I would have said the same exact thing whether it was a man or a woman who was the lazy leech. Either scenario is unfair.
You are welcome. Glad I could help. BTW three things:
- If we ever meet IRL you owe me a beer.
- Tell your lawyer I want a fee split.
- Assuming that your lawyer knew about the prenup they should have read it and offered their opinion without being prompted by some guy on a message board. What this means that you need to read and understand everything about this divorce before you sign it. If it does not make sense ASK! Keep asking until it makes sense.
So ah how YOU doing?
Hey if you don’t marry the guy you are dating, how about me?
Even after Foxy 40 has been given legal advice that he is entittled to zip people here are still raking F40 over the coals for not giving her soon to be Ex enough.
Her soon to be ex over 21, presumably of sound mind, and has been told to retain counsel. If he chooses not to, whoose fault is this? Hint: The person responsible is not a poster here.
FWIW, Foxy I think you are being way more than fair here. I think you are bing both honorable and moral.
In closing I think John Carter of Mars made a great point back in post #191
Duh!
They had a responsibility, but Uwe knew they expected to be going into an essentially non-adversarial setting, and he took advantage of their expectation to beat them bloody.
If you take advantage of your husband’s expressed expectation of a non-adversarial divorce to deny him what he’s legally entitled to, you’re no better than Mr. Boll. Worse, since you’re betraying someone who you once loved.
His irresponsibility doesn’t grant you any major obligations. You’re not obligated to hire a lawyer for him, or to hound him and hound him to get a lawyer, or to research all his possible legal remedies and lay them out for him. But once you know that he may have a certain legal right that will disadvantage you, you have an obligation to speak one of two sentences:
- “I am going to treat this divorce as an adversarial contest, dumbass, and if you don’t get a lawyer you’ll be FUCKED!”
- “You might have this legal right against me…”
Speaking those sentences costs you approximately zero effort, and maintains your honesty. Refusing to do so is something you’d only do out of a desire to cheat him out of what he’s legally entitled to, and is dishonest and unethical.
If you are not aware of a legal right he has against you, of course, you’re not obligated to speak a single sentence.
Daniel
Gah! Stupid insomniac posting and forgetting to log my wife off! That was me of course.
Daniel
On further thought, don’t do this. Several reasons for this. First off your feelings may change over the next few years. Secondly what happens if the house burns down, or there is a real estate crash etc?
Don’t lock yourself in like this.
If and when you sell the house if you still feel this way, then give him the money. If you don’t send it to me.
Either way don’t obligate yourself.
You got it! Thanks so much for the kick in the butt.
However, to defend Julie (my lawyer) she had no idea I was even agonizing over whether or not he was entitled to half the house. I took some bad free legal advice as fact. I don’t know why I assumed she just paper clipped it all together to submit without reviewing it. Of course she would make sure it was legal.
The more I consider what to give him, the more I realize I have some kind of odd mental obligation to continue to take care of the guy. As I have said over and over, he isn’t a bad guy, just the wrong guy to be part of a family. After one takes care of someone so long both emotionally and financially, it is hard to just cut them lose with nothing. Knowing the world will eat them alive. All I get from him when I ask about his plans is “dunno”. Where are you going to live “dunno”. Are you going to get a full time job? “dunno”. Which car do you want to take? “dunno” and on and on like that. My mother is convinced I have Stockholm Syndrome. If I knew he wasn’t going to piss it all away in six months, I think I would give him half in a heartbeat.
People like you are making it ugly so instead of asking for it to close, please stop reading it. Thank you very much and have a nice day.
Originally Posted by lisacurl
I reiterate my comment from earlier in the thread. I really don’t believe you were honestly looking for opinions. You were looking for validations on what you had already decided to do. You’ve made up your mind on what you feel is “right” to do, and I think you’re righteously pissed that this thread wasn’t filled with rah-rah’s for you to go ahead with it. If you want an opinion, I’d ask a moderator to close this trainwreck, because I think it’s going to get ugly.]
Furthermore, I have not and have no intention of stooping to the same level as people that have nothing better to do but attack a perfect stranger’s character. Don’t approve of my behavior? Fine, say so. Want to create a saga of intrigue and deceit by mentally spinning some kind of false motivation? Knock yourself out but I am not biting. You seem to want to pop in and stir the pot every once in a while. Now you want the thread closed because you don’t like it. I guess the similarity of the two questions I posted here about personal responsibility bothered you as you want the mods to* stop* you from reading instead of stopping on your own. Perhaps you should stop judging strangers and question your own motivation. I am able to admit at least that I don’t know you and have no idea what that might be.
I made that comment before you clarified with additional information that your husband was not entitled to any equity in your house according to your lawyer. If you aren’t going to keep up with the thread, at least check the date stamps before you get into a snit. Best wishes to you and your daughter, and I do mean that sincerely.
My maybe-final assessment of the situation:
I think people get married for many, many reasons. There are many, many arrangements that are perfectly valid. Such is the case with Foxy40’s relationship.
That said, people and situations change. The fact tht she was ok with things when they married doesn’t lock her into that scenario for the rest of her life. If she decided she wanted a more active partner than what she signed up for in the beginning, that is perfectly valid as well. Things change.
If her husband was unwilling to grow WITH the marriage, she has every right to resent his lack of effort. It sounds like she protected her assets adequately. I hope he gets his act together, but if not, it’s not her duty to inhibit her emotional or financial growth because of it.
I wish everyone luck in their new lives. Her ex has every opportunity to step up to the plate and be an involved parent. I hope he takes advantage.
Foxy40, I wonder if maybe, byt ‘taking care of’ your husband for so long you haven’t enabled his weaknesses? Maybe cutting him loose will be a good thing for him. Since you say he is a decent but shiftless guy, maybe being forced to make his own way will be good for him.
I know you have said that you will not seek child support, but I truly don’t believe a divorce judge will go along with that. I believe he will be ordered to pay some sum, although it may be small. And you definately ought to take whatever money is ordered. That way he will have some reponsibility to your daughter (as he ought), as well as the reponsibility to keep himself fed and off the street. Maybe (and, yes, I am always an optimist) he’ll rise to the challenge, once he has to.
As for the money issue – I wonder if there is some way you could give him the equity money (since you do seem to be thinking about doing that, although you aren’t legally obliged to do so), but in a form that he can’t piss away. Perhaps a trust in his name and your daughter’s name, that he can only draw on the interest from? Then you could also give him a lesser amount of cash – $5000 or so, instead of the $20,000 you were considering before. Just enough to get him into a place of his own and tide him over until he gets a job. This way you’ll know he has a cushion every month, but not so much cushioning that he doesn’t also have to work to support himself and meet his obligation to your daughter. And, if something happens to him before your daughter is of age, the remainder of that money will come back to her.
Give your ex what he’s entitled to as your spouse of 8 years and then move on with your life. Being above board and honest is essential because you don’t have honor without it. But there’s a difference in being honorable and being a schlep. He needs to grow up and learn how to take care of himself. (Though if he’s like other men like him, he will soon find a new wife to support him.)
On another note, I’d definitely consider couples counseling before entering into a union with Man B. You both seem so pre-occupied with protecting your little piles of gold that I wonder why you’d muddy up the water with a marriage contract.
It’s starting to sound to me like the guy suffers from depression and is pretty much incapable of thinking or acting for himself, at least for the time being.
Maybe, instead of all of us screaming that he should get his own lawyer, we should start screaming for him to get his own therapist.
The end of a marriage, even a bad marriage, is a shock to the system.
nodding in agreement
That’s been my conclusion while reading through this thread.
If you want to do the moral thing, you sit down with your husband, you explain ALL of his rights, what he is entitled to under the law, then you negotiate with him. You could try something like this:
"The law says you are entitled to half the equity in this house. It also says you will be responsible for child support payments. The judge will not let you get out of that. You could agree with me in private not to pay it and for me not to seek it, but be aware that if I lost everything tomorrow and decided to come after you for help, a judge could mandate it. So you have to decide whether you trust me to keep this agreement.
Also, I don’t really want to sell the house, or borrow money to pay you out. And in the end, I think you’ll wind up paying as much for child care as your half the equity is worth. So here’s what I’d like to propose, and we’ll have to get a lawyer to look at it and make sure it’s kosher…"
And then come up with some creative ways to protect you and to protect him, and to make sure everything is divvied up equally. For example, you might be able to draw up a payment schedule to him to pay out his share of the equity, that just happens to match the amount of child support he has to pay. The numbers cancel out, and your debt to him slowly diminishes. If your daughter gets to the age of majority and you still owe him money, you agree to pay a lump sum. If the money runs out before she’s of age, he starts paying you alimony.
Or, you could give him the cash, but plead with the judge to have it tied up in a trust for your daughter because he’s too irresponsible to make payments.
Ultimately, if he says, “Give me my half the equity, in cash, and I’ll pay the child support when ordered to”, you should agree to that too.
There are very few divorces where everything balances out perfectly. Usually one partner winds up contributing more than the other. This does not matter. It’s not just that the law states that you share your assets after you got married, it’s that you knew this, and married him anyway. That means you have a contractual obligation. By screwing him out of what you agreed would be his when you married him, you a breaking your word.
There is no way I can spin the choice to attempt to play on his ignorance and laziness by screwing him out of what’s legally his as anything but unethical.
Usually it’s men who make this argument. They have the high-paying jobs, and the wife stays home. Then they get divorced, and the man in incensed that he has to give her half of what he earned. We generally don’t look kindly on men who try to weasel out of that arrangement, and neither does the law. It should be no different when the tables are turned.
You could also look at this another way - maybe your husband was lazy and shiftless because he could be. You were the breadwinner, he didn’t need to work. You were apparently cool with this. It was the arrangement you both had. Had you never married, he may have been forced through circumstance to improve himself and build his own career. This is one of the arguments that has been used to ensure that housewives who have never worked still get half of whatever the family earned - had she not been married, she would have had her own income. If the marriage was set up so that she didn’t work, that doesn’t mean she can be tossed penniless onto the street at some arbitrary time in the future. Hence the general rule that marriage is a partnership and any assets accumulated during the marriage are split.
BTW, are you also checking to see if he gets half of your 401(k) or any other retirement benefits you may have accrued while you were married? I suspect he may be able to make a claim there as well. There are plenty of cases where one spouse might forego a retirement savings because the other spouse’s retirement plan is enough to cover both of them. So the one spouse saves the money and they use it for expenses, travel, whatever. Then a divorce happens, and suddenly one spouse is left without any retirement funds.
He should absolutely get his own lawyer. You should tell him to do so. You should insist on it. You should both make sure that the law is fully complied with and that any settlement you make is made with each party in full understanding of their rights and obligations. Anything less is taking advantage of the man.
Beautifully put, Sam. It’s kinda funny–despite our differences on politics, I think we have some pretty similar values on a lot of issues.
Daniel
I guess I don’t see why she should have to look out for him. She’s been taking care of him for eight years. She is/was his wife, not his mother. He doesn’t seem to be very interested in looking after himself - but that doesn’t obligate her to do it anymore.
I just hope he maintains some sort of contact with his daughter. My father only saw me once after my parents divorced when I was five - I was eight at the time. He had two sons with his second wife and I guess a daughter didn’t matter anymore. And for what it’s worth - my mother told the judge she didn’t want child support. He told her she was crazy, but that’s how it was written. She said if he wanted to pay it, he would. He never did. That was in 1965, so things may be different now - a judge may order support whether the custodial parents asks for it or not.
She doesn’t: all she needs to do is to tell this man who trusts her implicitly one of two things:
- The truth
- That she is no longer trustworthy, and that she will take advantage of any ignorance about the law that he has.
If she knows that he trusts her (and he’s been married to her for eight years, and may have no experience with the law–it’s not like this is totally unreasonable on his part), and she gains an advantage from that trust, to his disadvantage, then she’s being unethical in the extreme. It would take her twenty seconds and one breath to solve the problem, costing her nothing at all (except, possibly, ill-gotten gains).
And that’s why she should do it. It sounds as if the current quesiton is resolved, but unless she’s changed her entire attitude, she still owes it to him to tell him that she plans to take advantage of any ignorance he has about divorce law in order to maximize her gains and minimize his.
Daniel
I guess you missed it. Up-thread a few posts, Foxy40 says her lawyer confirmed what several of us had suspected: Her husband is not entitled to 50%, or any other % of the equity in the house.
I wouldn’t bet on this either way. It’s probable that if Foxy & Co. explain their situation and desires fully, a judge will go along with no child support.
Did you not read the part where Foxy says they had a pre-nup? He was promised nothing. There is nothing that’s “legally his”.
Unless, of course, Foxy had a prenuptial agreement, which she did.
Why? There’s not a lawyer in the world that could negotiate as sweet a deal for him as what Foxy’s already offering.
Have you read the pre-nup? Because many such agreements are specifically limited to the assets that each person brings into the relationship. In such cases, wealth accrued during the relationship is not subject to the pre-nup.
This has to be one of the oddest threads i’ve seen. We are presented with a moral and ethical dilemma. The OP soon makes it clear that, while she is ostensibly asking for people’s advice about how to deal with this dilemma, she has absolutely no intention of changing her mind about anything, or accepting any advice that runs contrary to the course of action she had already decided to take.
Also, when it becomes clear that plenty of people do, in fact, take issue with her behaviour, the scenario itself mysteriously changes. Money that her husband was (per the OP) initially legally entitled to is now, magically, money that he’s not legally entitled to.
The whole thing smacks of sophistry and disingenuousness.