Thanks for your answer begbert.
FWIW, I wasn’t trying to confuse you or trick you. I was just curious how you felt about the opposite case.
That’s interesting. In the case of the OP, his wife walked away and no one is suggesting that she is therefore responsible for the ongoing bills she left behind. To the contrary, people are suggesting he needs to move out of his (formerly their) house and find a cheaper apartment because he can’t afford to make the payments.
OTOH, you say your ex had no lawyer, so maybe he could have done better if he had (which is sad in it’s own right).
This is my position, except for the 50% number.
The parents have a responsibility to make sure the kids have basic necessities, and the state can enforce this responsibility (whether they’re married or not). As to what percentage is provided by which parent, that’s something else, and would depend on how much income each parent has, and possibly other factors, as is done now. Typically a non-custodial parent will have more, and should pay more.
Of course it isn’t the only behavior. Which is why I said cheating etc. Now there will be many situations where a divorce is mutual, where the parties are not compatible etc. But it is foolish to suggest that because women file for divorce more often than men this is a sign that women are more responsible for divorce than men. Even if you remove the behavioral aspects, I would think there are plenty of situations like mine where the hsuband intended the marriage to end, started the whole process, but the wife filed for divorce.
And there were no children in my case - big difference. In my case, it was a grown man with no children walking away from bills and responsibilities he’d incurred jointly in marriage.
Him paying for a lawyer would have likely turned out worse for him, since all assets would have likely been sold and debt paid. He didn’t have the money to pay for a lawyer. Since we had a negative net worth, he would have ended up in bankruptcy.
I think I said five years, but it was probably three years he was supposed to paid me - $7200 on a convenient payment plan to his ex wife for him to walk away from all his debt (mortgage, car, credit card bills) and his marriage isn’t bad. And he stopped paying me a year early and I didn’t choose to pursue it as I’d gotten out of debt except for the mortgage by that time.
“Intended the marriage to end” is the important clause here, in the context of this discussion.
Because remember, you’re trying to prove that men view divorce as a favorable option, by saying that men initiate divorce (in the meaningful sense of the word). If you’re talking about a situation where a guy cheats and/or otherwise acts like a jerk but intends to get away with it and stay married, then he is not initiating divorce for purposes of this point, even if the wife feels that she has no other choice than to get divorced.
[I should also add, BTW, that a lot of men are genuinely unaware of the nature of how the divorce process skews against them and are rudely surprised once it’s too late - especially since there’s much more media publicity about how the process is harmful to women. By contrast, people with children generally have a pretty good idea of what raising children entails, and are making informed choices.]
Understood. But the shoe is generally on the other foot (i.e. the wife walking away and having lower income) and this argument does not get invoked. Especially since he paid the bills and you kept the car.
I’ve never heard of a lower-earning ex-wife paying spousal support to a higher-earning ex-husband just because she’s the one who decided to end the marriage.
I’m not sure if this is the same in all states, but generally what the courts do in such cases is make the higher earning spouse pay for the poorer spouse’s lawyer. In this case that would amount to you paying for his lawyer.
As part of the recently passed NY no-fault divorce law, it was made a “rebuttable presumption” that the spouse with more money pays the legal fees for the other spouse. This was done to make it easier for women to initiate divorces, since their husbands are forced to pay legal fees for both sides.
Those schooling prices do sound insane, but other than that, nothing in those figures is all that out of wack. I’m also in the DC area (though in Virginia) and 1600 a month mortgage would get you a fairly basic townhouse and that’s about all. Not a McMansion by any means.
Furthermore, 200,000 in household income is not that high. Yeah, it’s high enough that in a single household, you’ll be living fairly decently (we don’t make that much and we’re doing OK) - but not exactly jetting off to the Riviera for the weekend.
100,000 -is roughly 8,000 a month. 25% of that is 2,000 which is the recommended mortgage ratio so 1,600 is NOT at all out of line.
For those of you who suggest he consider moving to Virginia: Remember, Virginia is the state where a grandmother got custody of her grandchild because the mother, her daughter, got the gay and therefore was deemed unfit. Dunno how they are, child-support-wise, but they aren’t terribly family friendly in my opinion (and I live in Virginia so I’m not just dissing That Other State).
Having spent over 30 years of my life as a legal resident of Virginia, I’m not about to dis it either, but I’m not suggesting he move there. I’d recommend Calvert County, MD for the OP and his ex, if it’s within commuting distance of their jobs. Best public schools in the state, outside of Montgomery County, and I’ve already mentioned that quality day care here is $10K/year cheaper per child than what they’re paying now, and that you can get a lot more house for the money out here than in Expensive County. And it’s a hell of a nice place, too.
Sure it does. My brother in law got divorced and that argument was used - unsuccessfully, on him by his ex wife. In a different state - Colorado in that case. But my ex incurred his share of the bills. The other option was to let them go into default and declare bankrupcy. The judge seemed to think it was a fair arrangement. My ex was also fairly anxious for me to refi the house, which was the only way he was coming off the mortgage. Since he couldn’t pay closing, and I really didn’t care if he was on the loan once he signed the quit claim deed as part of the divorce, that was another point of negotiation for him. If I chose, he’d STILL be on the loan, but not own the house. (He was a bright man…and yet, stupid.)
Again, that wasn’t the case in my brother in law’s case, or my uncle’s, or my sister’s. Each party paid for their own attorney, no matter what the income disparity was. Minnesota and Colorado. My ex did pay for my attorney, but did not bother to get his own. He was a little anxious to clear the way to marry his girlfriend (they are still married) and pretty much said yes to anything I asked for. Its a good thing I’m a reasonable person and was only interested in coming out as whole as possible, or I’d probably still own him.
But all of this is rather immaterial, as we didn’t have children and we aren’t talking about spousal support (which was what mine was labeled, but everyone knew it wasn’t - it was really debt payments, but there isn’t a provision in Minnesota divorce law for “I need to pay my ex back.”)
Move to Michigan… the judges there love the daddies!
My ex-husband doesn’t have to pay a single dime in support. Ever again.
When I moved to Georgia with the 2 kids, the judge said no more support from Daddy (of course, he was only paying $25/wk per child anyway so it’s not like I lost something I depended on to take care of them with.)
But to add insult to injury, I have to buy the kids round trip, non-stop airline tickets twice a year so that he can see them (at $800 each trip)!
This past Labor Day weekend I had to buy HIM a round-trip airline ticket to Georgia, pay for his hotel room for three days and provide him with a mother-loving car!!!
Oh yeah… he is required to provide the kids with medical insurance and pay for half of all uninsured medical/dental costs. Three guesses on whether or not he actually does any of that! :rolleyes:
To be blunt, you can’t.
Can you try to trade in the new SUV for something older and cheaper, or let the bank have it and ride the train? A divorce is going to screw your credit anyway. No insurance, no note=300$ extra a month, right? Or, since you have a 3-bedroom townhome, find a roommate.
Other than that, economize. Thriftstore clothes, watch your money, turn your lights off, cook your own meals, pack your lunch every day, take your kids to do free stuff, learn new Ramen recipes, beans in a crockpot, think about getting a second job or a business you can run on the side.
Most of which I do, except my version involves overtime, attempts at homegrown veggies and home car repair.
This is based on a 10 year study from the UK (with some European data included) so probably not exactly parallel to the situation in the US (and not intended to be a direct critique of the OP), but it showed that on average women are worse off financially after a divorce:
Similar study from Australia:
[“In the year immediately after divorce, women’s income declined while men’s stayed the same (after adjusting for changes in household size). While women’s income recovers over time, compared to the incomes of non-divorced women, they are still significantly behind.
Four years after divorce, women experienced a 2.9% increase in income from pre-divorce levels compared to an increase of 12.3% for non-divorced women. For divorced men, income increased by 12.5%.](http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/media/media090708.html)
I don’t understand what you’re saying here, as it doesn’t sound like you’re contradicting me. Who earned less money and paid support to the higher earning spouse in this case?
ISTM that a third option might have been to sell all of it, pay the debt and divide the excess, if any.
That’s generally the case. Otherwise you wouldn’t have won it.
Why?
Actually it seems to me more like division of assets than either spouse support or debt payments. (Unless there were also payments for credit card bill for things that had already been consumed.) I’m not sure I completely understand the situation but it looks like you incurred debt together to buy things and you were awarded the things, and he had to help make the payments for the things which you kept.
In general, it sounds like you seriously crushed your ex-husband in the settlement, but it’s unclear to what extent this was based on your gender and to what extent it was based on your ex-husband’s foolishness and desperation. (I would guess a mixture of both, particularly as courts tend to be more protective of women and are more likely to save them from their foolishness and desperation, but that’s just speculation.)
I’ve noted such studies earlier. And again, I think they are likely misleading, because they don’t account for true net income. It’s not even clear in the descriptions of some of these studies whether the statistics they provide whether these stats subtract spousal & child support payments on the one side and add it to the other. But in addition, it appears that they do not account for 1) the fact that poorer women with children tend to be eligible for financial assistance while men are generally not, and 2) the fact that women with children will pay less taxes than single men. These studies need to focus on bottom line net income, and it doesn’t appear that they do that.
The more interesting stats are those of the Australian one that looked at measures of hardship and found women (slightly) higher by these measures. But I think these are misleading as well. For one thing, the study focused on the first year, and the fact is that for men their lifestyle generally gets adjusted to their lower income a lot faster than for women. If you get bounced out of your house and go live in a small apartment, you are going to have a easier time of paying the utilities than the one who remained in the more luxurious house and needs to maintain it on a smaller income.
But for another, the study is cooked in that it listed “Asked for help from welfare/community organisations” as one of the measures of hardship. The fact is that welfare/community organizations are heavily geared towards women and children in distress, and if you are a man in similar circumstances as a women you are not nearly as likely to turn to welfare/community organizations. There is no doubt that this particular measure is extremely heavily skewed towards women, and it is not a valid indicator of a true disparity in hardship. This alone renders the entire statistic invalid.
[In general, ISTM that most of these studies are designed to produce the results that they produce, and are intended to influence public thinking on the matter, and are thus skewed - whether consciously or unconsciously - towards methodologies that produce these results.]
Did you possibly violate any court custody orders by moving to a different state?
In my brother’s ex wife’s case, he earned more. She wanted support to pay bills she had incurred. Judge told her to take a hike. In my case, I earned more, I wanted support to pay bills HE had incurred, judge agreed with me. No kids, so in her case, judge said she was responsible for her own bills, in my case, judge said he was responsible for his bills, but since he couldn’t afford them, he could pay them through a ‘support agreement’ to me.
No excess, negative net worth, remember. And when I say I out earned him - I made about $18k a year. He worked part time and made less than $10k dependably at that point. We aren’t talking lots of income in either case.
Ownership in a house and name on a mortgage are two separate things - you can still be liable for the mortgage but not have your name on the deed to the house. That was the case - he didn’t have the income to support the house, I did. We were underwater on it (we’d only owned it about a year), so he signed the deed over to me, I refinanced the house.
And no, taking him to the cleaners would have involved letting him go bankrupt over his debt, keeping him on the mortgage, but getting him off the deed (the divorce decree only had the second, not the first), and making him pay his obligation for the whole term, instead of letting it go after two years when he stopped paying. I didn’t get all the assets - although I got the house (underwater with a mortgage) and car (and the car loan - the car was 30 days old when he left), and $200 a month to pay bills mutually incurred. He got half of the furniture, the computer (which was expensive), the stereo (expensive), most of the electronics, almost all our mutual CD and book collection (20 years later and I’m still saying - oh, that’s right, i don’t have that any more).
But that’s not what we were discussing. We were discussing a lower income ex-wife paying support to a higher-income ex-husband.
Why were they his bills? It sounds like they were for a car that you kept.
That makes more sense. People who work part time sometimes have additional income “imputed” to them in divorce situation.
But that itself is odd. (I understand the house was underwater at the time, but the ongoing payments would add equity to the house, and you would receive all that equity, since he was off the deed.)
[BTW, I don’t mean to bust your chops over your divorce settlement. It’s not a big deal in the context of this discussion. If you don’t want to discuss it, or feel you’re being hassled about it, we can drop it.]
Well, I was discussing “meeting the obligations you incur” whether that is children or credit card bills.
The bills - the car was what sent me over into “I need help” - but we had credit card bills - for that computer, the stereo, dinners out, our honeymoon…things he kept or things he shared in the enjoyment of at the time. And some of the bills were incurred in the “getting a girlfriend” process. Paying for her gifts and their dates while he was married to me and seeing her behind my back wasn’t - understandably - high on my list.
Yep, the equity would build. But at the time, selling the house would have been not a great idea. After the divorce, I made the payments, I got the equity. I also got all the bills, all the taxes, all the repairs. This was the 1988 or so, the house didn’t do mad appreciation - and when I sold it in 1997, it really hadn’t appreciated much - the new roof I had to put on and the new furnace ate any gain. And I’d been paying a 30 year loan for ten years - most of the payments were still interest.
He could have made other choices. But it wasn’t my job to babysit him any longer. I was as fair as I could be while looking out after my own interests. I feel pretty strongly that when you are banging your girlfriend, and you go car shopping with your wife and she says “we can’t really afford this” that if you have intentions of leaving in the next few weeks, the answer to that statement is “you are probably right, lets put this off for a bit.” Not “sure we can - we can make this work.” Once you say “we” can make this work - you’re stuck.
And that if you are going to buy presents for said girlfriend at Victoria’s Secret, don’t be surprised when your wife gets you to pay for some of that in the settlement terms.
OK, that’s a more complete picture than how it was originally presented. Specifically, the credit card bills. Glad it worked out for you. 
From the UK study quoted, it does very clearly define income as including state benefits and maintenance (support payments):
Personally, I would say that a divorce is instigated by the person who says either “I’m leaving” or “Get out”, regardless of who initiates the legal paperwork.
Nope. Asked the court’s permission and everything.