Divorce is Not Frugal
If you didn't know, take it from me-- divorce is not frugal. It is expensive, painful, and draining both emotionally and financially.
The only winners in a divorce are the plaintiff and defendant's attorneys. They love bitter, drawn out, and contentious battles. Their bloated mortgages, expensive cars, fancy vacations, and kids' college educations depend upon it.
The biggest losers are the kids. Their lives get turned upside down, they suffer financially, and they end up as collateral damage. I work hard at normalizing my kids' lives.
Why do I think divorce is expensive and not frugal? Because it forces the non-custodial parent to pay for many things twice. Food, clothing, shelter, gifts, you name it-- paid for twice. There are two sets of everything. It impacts net worth, retirement funds, and educational funds for the kids. Furthermore, with a lack of accountability, there can be plenty of wasted money by the parent receiving the money if they are a spendthrift by nature.
My recommendations:
- Work it out with counseling if need be
- Wait until the kids are older or out of the house
- Do something equitable about divvying things up without the lawyers as much as possible
- Keep emotion out as much as possible-- anger and emotion can cost more money (hard to do-- believe me)
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Categories: Personal Finance, Divorce, Frugality, Personal Philosophy
Tags: Frugality Personal Finance Frugal Divorce
There is a hidden cost of divorce that most younger people don’t realize. Social Security is not of interest to most people until they reach 55 or so, leading to not noticing this. In order for a divorced spouse to collect on the ex’s SS account, they must have been married for ten years. In my case, there is an ex-wife to whom I was indeed married for ten and a half years. We were divorced around 1973, and she never remarried. She now gets Social Security payments on my account since I had a steady career, while she barely worked in the meantime, so her own account would produce very little. By contrast, I have a neighbor lady who got divorced after nine and a half years, and now at age seventy gets much less from SS than she might have. This is obviously not a concern for everyone but if you are close to the ten year mark, it might be valuable later if you wait a bit longer now. There is no cost to the higher-earning spouse. All the rest of us are paying for it! Heh! Heh! (Notice that you could mathematically have four spouses of ten years each between your ages 20 and 65, and then get married to the fifth. This would mean potentially that four ex spouses claim on your account plus yourself and the fifth. If you manage to have children under 18 when you are over 65, they get payments too.)
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Clearly, you are well versed in the whole divorce thing . . . I too, am painfully aware of this fact. Oh, how undeserving get rewarded!
I do try to simplify my posts. There are other fun financial realities of divorce I didn't touch upon like all the double-dipping that goes on such as the cost of daycare so they ex can work or whatever she chooses to do, not coming from the child support. How about the tax deductions that the ex gets despite the fact that I pay all the taxes on the support and "additional support" (glorified alimony that I can't tax deduct). Let's not forget the disincentives to make more money because a raise for my extra efforts is a raise for the ex too.
It is messy, dirty, and expensive no matter how you look at it. The only thing that keeps me sane is knowing that my ex is accustomed to a subsidized lifestyle she can't afford when it ends in a few years (she spends above all her incomes including support). Meanwhile, I have had to live on a diminished income and will have a "windfall" when the support ends.
My final gripe is that the system is clearly sexist, when it should be slanted against the "guilty" and greedy initiator who uses the system to "win the lottery" and enjoy a multi-year annuity.
If that sounds bitter, well, I never cheated on her, beat her, came home drunk or drugged up, nor did I gamble the rent money. My sin was twofold: 1) I never could make more than she could spend (I was making about six digits) and 2) when I said the spending finally had to stop (after I paid off $15,000 in debt--twice!)-- she suddenly wasn't happy and found a new way to still get the money thanks to the broken system we have . . .
I try to focus on the positive and the things I can change, while I count the days until the "Reversal of Fortune" Party
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My favorite ex-wife comment of all time was when she said “you were right”. This came about 20 years out when she realized that I was doing very well managing my way, while she was sliding down the tubes with hers.
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For my own sanity, I have to hope that everyone gets what they deserve in the end . . .
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