nor does it offer any service or product that predicts a potential divorce," the company said in a statement. "These claims are false, and any media outlets or authors citing that Visa has such capabilities are inaccurate and wrong."
It's already widely known that companies — especially those with a heavy reliance on risk analysis — go to great lengths to track people's online spending and lifestyle behaviors in order to custom-market to them.
"Predictive modeling" is a tactic sometimes used by credit card companies to find out more information on their users.
For instance, they can find out whether a customer has moved recently. This, in turn, could help their real estate partners as they attempt to generate new business for themselves.
"There's a whole market out there that has tried to predict whether someone has just moved, and to be first with offers," Bob Grossman, the director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said. "Those kinds of things tend to be pretty high value."
It isn't just credit firms that dig for personal dirt on clients, however. The matchmaking site eHarmony does it. Google does it. The federal government, Walmart, Harrah's Hotels and Casinos, and others do it. Honestly, the list is long. Some might say infinitely so.
Sure, it could be a good thing that your credit card company and other businesses you patronize are getting to know you better these days. There's something comforting about sales pitches being tailored just for you, isn't there? But the trend has also sparked controversy about the invasion of privacy and consumer rights.
Mayer also said, "I would love to see buying habits included in profiles. The information doesn't have to be public, but credit card companies know an awful lot about us.
Why not put the data to good use?" Ultimately, it just means that you have to be an even savvier customer — whether your marriage is in trouble or not.
My Daily is a former partner and contributor with YourTango.
