Marriage and the Power of Divorce

I love that insurance companies view pregnancy as "pre-existing condition"

BrutulTM_sl said:

Bingo. From a purely financial standpoint there is no benefit to men, but who gets married for financial reasons?

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Men generally won't get married for financial benefit, but they will avoid getting married for fear of financial loss.. The closest I ever got to getting married involved a woman that had 1/20th the net worth I have, and while her lack of income/assets didn't bother me, the fact that she'd be entitled to half of mine if ever we got divorced did. A pre-nup was out of the question for her and that pretty much ended things. My dad has to sell off his business and his home when I was a teenager to pay off his cheating second wife, and I'll be damned if I ever end up in the same powerless situation.

Tuco_sl said:

I don't blame you at all, but I also don't really blame the woman. For every dude screwed by his cheating wife who takes half his shit there's a woman who plays homemaker for 10+ years and gets replaced by a younger woman. She's now middle-aged, and has no real skills or recent experience.

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Yeah, I thought my proposal was fair and would protect her from a situation where I have some hypothetical mid-life crisis that replaces her with a hot young piece. The proposed agreement stated that I would pay for house, children, utilities, vacation, etc, while her earnings would cover her and anything she wanted. Anything she could save in excess of her wants would be hers. If/when we were to have kids, I would pay her the equivalent of her salary for up to two years, or whenever she went back to work-- whichever came first. I also put in that if I was ever caught cheating, the pre-nup would be void.

She felt that a pre-nup tainted the concept of marriage and that I didn't trust her. Truthfully though, I think it was really because she didn't want to go back to work after having kids.

Tuco_sl said:

It's totally warranted. My wife has been having some complications through her pregnancy and I feel like I'm recuperating all the money I've dumped into health insurance since I started paying for my own. I think together we've had only a few doctor visits before my wife got pregnant, in the last few months we've added like 10 with no end in sight.

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HMO saved my ass when my wife was pregnant. No real complications except for a very early miscarriage the first time so we were fortunate in that regard. I know people have HMO horror stories and hate them but it was really the best insurance decision we ever made.

Oh you need 27 blood tests now that you're pregnant? $30 copay.
You need to see the doctor 20 times? $30 copay once, $0 after that.
Oh you need a C-Section and 3 days post-op? Here's a bill for $35k but you pay $0.

Then 3 days after we leave, our daughter gets re-admitted to the hospital to go under the bilirubin lights... another $5k bill that we paid $0 for.

So my cousin recently got separated from her husband after he caught her cheating on him (videotaped the deed) and now she has a new younger boyfriend (25, she's 39) that we're supposed to meet. I can't seem to bring myself to care about meeting this person since we have all already been through all of this with her first husband that was doomed to fail. Should I put in the effort or just forget about it?

Yeah I can't imagine doing a prenup. If something happens with my wife, I just won't get married again. I understand why people do it, I just can't imagine doing that, even bringing it up really.

Prenup is the only way to go. Unless you go into the marriage with nothing.

mkopec_sl said:

Ive heard that prenumps dont really stand up in court either, maybe cad could come in here and shed some light on the subject.

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It depends somewhat on the state and the quality of the pre-nup. For instance pre-nups in Texas are rock solid I'm told. In most cases, a woman that tries to challenge it will do so on the basis that she was either pressured to sign it or didn't understand what she was signing. Think her in her wedding dress an hour before the ceremony and you dropping a pre-nup on her lap and saying "sign it, or we're not getting married". The proper way to do it is to have her hire a lawyer of her choice to review the document before she signs it, just like any contract.

Frenzied Wombat_sl said:

The closest I ever got to getting married involved a woman that had 1/20th the net worth I have, and while her lack of income/assets didn't bother me, the fact that she'd be entitled to half of mine if ever we got divorced did.

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Isn't that incorrect? My understanding is that, other than maybe the house, a divorcee is only entitle to half of the assets that the couple both earned while they were married. Like for me for example, if my share of the family business is worth 5 million when we get married, if we get divorced 10 years down the road and the business was now worth 10 million, she'd only be entitled to half of the difference, or 2.5 million.

That was my understanding of how it worked, anyways. And yes, I realize that lawyers will find a way to fight over shit like that, but the principle is what I'm talking about.

Tuco_sl said:

I don't blame you at all, but I also don't really blame the woman. For every dude screwed by his cheating wife who takes half his shit there's a woman who plays homemaker for 10+ years and gets replaced by a younger woman. She's now middle-aged, and has no real skills or recent experience.

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Yeah, I agree with you. But a pre-nup doesn't necessarily have to be incredibly one-sided. And in fact it'll stand a more likely chance of holding up in court if it doesn't fuck the woman over to an extreme. If I ever do get married, I think I probably would get a pre-nup (or at the very least discuss it), if only so that things are spelled out clearly beforehand if shit goes sideways, not necessarily to ensure that I keep every nickel I've ever earned and fuck her out of everything I can. But on the other hand, I know next to nothing about pre-nups and how they're structured. My bro didn't get one with his wife, and doesn't seem too concerned about it. His wife makes pretty good money, but it's still a fraction of what he makes, and she'd definitely be entitle to a pretty huge buyout for her share of the value of the business.

chaos_sl said:

Yeah I can't imagine doing a prenup. If something happens with my wife, I just won't get married again. I understand why people do it, I just can't imagine doing that, even bringing it up really.

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Everyone's situation is different. For those who got married and cranked out kids before they'd accumulated much of any net assets after mortgage and other debts, yeah maybe they don't make sense or aren't worth worrying about. For me, I probably won't be married before 35 and I'll have accumulated a pretty significant net worth prior to the marriage. Again, I wouldn't try to have something that is one-sided, but on the other hand, I don't think it's fair to potentially have to give up half my hard earned assets a couple years later if the wife goes crazy. Just think of the mechanics: I'd have to go get a loan for millions of dollars to cash her out of the company, because that's the vast majority of my net worth. On the other hand, the chick I'm with is pretty spectacular and probably wouldn't go crazy in the first place, and in the second I can't ever imagine her lawyering up to bleed me dry.

But shit happens.

mkopec_sl said:

Ive heard that prenumps dont really stand up in court either, maybe cad could come in here and shed some light on the subject.

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Anything can be litigated. If it's done well, not one-sided, wasn't coerced under duress and all that shit, then they're pretty tough to fight. If it completely fucks the woman over and was shoved in her face five minutes before the ceremony with zero prior discussion, then yeah, that shit is probably going to be thrown out.