Hacker News Reader

Comment by teakettle42 | Hacker News Reader

> They often say that there's no one more hopeless than a rich junky. If they have a very large amount of money, they never hit rock bottom until they're dead.

She’s fortunately still alive, but when I divorced my ex-wife over her substance abuse, she walked away with ~$1M in cash.

It took three years of partying, but she finally ran out of money, hit rock bottom, went to AA, and is actually looking for a job.

It was sad to watch, and infuriating to be forced to be her enabler by the state after she’d already cost me so much. No-fault divorce is a broken system.

View on HN

"No-fault divorce is a broken system."

Or was it a community property state?

It’s an “equitable distribution” state; property is divided without regard to marital misconduct or fault.

For whatever it's worth, those laws were built around an idea of marriage that's very different than the institution as it exists today.

Maybe it'd help if states were required to provide marriage applicants with property allocation statistics from the last year of divorces, and list every penalty and rule that would execute upon divorcing their spouse. Oh, showing how much money people pay in alimony, and how much divorce lawyers rake in would be good, too.

Maybe fewer people would get married. Maybe it'd prompt some changes.

That's a pre-nup

More like a codified collection of what the default pre-nup is if you don't have one customized. Probably more than 80% of the married people I know fell into it without a whole lot of intention and planning, and it shows. "Marriage, because baby" is like compound interest, except it's compound stupid.

> No-fault means what?

I believe they are referring to half of all assets going to your spouse without a prenuptial agreement even if there was a good reason for divorce.

That's not the same as no-fault divorce though. That's typically a Community Property provision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com