It shouldn't be that scary. I've been married coming up on 10 years in January. I've been the sole income provider for a large majority of the marriage.
I wouldn't be able to make the income that I do without the contributions my wife has made to making my life easier, and in general keeping the more administrative aspects of life under control.
I'm in a marriage with her because I love her and respect her. Part of that is recognizing that it is our income. Part of that is recognizing that even if our marriage were to decay to the point of divorce that I would still care enough about her as a person to want her to be able to establish a new life.
I'd advise the friend of yours to create a relationship their spouse wants to be in. That's how you prevent the downsides of alimony.
I'd advise the friend of yours to create a relationship their spouse wants to be in
This just isn't always possible. Sometimes, folks change and want different things in life. For example: If my spouse suddenly decided he wanted children, that would end the relationship for me. I could not expect them to go without something they are finding critical to their happiness, but I'm not willing to bear children for someone else's feelings either.
And honestly, this is what being respectful in a relationship actually is.
But all that said, would one of us qualify for alimony or need some help getting on our feet? Yeah. One of us stays home, after all, and would need the assistance (though I'm not convinced it should be alimony, per se - not at our income level).
sure, people aren't static, and needs and wants change over time. sometimes they diverge.
I certainly didn't mean that one should betray their own needs or boundaries to accommodate their spouse. My intent was more to convey that fostering a caring, loving, respectful, and interdependent relationship drastically lowers the probability of a divorce. Life still happens.
Of course our existing systems aren't perfect either. I do think there's probably a case for a lower bounds on when alimony is viable. e.g., if the paying party is/would be below the poverty line, but I'm far from well enough informed to speculate what a good system would be.
If you have 15m and lose half of it, you are still pretty well off with the 7.5m you retail. Even a quarter of that would get you a house and you probably won't have issues having a stable life, even though both parties have to set up house again.
Half of 35000k - 17.5k - might be the difference between living on your own and having to move in with relatives.
It is basically the difference between some money when you are nearing poor and money while rich - the poorer you are, the more you are going to depend on the money and the bigger difference losing/having it will have on your life.
> I wouldn't be able to make the income that I do without the contributions my wife has made to making my life easier, and in general keeping the more administrative aspects of life under control.
If you were to divorce would you find it reasonable for her to get 50%?
Because I would seem as tho she gave up (willingly in support of you) a career for you. And after divorce wouldn’t be able to maintain any sort of lifestyle as a result of having no career or work experience?
Seems reasonable to me she would get the 50% from during the marriage, but nothing after. Most people agree to share resources from during the marriage, not after the marriage. If the bread winner owes alimony, then the house-maker should owe maid service or something, but yet you never see that in the court order.
It is especially scary when you consider that some people get locked into a career or job they hate to pay alimony which cannot be reduced if they change jobs
I think you have a flawed mental model of alimony. Try modelling it more like a severance package. Should you keep working for your employer after they've terminated the employment agreement, but agreed to give severance? The universal answer is a resounding 'no'.
I see marriage as an equal partnership, so if there is a post-marriage 'severance' (beyond 50/50 asset disposition noted above) it would be bilateral (bread winner gives money to home-maker, home-maker gives maid/home-making service to bread winner). Seems cleanest at all just to cut ties though.
It's not a symmetric exchange though. One person has decidedly more capability to start a new life than the other. The 'severance' is intended to help them establish that new life (e.g., acquire training, housing, etc)
If they're continuing to perform home making duties, they don't have the time to build that new life. And you're essentially keeping them trapped in the relationship even after a divorce.
You're of course welcome to negotiate anything with a potential spouse before marriage and encode it in a prenup.
I find it odd that the law considers the contributions during marriage symmetrically, but losses of each party asymmetriclly. That is to say, the contributions of a homemaker are equal to that of an income earner during marriage, but there is no harm from losing the expected support of the homemaker.
The homemaker can continue to be a homemaker for themselves exclusively, while receiving half an income. The income earner needs to work while homemaking, or work while supporting a 2nd homemaker.
The legal situation is complicated because the courts try to balance conflicting objectives. One is to help the homemaker reestablish themselves, the other is to maintain a lifestyle they are accustomed to. If it was only the former, some sunset duration would be appropriate, I think.
The reality is that it is often a distinctive. If the partner receiving alimony starts a career or remarries, they will lose the revenue stream.
>One person has decidedly more capability to start a new life than the other.
I mean possibly, possibly not. For instance, my wife makes bundles more than me and is the bread-winner yet she works a licensed career, with her license restricted to a limited geographic area with not so many jobs. For her to start a new life would be much harder than me even though she is the bread winner. Also worth noting 'home-maker' is an extremely common niche in life so it's unreasonable to believe someone occupying that niche can't find another marriage with another divorced bread-winner seeking to return to the interlocking bread-winner home-maker scenario.
As a second, point, I totally object to the idea someone has an obligation to provide someone a 'new' life just because that person lost opportunities by voluntarily entering a relationship. For instance, people often give up career opportunities to take care of an ailing family member and no judge is going to order the ailing family member pay alimony pay them back to start a new career. In particular, if the vows include 'until death do us part' then that is a pretty explicit agreement not to provide provisions for post-divorce alimony arrangement. Even worse, no one should be in the position to pay for somebody else to get a new life if a partner say cheated on you and then divorced you to chase another partner.
And a third note, you've totally looked at it from a one-way lense here. The home-maker bread-winner interlocking really is a team equal effort. When the bread-winner loses the home-maker, they may have a lot to 're-learn' -- how to efficiently manage shopping, cooking, cleaning, balancing the budget (possibly). That takes a lot of time and their health may suffer because they no longer know how to say cook nutritiously anymore, so if the bread-winner needs to pay the home-maker to re-tool for a career then the home-maker should be ordered to help the bread-winner re-learn how to cook and other essential tasks (no joke, efficiently performing all the home-maker tasks can take a long time to master!). It really is a bilateral severance, if we want to create a severance fairly.
>If they're continuing to perform home making duties, they don't have the time to build that new life
If they're continuing to perform labor to pay alimony, they don't have the time to build that new life.
>And you're essentially keeping them trapped in the relationship even after a divorce.
But that's what alimony is! I'd support some provision that alimony could be cancelled if they don't want to perform the maid service, so they could avoid being trapped into receiving an alimony payment.
>You're of course welcome to negotiate anything with a potential spouse before marriage and encode it in a prenup.
The counterpoint is here any severance should be arranged in the pre-nup. In the old days in some cultures this was a dowry, which relied on up-front mutual agreement rather than unilateral violence of the state by judge after the fact. The default should be asset transfers and splitting happens during and at the termination of marriage and not after.
The person staying at home has given up work, and cannot enter the workforce in the same way after marriage because they've not been in the workforce for years. They've given up earning potential for you to work and alimony (in theory) is to make sure you are regulating someone to poverty after they gave up that earning potential to be a homemaker without the benefits of employment (days off, insurance, hourly wage).
In states without alimony, you just split the stuff and move on. This is what you describe - divorce without alimony.
Yes I'm aware. I was specifically asked to model it as 'severance.'
Most of the stay-at-home spouses I've met didn't give up work as a gift to their spouse, they did it as a gift to their children. Should children pay alimony to stay-at-home moms for the work opportunities their mother lost out on to take care of them?
Are you suggesting the father derived no benefit from the arrangement, that he continued to do half of the childcare, cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc?
Are you suggesting the mother derived no benefit from the arrangement, that she continue to pay half the rent, health insurance, groceries, car insurance, gas, etc?
Personally, when my wife didn't work for over a year (more like two), it did fuck all for me. I paid all of the fulltime childcare, took care of the kid before and after school, and paid every single financial interest of my wife except her car insurance and phone bill. I can truthfully and honestly say in my personal situation I got nothing out of it. I paid for her because I love her and wanted her to have the same standard of life I have WHILE WE ARE MARRIED -- but I would be quite displeased indeed if my generosity in marriage is taken to mean I would be so generous after being ditched.
I paid all of the fulltime childcare, took care of the kid before and after school, and paid every single financial interest of my wife except her car insurance and phone bill.
So, you gave her everything but the freedom to get out of the house and the freedom to talk to people as needed, even though she wasn't working at the time? Seriously.. the first thing my spouse did when I moved overseas with them was to make sure I could communicate with folks and have the ability to leave the house on a whim (within reason, I could always do free stuff). This was because these things keep people more free and less trapped in a situation.
And honestly, it sounds like your situation wasn't average: Most of the time, the stay at home parent is an unpaid childcare worker, unpaid cook, and unpaid maid without ever getting days off and often without having spending money of their own unless they save money on groceries. I'd guess that your situation had other factors.
And a note: If your ex lives in poverty after divorce, it means your children live in part-time poverty and I really don't understand wanting that sort of thing.
>So, you gave her everything but the freedom to get out of the house and the freedom
No she spent pretty much the entire day out of the house pursuing her goals while I financed it and took care of the kid on top of that.
> it means your children live in part-time poverty
That's what child support is for, for the child to have money even if the parent does not. Also, alimony is a thing even for people without kids. If the father goes into poverty to pay child support nobody gives a fuck, even if that means the child ends up living in part time poverty with the father. You'll hear judges impugn people paying child support all the time because they didn't pay it while eating and putting gas in their car, somebody posted a video here of a judge doing that.
I wasn't trying to make it personal, and your situation does sound unusual; sometimes the stay-at-home partner ends up working more hours than the breadwinner spouse, who might work 40 hours at the workplace and do nothing at home. That doesn't sound like it was the case for you when your wife wasn't working.
I would be quite displeased indeed if my generosity in marriage is taken to mean I would be so generous after being ditched.
I would say to anyone on the default marriage contract, there may well be spousal maintenance in the event of divorce, so if anyone thinks that's unfair, draw up your own agreement.
I think at the societal level though there needs to be a re-adjustment of the family court so that "I will support you to pursue your own goals until whatever arbitrary I time I decide not to" does not default to "I will support you to pursue your own goals, even if you cheat on me and then ditch my ass to get filled up with cum by strangers." That is just an act of tyrannical judges using unilateral violence of the state to pursue their own hate against the generous.
>who might work 40 hours at the workplace
Lol I was working a lot more than that to support a loved but at the time dead-weight wife on top of my kid and paying for full time care workers for my kid. There was one month my fingers and wrist were in such pain from working waking to to night all day everyday I could barely work without being in constant pain.
> If you were to divorce would you find it reasonable for her to get 50%?
Seems like a good place to start, although it should probably be for a limited time and/or reduce over time. My spouse stopped working shortly after we married, as was mutually agreed and beneficial, and many years out of the workforce likely reduces earnings forever, but 50% of earnings after divorce forever doesn't seem fair; 50% for a limited time is probably less administrative burden than an amount that more fairly or accurately compensates for the lost earnings potential for a longer time. Certainly 50% of retirement accounts, and if there's a pension, 50% of that portion fairly allocated to the marriage (social security has its own rules for spousal allowances in a divorce, which may or may not be fair, but are what they are; I'd assume that's mostly accepted as-is though?)
50% would be a reasonable starting place. I might factor in her earning potential had she not left her career.
We've discussed getting it codified in a postnup (along with assets), so we would know in advance what any numbers would be should either of us want to terminate the marriage. I forget off the top of my head what number we floated -- she didn't ask for it to be 50%.
I’m in a similar boat but it’s something that just kinda happened as a result of having kids and living in Singapore. In my head I wouldn’t even want to discuss it I would just split down the middle but I read your post and wondered if my thoughts would change /if/ I was going through a divorce.
Hopefully it never comes to down because our relationship is amazing.
of course -- read literally, it's not true. I just left a comment[0] that clarifies what my intent to convey was. tldr: it lowers the probability of divorce.
one person can't reduce that chance to zero, because as you mentioned, the other person very much has free will.
I wouldn't be able to make the income that I do without the contributions my wife has made to making my life easier, and in general keeping the more administrative aspects of life under control.
I'm in a marriage with her because I love her and respect her. Part of that is recognizing that it is our income. Part of that is recognizing that even if our marriage were to decay to the point of divorce that I would still care enough about her as a person to want her to be able to establish a new life.
I'd advise the friend of yours to create a relationship their spouse wants to be in. That's how you prevent the downsides of alimony.