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Comment by sean_patel | Hacker News Reader

> In any given year, trillions of dollars sit safely in the offshore financial world, effectively stateless, protected by legions of well-compensated defenders and a tangle of laws deliberately designed to impede creditors and tax collectors.

This. I always worry that if/when I get married -- in California where the Divorce laws are heavily in favor of the woman -- that I will be middle-aged, penniless, and will have to start over in my only known career (software development) that is brutally ageist.

So my sincere question (not trolling) to HN peeps. Are there any such banks / off shore options for the 99% not-so-wealthy crowd, whereby I could "squirrel away" just a few 1000 $ (maybe like 40, to 50K) so that in my worst-case-scenario, I don't have to start from 0. I understand there is no incentives for the "well compensated defenders" since the $ amount of such accounts won't be in millions, but surely there must be some countries / banks that offer this?

(NOTE: The intention is more to safeguard my individual future from a bad marriage and divorce and not greed. Hope you understand).

Thank you!

View on HN

This is premature optimization. The California divorce regime is "community property", that is anything not covered under a prenuptial agreement is divided 50/50. A visit to a men's rights website will unearth horror stories of abusive alimony decrees but these anecdotes are unrepresentative outliers.

A prenuptial agreement would safeguard you more than attempting to hide money overseas. Another safeguard would be to marry a person who wouldn't be eligible for alimony due to preexisting income.

I consider this sort of optimization to be an inaccurate threat model, focused on outliers rather than the expected case. The expected case in California or any other state would be that the marriage would survive if not flourish (the most common case for upper-middle-class marriages), with a contingency that a divorce would occur amicably (the second-most common case). Screening for contentious attitudes is part of the due diligence of dating.

(only on HN would I ever expect to post something like this instead of the common-sense "find the right spouse and work on your marriage and you won't have to worry about this issue")

> find the right spouse and work on your marriage

Why buy car insurance? Just find the right car and work on your driving.

Wait a minute. Liability insurance is not for you, it's for all the other road users. The rest of the world won't put up with you being uncollectible when you cause damage with your vehicle, yet meanwhile reaping all the benefits.

When you buy comprehensive insurance (or any other-than-liability) it is for your benefit, and sometimes also for your lender's.

The grandparent's analogy is perfectly apt. There are two reasons to get liability insurance for your car: To protect yourself and to protect society.

Suppose liability insurance was entirely voluntary and not required by law. Would you get it? I'll bet you that most people with good income or significant assets would still buy it, just like people buy home or fire insurance even when not mandatory.

> with a contingency that a divorce would occur amicably (the second-most common case).

Is that the second-most-common case? I haven't seen a single amicable divorce amongst my friends and colleagues. The level of nastiness has been different, of course, but it's never been amicable.

Given the profound downsides that I've seen, I think that a prenuptial agreement is mandatory for anyone who chooses to marry in our era. Otherwise you're just going for the standard 'prenup' — and like the standard deduction on your taxes, it just ain't sufficient.

Dammit. While researching for some hard stats on this, I performed several Google searches containing the keywords "California divorce". Now I'm already getting divorce ads. Which my spouse might see. Better explain this one now before it becomes self-fulfilling ;) !

Another great reason to have an ad blocker.

That's what incognito mode is for. My cellphone provider is Cricket Wireless, and just leaving out the ".com" had Google showing me cards for cricket games for weeks on my Android.

Now I only ever visit Cricket's website in incognito mode.

Ads could be targeted by IP.

Can you clear it on this page? I've used it before to clear out "temporary" interests.

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated

You should be able to opt out of OBA ads by clicking on the AdChoices icon at the top of your display ads a little "play button", typically. Another, possibly less effective, way to do this is to clear your cookies. Then the "ad networks" will have to find another way to identify you and stitch your cookies together.

> find the right spouse and work on your marriage and you won't have to worry about this issue

Because, unfortunately, it is way too easy to give up on a marriage[0] instead of trying to work it out. Marriage takes effort.

[0] Preemptively, because surely someone will reply about it: If a spouse is getting beat, they aren't giving up on their marriage if they leave; they're protecting their life.

Uhh considering how divorce rates are near 50%, your assumption of divorces occurring amicably as a second-most common case would heavily depend on what portion of that 40-50% _does_ actually end in a friendly manner.

Let's be extremely optimistic and say 80% of divorces occur amicably.. that would give us ~10% odds of a nasty divorce--which I would not chalk up to "outliers"

divorce rates among upper income, educated folks is low. . . closer to 10-20% range. . . and to be fair some matches are just plain bad or green card marriages.

That wasn't the point of my post.

My point was that, no matter how you fudge the numbers, it's impossible to chalk up bad divorces as outliers. Outliers are defined as 3 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution, so the parent was implying that bad divorces occur at a rate of 0.1% or less--which is off by at least one order of magnitude.

> Outliers are defined as 3 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution

I kind of agree with your overall point, but that definition is wildly incorrect.

Hey there, my green card marriage is coming up on 18 years strong..

that 50% thing is not really true any more. http://bestdivorcelawyer.co/family-law/divorce-rates-higheri...

~50% divorce rate is dated information, it's much lower and decreasing [0]. There's also the fact that the divorce rate amongst the college-educated (which I assume includes the software developer in question) has always been much lower. Something else that throws off divorce statistics is serial divorcers, a significant cadre who have divorced two or more times.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-i...

You're sorely wrong. Divorces in several states, California included, are like mutually assured destruction with one side having twice the firepower, and everything about a relationship can change in a divorce.

To OP: you don't have to hide your assets in offshore accounts, you can talk to an estate planner and look into setting up a trust (google domestic asset protection trust) and make yourself the sole beneficiary. You would no longer "own" the money and it's protected in a divorce.

Also prenups are typically worthless in the madness that is family court. Never ever ever rely on one.

> you can talk to an estate planner and look into setting up a trust (google domestic asset protection trust) and make yourself the sole beneficiary. You would no longer "own" the money and it's protected in a divorce.

Thank you for this real and actionable advice.

I found this article, and according to it, California does not allow it. I guess I'll have to move to 1 of those state? Not too bad lol. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2016/07/06/compari...

> Also prenups are typically worthless in the madness that is family court. Never ever ever rely on one.

Are you saying that prenups are worthless in the case of child support or that prenups are worthless in all cases? In the case of child-related issues, you're right. However, in the case of dividing assets, I think you might be mistaken.

I've read stories of super wealthy people with prenups who did not get screwed; i.e., the prenup held up. The best example I can find is a certain billionaire who got divorced, but I cannot mention his name without creating irrevelant political discussion. He had an ironclad prenup and it held. That's the point I want to make. Prenups still work.

>I've read stories of super wealthy people with prenups who did not get screwed

That's because we (the USA) have a two-tiered legal system.

> The best example I can find is a certain billionaire who got divorced....

lol would that be by any chance XXXXXX XXXX ?

Almost everything you wrote is factually incorrect. Prenuptial agreements are upheld 99.999% of the time; it is the extremely rare case that a prenup is voided, which is why such situations make the news.

Also, in a community property state like CA, all assets acquired during marriage are presumed to be "community property" of both spouses, unless there is a prenuptial agreement specifically describing the ownership of assets acquired during the marriage using a spouse's individual and separate pre-marital assets (i.e., pre-marital savings). Thus, an estate planner could not do anything to help you in this situation.

Don't be an armchair lawyer if you don't know what you're talking about.

I personally know two folks where the prenup was partially voided. It didn't make the news and these guys were certainly not wealthy by HN standards.

Do you have some research on the topic? I'll admit my assumption has always been they are more or less worthless due to my anecdotal direct experience, and I've even had a family law attorney in my state make comments that also led me believe this was the case.

You shouldn't wear a seat belt or a helmet, you should make sure your skills are the best and you should really choose the best bike!

Shit happens, thats why we have audits, contracts and airbags and why many people avoid driving motorcycles vs. cars. There is stuff outside of our control and to get rid of unnecessary risk is a benefit in itself.

>> "...horror stories of abusive alimony decrees..."

[0] is IMHO a fairly evenhanded (and comprehensive) treatment of divorce outcomes by state, partially written by an MIT CompSci professor.

It was an eye opener, and I wouldn't call it a men's rights website.

[0] http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

Stop caring about nonsense stuff.

If I were you I will go to an extremely inconvenient experience with my girlfriend, like for example crossing the Atlantic on a small rented yacht or camping for a serious amount of time without the comforts of civilization. I have done this myself and it is extremely useful.

Your priority should be to know the other person as fast as possible, her priorities in life, her deep beliefs(and she doing the same with you). Not what she says about herself but how she is, how she behaves.

With hard experiences it becomes orders of magnitude faster than in normal life, in which acting-faking-posing is possible.

This way you will marry the right person. Even if the relationship breaks you don't need to be enemies. I had a lot of girlfriends in my life and most of them continue being part of me. If they need help I will help them without a doubt, but most of the time they are the ones that help me.

You are seeing a relationship as a liability, but a great relationship is a big asset by itself. It provides much more than the sum of the parts.

By being extremely afraid, you are not living your life in the important stuff, and you are not risking anything, so you are already losing.

Congratulations, but not everyone is as great with women as you are.

>>If I were you I will go to an extremely inconvenient experience with my girlfriend, like for example crossing the Atlantic on a small rented yacht or camping for a serious amount of time without the comforts of civilization. I have done this myself and it is extremely useful.

Unless you plan to spend your entire married life on a small rented yacht, it's a silly idea to use it as a "trial run" for marriage.

I've seen similar practices backfire many times. What happens is that the adversity of the adventure brings the couple together and helps them bond, but when they return to their regular lives they grow resentful of each other because they no longer have the Adventure Stuff to distract them from their actual issues.

I think the idea is not to do something adventures but something monotone and boring.

Sorry to break out the bad news to you.

Every thing sells for money. Its just the figure.

If what the person wants from you is big enough. None of your on-the-yatch evaluations will even matter.

They will want that divorce, take that alimony and move on.

Love that approach. Any literature, message boards or similar places that you can recommend?

1 - Get an attorney and arrange a pre-nup and all these issues go away.

2 - If your masculinity can stand it, find a bright intelligent high earning woman for a partner. Who knows, she might owe YOU support in a divorce!

3 - Foreign bank accounts have tax implications, like FACTA reporting compliance during tax reporting. Your tax preparation bills will go up... unless you plan on keeping these accounts secret from the government? Then hey, here's a felony tax evasion charge for you! Say Hi to Wesley Snipes for me.

...PS...

4 - You may wish to think about a vasectomy before marriage. In many cases, the woman has physical custody of the children so the husband has to pay her support for rearing his kids. This is why the law appears to favor women. In truth the law favors kids not being financially abandoned by their fathers. Anyway, you can prevent having to pay for children by not having any. A vasectomy is the best solution for remaining financially sound.

Marry someone who isn't dependent on your income and doesn't want to be. Get a prenup so it stays that way. End of story.

And they say romance is dead!

A relationship that's based on things other than money is unromantic?

Is "you get half my assets" really the height of romance?

My vision of romance is more like "I love you for who you are, so I give you everything I am, and everything I have, until death do us part". Corny and old-fashioned, but that's me.

http://reddit.com/r/bpdlovedones

And before you say "well you can always see the signs"...sadly, no, some people are really good at hiding it.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.

Old-fashioned romance is a financial agreement. "marrying for love" is a modern innovation, not necessarily a good one.

Er, pardon my confusion, but I have no idea what that has to do with my comment.

At least in the terrible romcoms my wife makes me watch, people just marry someone they love. They don't ask "what's my exit strategy when this marriage inevitably fails?".

It's a good idea to prepare for risks even if they don't have a 100% chance of occurring ("inevitable"). Your point stands that preparing for a non-zero chance of relationship failure is certainly "unromantic" in the traditional sense, but it might be a wise move anyway.

Knowing a breakup would have a lot of painful consequences encourages me to focus on making my marriage work. Carrying a "get out of jail free card" would me make more reckless during arguments, this increase the chances of failure.

What's missing from this thread is the psychological effect of breakups - on you, your ex-partner, your children, your friends, etc. A prenup doesn't wave away all that damage.

> Carrying a "get out of jail free card" would me make more reckless during arguments, this increase the chances of failure.

This is interesting. Does wearing a seat belt in a car equipped with airbags make you drive more recklessly? Does wearing a helmet make you bike more recklessly? This may be true for some people but not for me. None of those countermeasures claims to guarantee you'll walk away without a scratch if the worst happens - they are designed to mitigate damage.

I'm sure it's not a perfect analogy - none are - but what do you think?

I honestly can't say. There are quite a few studies that suggest prenups make divorce more likely, but probably those more likely to get divorced are more likely to get prenups.

I would turn your question around. How much does your potential loss from an event affect how hard you try to prevent it from happening? My guess would be the greater your loss, the harder you'll try.

When in the midst of what feels like an irretrievable situation, knowing that you stand to lose economically can make you go back and work on it - and that's usually a good thing. That's my personal experience, but I'm sure it's not true of all people in all relationships at all times.

True - the greater the loss, generally the harder I'll try to prevent it. However, I'll make just two observations.

One: of course the potential loss from a divorce is often not equal for both partners, meaning on some level they may - to your own point - be unequally incentivized to prevent a break-up.

Two: In some unfortunate situations it may not matter if you try even harder to prevent a break-up if your partner has made up their mind. Or, if you stand to lose more, concessions can be squeezed out of you in an unfair way. Obviously you do your best to avoid a partner that would do anything like this, but in the end you can't be sure for a variety of reasons.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that one party may do fairly well in the absence of a prenup, so is actually more likely to breakup rather than less.

That's a good point, and not something I'd thought about. Perhaps as I'm not very wealthy, these questions are so hypothetical that they sound a bit ridiculous to me. If I had a £200 million in the bank I might be more inclined to worry, no matter how in love I was. More money, more problems!

It's been shown that a biker wearing a helmet makes car drivers more reckless.

To clarify, did you mean riders of bicycles or motorcycles? I would expect the same effect applies to both, in any case.

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." --Socrates

Put into any bank or brokerage account in your name only now. Don't commingle with community funds when you get married. Separate property remains separate -- it's what you acquire and earn during the marriage that's considered community property. If still worried, get a pre-nuptial agreement before taking the plunge.

To those young-uns worried that asking for a pre-nup might upset your potential future wife: it's much better to see what kind of personality she has in a controversial situation now rather than 2, 5, 10 years down the road. Sometimes it is only under stress where a person reveals their true personality, and believe me you are going to encounter stress during marriage.

Not only that, the terms you propose in the pre-nup give your potential wife a very good indication how you value the effort of child-raising and her career that she will give up for you (it's still usually the wife that follows her husband). Then she can also make an informed choice.

Spot on.

"a very good indication how you value the effort of child-raising and her career that she will give up for you (it's still usually the wife that follows her husband)"

Is that still the trend these days? Are most couples able to afford to only have a single working parent anymore?

Cases where wife follows her husband in job-related relocation are more common than the opposite, and they are typically detrimental to the partner's career.

What you usually see is that one spouse (the wife, usually) spends time with the children when they are very young and then works part-time. Obviously, that impacts career progression. Salary data would support the theory. It's not a single working parent, it's 1.5 working parents for a few years.

I suspect you are right. Now that I think of it, I actually recall hearing a podcast on this (Planet Money? Freakonomics?) where they dissected the statement around women only earning something like $.75/dollar compared to men. I believe they found that if you looked at earnings before having a child, they were equal, and that the reduced earnings came from taking time off or sacrificing workload (and presumably total contribution) for flexibility. This then resulted in not advancing as rapidly as say, someone putting in twice the hours, or who did not take several years off and thus has that many more years career experience, despite being the same age.

While the laws may be awful in California and you should always seek to make reasonable and prudent financial decisions... if you have a spouse in mind and this is still weighing on you then you're probably not ready to get married.

Also if you have a ton of money go talk to a financial adviser or do some more research, there's many ways to protect your finances from a number of scenarios that don't involve skirting the law. You'd likely have to disclose offshore accounts in the scenario you're imagining so you'd either have to lie -- which is illegal -- or it would all be wasted effort.

Generally if you're ready for marriage, the question you should be asking yourself is in the event of death, sickness, and yes divorce, how do I ensure the well being of my spouse and kids?

If you're asking how do I protect myself in the event of divorce, you yourself are not ready for marriage.

If this is truly a concern of yours, I would suggest not marrying.

Or living together. Thanks to government, in most Western countries (including the U.S.) even living together binds you to the same or almost the same contract as marrying.

I've never heard of this. Someone can actually be entitled to half of your wealth just for living with you...?

If you live together long enough. Common Law marriage or something...

Common law marriage is only a thing in eleven states. It requires the couple to present themselves as married.

Australia and Canada have common-law relationships that aren't marriage but do involve dividing property in courts.

How does this work with same sex roommates in states that allow same sex marriage? Or even simpler, what if a male and female live together as roommates?

> in most Western countries (including the U.S.) even living together binds you to the same or almost the same contract as marrying.

Correct. This is such a terrible thing. I'm coming up on 6th year of living with my girlfriend and I am told that California is also something like this... i.e. if you are living together for 7 or more years (maybe 10, not sure) that it's as if you are married. Terrible!

This is incorrect and is a common myth being propagated recently. States don't have a defined time period. It's up to the parties to make a claim in a court whether they are reasonably married (looking at correspondence, documents, etc.)

http://www.npr.org/2016/09/04/487825901/no-you-re-not-in-a-c...

Buy bitcoin with cash every month on LocalBitcoins. Store bitcoin wallet keys somewhere safe, offline, in at least 2 geographically separated places.

This. The asset has a very minimal presence in the physical world (just an encrypted file that is your wallet) so it's pretty easy to make it impossible to prove whether you own any or how many bitcoins.

Watch this for an interesting perspective on Divorce in Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaC-2lj6HNg

>and will have to start over in my only known career (software development) that is brutally ageist.

freelance consulting pays better and nobody gives a rats ass what you look like.

Flowers, date nights, and little gifts are all a lot less expensive than offshore financial schemes, a lot more likely to work, and a lot more personally rewarding.

Each $10K stack of mint $100 bills is just shy under .44″. $50K is rather easy to hide in cash or precious metals. Then there's BTC and other crypto currencies. An amount small enough to fork over to several people you truly trust and have them put it into their savings accounts in case you feel more comfortable that way. But like others have said: premature optimization.

A prenuptial agreement would probably be easier? And cheaper...

Agree with the prenup. That is the simplest way to establish what will happen when you divorce. If you remain part of the 99% then it will likely be uncontested, if you hit the lottery and become super wealthy there is a chance your soon-to-be-ex-spouse would try to invalidate it.

when

Nice catch.

How about not marrying? You could live a life as a committed couple including merged finances, co-living, even having kids. But without an actual marriage, you would never be at risk of losing in a divorce.

The only benefit to get married, legally and practically speaking, is perhaps for tax optimization.

$50K in $100 bills fits in a safety deposit box. Precious metals are even more compact.

The problem is, this money is losing value every year. I think he wants to put money away and still earn _some_ interest to combat inflation.

I'm sure those are registered in an asset seizure or discovery phase of a lawsuit. Sure nobody knows what's inside, but the bank owns the vault so there's got to be a discoverable record of it. Now, a fire-resistant keep-at-home box might be undetectable if you concealed it well enough.

I think that hiding money in a divorce is illegal and you made this post with what is presumably your real name. But maybe money you squirreled away before getting married is different, i dunno. IANAL.

> in California where the Divorce laws are heavily in favor of the woman

I thought they were in favor of the less rich of the two? I.e. marry a richer women that you are and you'd be the favored one.

They do favor the less wealthy spouse. That's why Britney Spears paid Federline several million dollars in alimony.

The reason for the apparent gender bias is that the woman is usually the less wealthy spouse, generally because the woman is usually the younger spouse and frequently leaves the workforce or takes lower-paying employment to care for any children that may issue.

Depends on what you want. If you only want money, this is true.

If you want custody of your children, most of the time women win it. I believe this is true even if the man was looking after the children and the woman was working, although I'm not sure about the US.

Family court is terribly biased against men. http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

The options are:

- cash and or jewelry in a safety deposit box (will lose money every year due to inflation!) - bitcoin or some kind of untraceable digital currency (risky!) - buy hard assets over time that don't depreciate in value (fine art, collectible coins, etc.) - transfer assets to someone you really trust - life insurance policy that you pay into over time

Back in the day you could have bought bearer bonds and stash them away in a safety deposit box.

  that I will be middle-aged, penniless

Is there any reason to believe a divorce settlement would not divide your assets reasonably equally/fairly?

He is probably including alimony into his reasoning. I think it's still over-the-top.

Numerous anecdotal horror stories I have heard from several friends in real life, as well as stories in the newspaper/internet.

Yup, I know a number of people who will never be able to save for retirement because their paychecks finance their ex-wives' (now carefree) lifestyles. Pretty scary.

> Is there any reason to believe a divorce settlement would not divide your assets reasonably equally/fairly?

In an ideal world, no. But a co-worker of mine -- Indian guy from India like my Dad was -- with 2 kids got divorced, and his all American white wife (born and raised in Florida) essentially took him to the cleaners. I don't know the details, but apparently she "worked" the system by "getting fired" from her day job months before the divorce was initiated, and now he has to pay child-support and alimony and 1/2 their house (on which he's the only one paying the mortgage) while she is "rediscovering" herself with yoga, hiking and other trips paid for by my co-worker's alimony.

He is 44 years old and in a state of panic. I think the only thing common between me and him is that we share the same ethnic origin. Maybe I am over-thinking this, or maybe not. LOL.

"Taken to the cleaners":

Child support for 2 kids and 1/2 the house. Oh come on! You have to take care of your kids! And, like it or not, 1/2 that house is yours and you should help pay. Sell it if you need to get out from under the debt, but it's still 1/2 yours to deal with.

Alimony. Ok, maybe he could have gotten out of this.

All in all, this is HARDLY getting taken to the cleaners. This is pretty much to be expected (especially the Child Support!).

I agree. That sounds like a more-or-less standard divorce.

> Alimony. Ok, maybe he could have gotten out of this.

Even if the wife lost her job months before the divorce, she should still be required to seek work and/or agree to stipulate a particular income for herself from which spousal support would be calculated.

Forgetting gender and who earns what for a moment...

If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?

And in such an arrangement, particularly where one partner decides to stay in the home, can the partner who is not there force the sale to improve their cashflow? If so, how should the proceeds be divvied up assuming that a disproportionate amount of money was paid into the house by one partner?

If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?

Makes sense to me. If say, the dad stays home to take care of the house and look after the children, while the wife works. Should the husband then be left with no claim to money/house if the wife decides she wants a divorce?

Maintaining a house and raising children are not low effort jobs. If you calculate how much daycare + a basic cleaning service would be year round, I doubt the cost would be minimal. Not to mention the fact that the person staying home will undoubtedly have a tough time entering the workforce after an extending period of time away from their careers.

Even if both work, how would you go about figuring out the split if the incomes were inequal? Do you literally just take the incomes and proportionally divide up the assets accordingly? What if the person earning more doesn't actually contribute their share to the mortgage, and wastes money on frivolous expenditures? How do you actually decide what is fair?

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I'm not sure why I got downvoted--I'm genuinely curious about people's responses to this.

Being a homemaker is absolutely a high effort job, and cleaning/daycare are hardly cheap. You also are right to point out the opportunity cost of not being in the workplace.

These are interesting things to think about as I just don't think the matter is as black and white as some people might want to think.

But that isn't what happened there. The wife quit the job on intention so that she could be eligible for free alimony pay from the husband.

Why work and make a living, while you could skin this man alive and have him pay for you.

This sort of behavior incentivizes divorce. Not that hard to play victim when you can get some one to pay for you all life, while you chill around beaches and make merry.

> If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?

In a marriage, this is what you agree to, yes.

  > If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?

That's a thoughtful question, and I'm not sure why it's being down-voted. It's literally one of the questions a court considers, when judging matrimonial division of wealth.

On the one hand, in the case of a spouse who brings significant assets to the marriage, or provides a significant monetary contribution to the marriage, their contribution is recognised.

But also, a spouse who has sacrificed a high-value career to care for children is given credit for that in a settlement, so that they do not lose out on their opportunity-cost. There are fairly standard practices for courts to determine the relative merits/costs when judging a settlement.

All that said, does it happen all that often that a court decides that the assets should be divided far from 50:50?

Thanks for seeing the question for what it was--a question. You are right that things are not black and white, and might be hard to put a value on. A homemaker certainly contributes value to the relationship. How does the value of that get determined? That's what I'm really curious about as I think it is anything but black and white.

One variable is extremely easy to quantify, and the other much less so.

if this is to be "expected" then why would anyone get married in California? Can you imagine the psychological cost of paying for your ex-wife (who initiated the divorce and planned well in advance to maximize her financial position) to enjoy herself without working?

You're only focusing on the alimony part, but anyway, if the court says you owe alimony, then you do. If you later find out your ex isn't trying to find gainful employment, you can always have your lawyer try and get you out of alimony.

Almost nobody should complain about paying child support[0] and 1/2 the house. Those are still responsibilities that need to be taken care of.

[0] I left this open ended because there are (very rare) exceptions.

you think he is telling you the whole story?

> from India like my Dad was -- with 2 kids got divorced, and his all American white wife

I wonder how much citizenship played into his decision to marry her originally ? In that case he would have been using her for a ticket on the "all american" gravy train.

> I wonder how much citizenship played into his decision to marry her originally ?

Nothing at all. In fact, he had already "earned" his Green Card by slaving for his Tech Employers for over 10 years. In his own words, it was "Love at 1st sight." Too bad it turned out this way. He says his Indian parents warned him against marrying a "Gori Ladkee" (i.e. white lady)

  > now he has to pay child-support and alimony and 1/2 their house

As a Brit, I'm not all that familiar with the term "alimony", but the dictionary definition I've read says "a husband's or wife's court-ordered provision for a spouse after separation or divorce". Alimony appears to be a generic term for the total payment from one spouse to another, on divorce. Would that mean he's paying "child-support and 1/2 their house"?

From the information given, that seems a fairly equitable split. Half the house, and a contribution towards his childrens' costs. OK, maybe he's the only one currently paying the mortgage, but in most circumstances, that would be a choice left to him: whether to keep his share (and equity) in the property, or sell it.

Alimony is also known as 'spousal support'. It's a completely different payment independent from child support. You can only get alimony if your married.

Child support can come up if your married or not and is based on how many children you have and your income levels. Your income can be imputed, which means your still on the hook even though you don't have that income level anymore. Child support is based on custody, which is a major reason why they turn very nasty in the USA/Canada.

It also sounds like they have a 3rd payment requirement in paying the mortgage. I don't know if that is voluntary or court ordered.

So this guy is paying

1. Spousal support 2. Child support 3. A mortgage

I can see him in that case paying out more than %60 of his income and possibly going in debt or living in his car to cover the shortage.

Alimony is quite different from child support in US law.

For one thing, child support ends once the kids are old enough. When and whether alimony payments end probably depends on the state...

People focus too much on the husband and wife when making this risk assessment.

They forget that the incentives for lawyers in family court are REALLY screwed up, and definitely not on the side of "dividing assets reasonably and fairly."

Indeed. My ex-wife was very much led by other people: her lawyers, her accountant, and later her new husband. Literally nothing she did changed any terms of the divorce-it was all ridiculous; but it cost us both quite a bit of money.

I asked my otherwise-great lawyer a clarifying question about something the other side had said or done and he immediately went on the offensive, which ended up costing some money in response as well. I put the kabosh on that quickly, but I don't think most people would have even thought about it.

HA! No, it rarely works like this, especially if one party is more spiteful than the other, or if there are kids. Pre-nups are the best way to go.

Would a prenuptial agreement help?

Also note retirement accounts are subject to being split for divorce, but they are protected from lawsuit. So loading up your 401k will prevent you being sued and having your assets taken.

This is what you took away from this story? That you want to conceal money best as possible in a byzantine labyrinth of tax optimization?

It would seem that the protagonist here would still be obscenely rich if he had simply settled with his wife.

And saved a lot of time and money.

> In 1999, the Florida attorney general sued to shut down Credit Key Express, saying that it misled customers into thinking they would receive preapproved credit cards. (In fact, all they got for their money was a list of banks that might give them credit cards.) Some years after Credit Key Express shut down, the Florida attorney general came after Xacti’s club businesses, claiming that Oesterlund’s companies had again misled customers. According to court filings, they had abused what are known as “negative options”: Customers would provide their credit card number for a “trial offer,” only to be charged a monthly fee, disclosed in the fine print and difficult to cancel.

> Oesterlund had begun exploring how to structure his business to insulate himself not just from taxes but also from future civil litigation. “I want to have in writing a statement,” he wrote to his lawyers in 2011, “that I can no longer be subject to Florida or U.S. law.” Take every step necessary, he added, to “remove myself from the country of Evil.”

> “Women get 10 percent in Russia by law,” Oesterlund wrote back. “In Dubai they get 0 percent.”

> Oesterlund had stopped making mortgage payments on the house in Boca Raton, she later said in court filings, and threatened to evict her mother and disabled aunt from a house they had bought in Wales. He warned Pursglove that he wouldn’t pay any bills until she agreed to a settlement.

Top HN comment: How can I be this guy?

Stick it in a metal box, and bury it in a big hayfield up near Buxton, under a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. Piece of black, volcanic glass.

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