I’ve been happily married for 30 years, but my husband doesn’t know about my secret £200,000 escape fund. I believe EVERY woman should have one – and here’s how YOU can do it…

We check in every few months or so, my secret little ‘arrangement’ and I. I like to see how it’s doing, whether it’s plump, healthy and fit for purpose.

Seeing it gives me enormous satisfaction and relief. I feel hugged, soothed and reassured, like an invisible hand has stroked my back and told me that everything will be OK.

For it will be OK, if we keep up this arrangement. The gods or whatever forces, divine or corporal, are responsible for my fate, can throw whatever they like at me and I’ll not go under.

I am talking here about my ‘running away fund’ – a stash of money I have squirrelled away that my husband doesn’t know about.

And it’s not an insubstantial amount. If you take into account shares, ISAs and savings, I have more than £200,000 to my name – and my name only – that only I have access to.

That’s money to cover rent, should I need to move out of our family home for whatever reason; or a sizeable deposit on another property; or even a little maintenance ‘comfort blanket’ should I not be able to work for a period of time, meaning I wouldn’t be rendered dependent on anyone else for my basic needs.

You’re probably assuming at this point that my marriage is unhappy, that I’m biding my time to flee an abusive relationship. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I am married to a generous, sweet-natured – and healthily solvent – man who has made me very happy for more than 30 years. My ‘running away fund’, as it’s termed by some, is something which, I believe, has strengthened our relationship.

The running away fund is nothing new. Various surveys by financial institutions over the years estimate one in five of us has a secret stash

While some may regard it as deceitful and pessimistic, I see it as a massive compliment to my husband: I am with him because I choose to be, not because I need to be – and isn’t that commendable after so many years together?

The running away fund is nothing new. Various surveys by financial institutions over the years estimate one in five of us has a secret stash.

Bake Off winner and celebrity chef Nadiya Hussain admitted to having one when she appeared on Loose Women recently.

Even before she became a wealthy woman in her own right – she is thought to have made around £5 million since she won GBBO in 2015 – she said she’d always ‘had a little something on the side’, that was just hers. Like Nadiya, a mother of three, my pot of money isn’t exactly a ‘secret’. As she explained: ‘Even if everybody knew about it, nobody was getting access to it.’

My husband does know that I have savings in my own personal account, but, crucially, he doesn’t know how much. We have a joint account, into which we’ve always paid the same amount of money from our earnings, and from which all household expenses are paid, but what’s left over from my work as a writer is my business and mine alone.

He knows I had a small windfall a few years ago, when my aunt and godmother died. She was childless and owned a modest house in Sussex, which – after tax and sharing it equally with my sister – saw my personal account swell by £120,000.

I wasn’t completely stingy with it. I paid for a beautiful, indulgent holiday for us in California and some renovations on the house (the mortgage on which was paid off years ago), but my husband doesn’t know how much is in there now and hasn’t asked.

My attitude, like Nadiya, stems from growing up relatively poor. She described her childhood home as a ‘red-letter house’, where final demands were always arriving and it felt like her mother – a traditional, stay-at-home British Bangladeshi wife – was holding on by her fingernails.

I spent the early part of my childhood in a council house, before my parents were able to buy a two-bedroom prefab in the late Seventies. Dad was a mechanic, Mum worked as a carer in an old people’s home and money was tight.

Thursday night dinners, before Dad’s Friday night pay packet arrived, were always a scratched together affair. Fried eggy bread – made with the nub of a mouldy white loaf and one egg, between four people – was not an uncommon meal. I can remember my mother crying over an electricity bill and seeing a ladder in her last good pair of tights.

Mum belonged to a generation of women who were trapped. She couldn’t survive on her own: she was wholly reliant on my father, who did his best, but who, again, was trapped by the confines of our still rigid class system, long before social mobility became a viable reality.

My parents had a happy marriage, I think, but there must have been millions out there, suffering in unbearable penury, financially beholden to a man they couldn’t stand. A sensible, risk-averse and big-thinking adolescent in Thatcher’s Britain, I worked out early on that the key to women’s economic empowerment and equality lay in her financial independence.

I swore then that I’d always have something stashed away, so I could ‘run away’ if I needed to.

When I met my husband in 1992, we were equal earners, working on a local newspaper. The idea of a joint pot was mooted a couple of times, by him, but rejected by me. It was too much hassle, I said. Plus, I’d feel awkward if I fancied a splurge on an expensive new coat, or pair of boots, and really couldn’t abide the thought of ‘asking permission’.

So we kept things separate. Of course, there have been periods in our lives, when the children were babies (we have two, both now in their 20s) when my husband did a lot of the heavy lifting, financially – but I always had a little cushion set aside ‘just for me’, to see me through my maternity leave.

Gradually, over the years, my secret stash has grown. I’ve sought financial advice, made some canny investments and saved every month. In 30 years of marriage, I’d say I’ve thought about using it once. It was a few years ago, in the throes of empty nest syndrome, when we weren’t making enough time for each other and arguing quite a lot.

After one particularly miserable Sunday afternoon, where we’d had an enormous row in Habitat over a new dining room table, I came home and started looking on RightMove. I costed up what I could afford, and where, should I decide to see out the last quarter of my life on my own – with the dining room table I really wanted.

I even looked into payments on a new car – a frivolous and sporty little number that I knew would annoy him. That I could afford it all made me feel instantly better, and I realised I was actually quite happy where I was.

We made up, spent the Habitat money on a nice weekend away, and the argument was forgotten.

We’re getting older now, and aware of our mortality. We had ‘that’ conversation recently, when we updated up our wills and had a ‘show and tell’ on paperwork and passwords etc, should one of us step under the proverbial bus.

Judging by how vague he was about some details, I suspect my husband has a little running away fund of his own. And that is absolutely fine by me.

Details have been changed. Joanna Richards is a pseudonym.