May be. It may be that monkeys will fly out of my butt, too, but I don’t lay awake nights questioning the possibility, and since no one in four years has ever shown how they may be, or even suggested such a thing until right this minute, or offered opposing authority of any kind, I don’t sweat it.
you’re the appellant, right? isn’t that a good indicator that your reasoning and analysis may be specious?
Dad, is that you?
Holy crap, you found a case that speaks directly to your situation. It’s got your ex in it and everything! 
I keed, I keed.
Seriously, though, Stoid does actually have a point here. If you ask an economist, the value of an asset is the price that you would get from selling it. Any other number is just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. In this sense, the value of the house is legitimately the appraised value of the house less the cost of selling. If Stoid’s Ex were homo economicus and there were no extenuating factors, he would probably find the above convincing.
The problem is that there are always extenuating factors. The two most obvious factors which argue against your proposed division are the following:
[ul]
[li] Money now is worth more than money later. This is as close to a true fact as you can get in economics. Stoid, you have indicated that you intend to stay in this house, if everything works out according to plan, for a good long while. What that means is that you are pushing your share of the cost of selling the house into the future–delaying the inevitable moment when you have to pay the cost of selling the house. In the meantime, you have the money in hand to do other things with.*[/li]
What does this mean for your payout to the ex? Well, the longer you intend to keep the house, the more you should pay him. Suppose that his share of the payout with the closing costs included and excluded would be $40K and $60K, respectively. If you both believe that there’s a good chance you will (or will have to) sell the house in the near future, but you probably won’t, then his buyout should be close to $40K. Basically, you both think that it’s likely that the house will be sold and so you will incur the cost of selling. On the other hand, if you both deem it unlikely that you will (or will have to) sell in the near future then his payout should be close to $60K.
(If you can’t agree about the likelyhood of sale, then you need some sort of arbitration to come to an agreement for you. More on that, later.)
By being so adamant that you want the house and want to live in the house forever, you were actually making an argument that you should pay him more. I notice that in the guidelines for distribution, you bolded the sentence “Now suppose the Smiths sell soon afterward.” If the Smiths (being you) don’t sell soon afterward, but rather several years down the line, this effect is mitigated.
[li] The second factor that influences the buyout amount is the fact that, while he has to go and find a new place, you have the house to live in. The house clearly has value to you over and above its appraised value. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be fighting for it. By buying the ex out, you are securing for yourself a stable place to live–a house that you obviously love. On the other hand, the ex has to go and find housing and then move to it. Moving can be an expensive proposition, and there are very real barriers of entry in the housing market. You have to pay security deposits if you rent, and make down-payments if you buy. (Well, not always in the Wild West of Financing that was Southern California.) [/li]
This factor also works against you when determining a buyout price for the ex, tending to increase the amount you should buy him out for.
[/ul]
Both of the factors above tend to argue that you should have offered the ex more than his “fair share.” You seem to place a large sentimental value on the house, and your division scheme ignored that value. It is a kind of externality, in that the market can’t price it.* There’s also the issue of what happens when you and the ex can’t agree on a price.
What’s supposed to happen is that you go to some sort of arbitration and bitch and yell and fight and cry until you hammer out a deal that you both find acceptable. One aspect of game theory is the division of assets. One of the ways of assigning value to goods (for instance, in a divorce) is a variation on the old standard of sibling rivalry: you split, I choose. The first person divvies up the goods into two piles that they judge to be equally valuable, and then the second person gets to pick a pile. Everybody’s happy.
Well, it is called game theory… 
And on preview: my, that’s a long post.
- A friend of mine is trying to buy a used motorcycle, and the seller won’t come down to a “reasonable price” because the seller just loves his bike so damn much. It’s not like he gets to ride it. It sits at the dealership, waiting for someone who will recognize the $1000 worth of awesomeness that the seller sees. Until that time, it will just sit, priced way above the market. Stoid, you’re like the bike seller. Your house has extra value to you. This is why people don’t sell their old teddybear. The market will pay you $0.25 for your ratty old teddybear. The value to you is more than that, so you don’t sell.
Yes, he’s trying to prove that he said it, not that what he said was true.
That, in a nutshell, is the hearsay rule.
It does not matter a whit if he lied or told the truth when he told you not to buy ads. All that matters is that he made a statement that put you on notice.
It cannot be made any simpler.
And if you go to this postin that threat, you can see that good advice was not followed.
And 2007 was only the begining of it!
Post 11 is also funny and/or telling in hindsight:
Why is this hard? Of course he is proving what he said by saying that he said it. Because what he said - that is, the fact that he said the words to you - is what is important. How else would he prove the withdrawal of authority to do something other than by saying he withdrew it?
You have now told us this is not part of your appeal, so I will risk addressing the abstract issues it raises. NOT ADVICE about your particular situation.
Think about this. Suppose I say in the witness box “I saw stoid rob a bank.” I can’t bolster that by then saying “And I’ve told dozens of other people I saw her doing it” (by implication, asserting that my primary evidence is therefore more likely to be true). This latter part about telling other people is inadmissible just as you say (except in narrow circumstances which don’t apply here - there is always an exception to everything). The basis on which it is objectionable (hearsay, self-corroboration, whatever) is academic. I don’t want that to distract from the general ideas involved here.
Now, suppose instead I say “Last year I orally told stoid she could sell my car”. This is, in a trivial sense, a narrative of past events. But it is also more than that. The past event I am narrating has a different character from “I told dozens of people that I saw Stoid rob a bank.” The difference is that there are occasions where words said have an actual effect outside their narrative value. By saying “You have authority to sell my car”, something more happened than just idle chat - our legal relations changed. You are now the proud possessor of something you didn’t have before - the authority to sell my car. If you were arrested for fraud for selling my car without authority, do you think you or I would not be allowed to give evidence that I gave you that authority? This is what the other lawyers in the thread mean by “verbal acts”.
This, by the way, is not intended to be an extended treatise on the law in the area, just an illustration.
So when your ex says “I told stoid not to do X”, his testimony is about the withdrawal of authority. It is not of the same character as the boot-strapping in the first example I gave.
May I return to my original question: how else do you propose it be proved that he withdrew his authority to you other than by his saying he withdrew it? (Merely asserting his evidence is a lie doesn’t address the issue.)
Stoid, I find illustrations sometimes help.
Suppose I give evidence that Jodi said she hated me. It is easy to see circumstances in which that might be relevant - I might be charged with slapping her, and attempting to defend myself on the ground that I was provoked.
I can clearly give the evidence that Jodi said she hated me in those circumstances. NOTE - I am giving evidence of what Jodi said, because the fact that she said the words is what’s important. My evidence about what she said conveys nothing at all about whether Jodi IN FACT hates me - they are not admitted for the truth of their contents. They do not establish Jodi’s state of mind towards me at all. She might have been joking. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.
But that illustrates how words can sometimes be admissible for the mere fact that they were said, as opposed to being admissible because they were true.
No.
Good lord.
FIrst, this:
“It does not matter a whit if he lied or told the truth when he told you not to buy ads.”
makes no sense on its face.
If you are (erroneously) starting from the position that he did in fact convey that he did not want me to buy ads …where is the possibility for truth or falsity in the statement? On what basis would such an argument rest?
“Don’t buy ads” <—what part of that is open to falsehood? It is what it is, a directive. How can a directive be true or false?
Secondly, seeing as how that makes no sense and there’s nothing in it to be true or false, the issue is:
Did.
He.
ACTUALLY.
SAY-WRITE-GESTURE:
“Don’t buy ads”?
Not “Was he sincere?” Did he actually convey that sentiment at all, in any form, at any time, using any means, ever, to me?
He says yes, he did.
His evidence: he says yes, he did.
His proof that his evidence is “true”: he says he remembers being angry (nothing else, jsut the anger)
Incidentally, does he have a motive to lie?
Yes, he does.
Does he by chance have any supporting memories, details, documents, or anything else at all that suggests that he did, in fact say that?
No.
(And not that it matters, but do I have documentary evidence of several kinds which strongly suggests that this is not true, including emails he wrote and admits he wrote? Yes.)
Are you kidding? You’re a piker.
Your points are all well made and entirely respectable.
I sure wish my ex had been willing to do something something like hammer out an agreement with help from experts, rather than sue me and hope that my terror would make me ABLE to cough up $200,000, which is what he wanted. Later it became $300,000. We had to borrow to our eyeballs to scrape up $12,000 to give him to live on while he went to go “find himself”, so that kinda demand seems just a tad unfair. But that’s the only thing he could ever contribute to the conversation of how to divide our assets. “Give me $200,000.”
Well, gee, I can’t. How about we talk about it after talking to experts who know more about this stuff?
Silence.
Lawsuit.
Observe the scorched earth at our feet.
No, it makes perfect sense when discussing if his testimony was inadmissible hearsay, which was your claim that we have been refuting.
It’s not. Which is why his testimony about what he said wasn’t hearsay.
This is a different question. The adequacy of the evidence supporting his contention that he gave you notice and the adequacy of your evidence refuting his contention is completely unrelated to it being hearsay or not. I personally don’t know nor particularly care if he was lying or not, or if you got robbed because the judge believed him instead of you, because I don’t want any part of your ranting about how you got the shaft in court.
It’s not hearsay. You wanted to get it in front of a professor. I obliged. He thought you were wrong too. We’ve been trying to explain why you were wrong about hearsay. Regardless of it being a trap for us to pounce on you or us not understanding that when you said “hearsay” you meant “lying”, the fact is you were wrong about hearsay evidence.
So, will you admit that you were wrong about hearsay?
Another nugget of great advice in post 12
was ignored.
How much that would have saved? Of course, we would have missed all the fun.
I bow before the master.
Sounds like a right mess. A lot of the ways that should work to divide assets come crashing to the ground when they’re applied in real life because people get too invested in the cycle of hurting their old partner and start acting completely against their own interests. Just imagine how much worse it would be if your ex were your mirror image. Sometimes you have both sides just as driven and determined as you are.
As I understand it, that’s what caused the hole in the ozone layer.
I did not mean lying, I meant hearsay. It was two different comments in two different contexts. Some people seemed to think that I was focusing on it as a genuine part of my case that i intended to argue, and that was wrong. The reason it came to mind is simply because it was a lie that seemed to fit the explanation being put forth in the text.
I am not attached to whether I was right or wrong, it’s not pertinent to any of my issues. I’d like to know because it’s interesting.
Since I do not yet fully grok why some parts are being ignored and others not, I cannot say “Yes, I was wrong” _ I don’t know. (Which in itself implies that I may be, since I don’t believe I’m right. I don’t know yet, the explanations being given have gaps I don’t understand.)
Precisely. Trashing me and my life and my struggle to make things right is entertainment for you.
Nobody ignored anything, I’m just not going to sit here and recite every event that has occurred between my ex and myself since October 2005 for everyone to pour over and judge. (Particularly given the strong tendency to pick, choose, and completely rewrite reality and then spit in my face with it.) I’ve put out more than I wanted or intended, for people who don’t deserve it because they have no desire to look at it with anything but a mind to find it in justification for their sneers, hostility and mockery.
Because I did what…called a few lawyers arrogant asshats? The degree of nastiness directed at me is truly bizarre. I haven’t attacked anyone, I haven’t made anything personal, I’ve worked very hard to avoid it. And the parade of people getting their jollies at mocking me continues.
And again…these remarks and jeers and sneers are proof positive that I am a greedy, evil, lying lunatic.
It’s astonishing.
But I’ve been on message boards for more than 20 years, why this surprises me even slightly is the real question.
My god, it is to weep.
HE IS THE ONE WHO CREATED THIS.
I tried to get him to talk to me on 7 separate occasions. EIther silence, or “gimme $200,000” or $300,000.
I came up with at least four different scenarios after the first trial. His response? "Take awy her medical insurance, evict her and put the business in my hands. "
The second trial, I said, give him some and me some, even though, in pure accounting terms, it’s all due to me…he said gimme $500,000 for rent, for all the mortgage payments she made FOR me, for all the car payments SHE made FOR me, for all the insurance an cell phone bills of mine that SHE paid FOR me… and make her pay my lawyer.
Please stop assuming and saying that this thing has gone on like this because of me. I made him an excellent offer that far exceeded the genuine value of his assets, and every single attempt to be reasonable or fair, or even TALK about it came from ME.
jesus fucking christ, people.
NORTHERN PIPER:
One question.
Ten Questions.
A thousand Questions.
The number of questions doesn’t change the nature of the request from “information/Knowledge” to “advice”
I will pick every brain I can find that will let me and I’ll keep picking til they snap it closed.
And I will never be picking for advice. Counsel. Suggestions. Future predictions. Just…data. Experience. And if I get it, i won’t base any decisions on it. I WILL USE IT TO GET MORE INFORMATION.
If someone DID sit me down and tell me they saw a situation where X and X happened, it would only mean I have something to GO ON.
I do not understand why this distinction seems so blurry to you.
And I DO UNDERSTAND why you would be uncomfortable being helpful in this way IN CASE the help was misunderstood. Just don’t tell me I AM ACTIVELY AND CURRENTLY MISUNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF MY OWN QUESTIONS.
And this is because, (said it before, but I’ve said all of it before) relying on other people’s judgment and advice is what got me here. I was freaking out at the deposition. (My first thread, 2007l, my first thoguht of doing it on my own, which I now know I could never have hoped to do at the time, I was a wreck even with a lawyer.) My lawyer told me he knew best and I was obsessing on the wrong things, just like everyone here. Well, golly gee whiz… turned out I wasn’t obsessing on the wrong things at all, my lawyer was being arrogant thinking he knew what was going to happen here because of what had happend many times before.
There was lots of other advice. From him, from my second attorney.
Here’s what blows: having your life blow up in your face because you trusted other people and they blew it. ESPECIALLY if you doubted their choices to begin with.
Here’s what blows a little less: doing (or choosing, or causing to be done) what I feel is right. What makes sense to me. And if it blows up in my face anyway, I can handle that. I am MUCH MUCH more comfortable taking full responsibility for my mistakes and failures AND my triumphs, than letting other people do it. I did it because everyone convinced me I should. And while I know I did have to have a lawyer the first time, the mistake I did make was in not asserting myself and demanding that he address the case the way I needed him to. I was a pussy because I was broke and I felt like a charity case, so I let him boss me around when I knew better.
So…fuck that. If it’s going to end up screwed, I wanna know that I screwed it, based on my very best efforts to NOT screw it. And if I don’t end up screwed, well, hell, won’t that rock the house.
Another Stoidal weirdness: unlike the vast majority of humanity, i do not LIKE having someone to blame. I do not WANT someone to blame. This is a concept that is so foreign to me. (Even in this… while I know that my ex made the choices that left me without any, ona a deeper level I know I brought this into my experience for some reason that hasn’t been made fully clear yet. And I also know like I know my name that everything we all do is for us, and no one else, good and bad. As fucking stupid and hellishly destructive and painful as my ex’s choices have been, I don’t take any of it personally. As wonderful as his love was, I didn’t take that personally either. It was about him, not me. Same thing with all you folk. While your messages may be unpleasant, I know they don’t really have anything to do with me…but this is getting way farther afield than I meant to…)
Blaming other people means one thing to me: giving up your power to control your situation. And why would anyone want that? My ex is like that…he’s the flip side of me. He hands his power to anyone who walks by…responsiblity for anything is a hot potato in his hands. So he gives it to his parents…then me…then his therapist, then his new girlfriend, then his lawyer. Why he thinks this works in his life, I can’t imagine, since he’s incredibly miserable.
All of which is to say again: I’d rather screw it myself knowing I did what I believed was the best thing to do. That just feels safer to me.
And when we get in the car, I’m driving, too. 