To think working women shouldn't have to split 50/50 when divorcing?

[threeisacharm18]

I've name changed for this.

I'm seriously thinking about leaving my man-child of a husband. We have 2 kids, I'm the bread winner, work full time , paid 150k house deposit and do almost all housework, sorting out the kids, home admin etc... DH only ever does things if I ask him to. He's not proactive. Never takes the kids anywhere unless I point him to things to do or book it.

As I think about leaving him I'm increasingly annoyed at the idea of splitting custody and the assets 50/50 when he has never brought 50% to the table.

Why should working mothers have to be short-changed in marriage and in divorce?

Back when men were the breadwinners you could argue the wives' compensation was a husband who took care of the money. These days it feels like women put in 80-90% and equality upon split favours the partner.

AIBU in thinking this? And if not, how do women in this scenario protect themselves ?

Tbh, I’d imagine a LOT more women than men have done well out of divorces.

Well, you'd be wrong. Divorce makes women poorer, particularly when there are children involved. Men become richer after divorce.

Mine got 60% as he also wanted maintenance for life - we both worked full time and very hard but I earned more. He did not help my career or sacrifice his so yes it feels very unfair.

@Gliderx

Tbh, I’d imagine a LOT more women than men have done well out of divorces.

Well, you'd be wrong. Divorce makes women poorer, particularly when there are children involved. Men become richer after divorce.

Yup. Even when marital assets are split in her favour, inevitably she takes on the bulk of day to day childcare, including costs, and has already suffered financially due to having children (and the inbred sexism of our society that means women routinely have lower paying jobs etc).

Not all women, obviously, but the vast bulk are worst off post divorce, at least in the short term.

Hi @threeisacharm18, make that change to your budget planner to cover the next couple of years.

If you don’t go for an equal 50/50 contribution - you both live in the home, costs, kids, have work expenses - then maybe you might maybe possibly make the contributions pro rata to each of you take-home incomes.

But before that is signed off you need to pay yourself back/hard code into the budget planner repayment of your cashed-in investments - consider that to be a loan that now needs to be paid back to your personal investment account. Also pay yourself back for the over payments you made when you took maternity leave or did your contribution ratio drop when you went on maternity leave?

What arrangements have you made for your current maternity leave drop in income.

If you can address this & get financial equivalence between you as a couple sorted you might even find that you like your OH a bit more.

Don't think it's the mantra on here. Only see people saying this about unmarried SAHMs or part-timers who are relying on their partner as the main or higher earner. This seems to be a much more common scenario than the reverse (based on posts where something has gone wrong).

Find any thread where a woman mentions being pregnant with a DP, about anything, and you'll get posters stating it's imperative they marry "to protect herself".

Sometimes marriage doesn't protect, but causes issues.

Posters next to never consider the nuances, there is all to often a blanket recommendation of marriage as being 'what's best for women'.

Tying yourself to a useless man financially is the opposite of what's best for many women.

Take a look around the threads.

I agree - I split from a useless DP and thank my stars every day I was not married.

On having to delegate chores with detailed instructions - dd (12) does things like laundry or weeding to get extra pocket money. There is a sliding tariff - when she asks "What can I do to earn money?" I'll give her a reply along the lines of "if you do x, properly, to the very end, by the end of today without me mentioning it again, you can have £x. It needs to be done by the end of [day] and if I have to mention it again you only get half." Her work is excellent. I am bitter and twisted after decades of useless men lobbing half-arsed efforts into the mix and then coming out with preposterous claims like "Well, I packed" when they threw one child's outgrown pair of pyjamas at a suitcase and then wandered off to watch the football.

@Gliderx

Tbh, I’d imagine a LOT more women than men have done well out of divorces.

Well, you'd be wrong. Divorce makes women poorer, particularly when there are children involved. Men become richer after divorce.

On what grounds? Are we looking at the man's salary after divorce? Or just division of assets?

You’re married, so a fair splitting of your finances and making sure the kids have a decent roof over their heads with both parents is all that a mediator or court will care about.
Go and see a solicitor about your own situation but if you do go 50/50 on custody then your DH will need to be able to afford to look after YOuR kids when you are together.
If you’re the higher earner then you will be better off in the long run .

@gordongrumpy

Don't think it's the mantra on here. Only see people saying this about unmarried SAHMs or part-timers who are relying on their partner as the main or higher earner. This seems to be a much more common scenario than the reverse (based on posts where something has gone wrong).

Find any thread where a woman mentions being pregnant with a DP, about anything, and you'll get posters stating it's imperative they marry "to protect herself".

Sometimes marriage doesn't protect, but causes issues.

Posters next to never consider the nuances, there is all to often a blanket recommendation of marriage as being 'what's best for women'.

Tying yourself to a useless man financially is the opposite of what's best for many women.

Take a look around the threads.

It’s only the mantra when the woman is not working or is the lower earner (which is the majority of cases). In which case getting married is absolutely the best way to protect yourself.

If the woman is the breadwinner it’s a very different ballgame.

In theory it ought to be irrelevant because the higher earning partner should always bear the greater load. But the problem is most women - even if the breadwinner - are doing the lion’s share with the children and domestically.

The problem is men and women typically want different things out of marriage. Men take a pragmatic approach and want to lock in someone to take care of their children and home. Women get caught up in notions about commitment and all the hearts and flowers stuff that comes with that and often think about the financial aspect.

If you are earning less that’s usually a good outcome for you by default because you are covered if the man runs off/dies/can’t work. If you are earning more it’s a shit show because you end up paying out to him, plus usually keeping the kid while he gets to avoid all the child related workload.

Marriage hasn’t really evolved to this yet.

It's absolutely not the mantra only when marriage is beneficial to the woman involved- usually marriage is recommended without the OP ever mentioning the ins and outs of the earning/pension potential and current, whether her partner has debts (disclosed or undisclosed) etc etc. Quite often an OP will say "I'm on mat leave, and my DP is doing xyz annoying thing, blah blah... I might go part time" and several posters with say "You should get married!" NO. OP may well have a great job that pays more part time than her DP earns full, or an inheritance to protect, or a great pension to protect, and her DP could have debt- she's posting because DP is a loser, WHY should she marry him?!

I'm not going to trawl the boards and link to threads where this is evident, but it is SO common.

How is it fair even when the woman doesn’t earn as much as the man? Shouldn’t we encourage women to progress their careers instead of aspiring to get half of the assets in case of divorce?
If your partner doesn’t do much at home, is that a man you want to have children with? Is that what we are going to teach our children? Childcare and household chores should be shared equally, regardless of who makes more money

@Bolzana

Of course they should be but they almost never are.

The problem about marriage for working and high earning women is it very often turns into a dosser’s charter for their husbands.

In theory it should be about sharing the workload on both fronts and that is lovely when it works. But the vast majority of men with high earning wives seem to see this as an excuse to both take their foot off the pedal at work and do minimal work in the home.

And if you’re in that situation and find you have had enough of carrying an adult child and then find you have to split your assets and children with them to get them out it will hurt you far more than it hurts him.

@thepeopleversuswork
I think we actually agree. I would never get married. I am, by far, the higher earner and my partner and I have two children. We both look after them and do whatever needs to be done around the house.
I just don’t see how splitting assets is fair even if the woman makes less or doesn’t work at all (given that she was not forced to stay home).

And for those who say that someone has to look after the children or the house of the husband doesn’t contribute, why would you marry/have children with someone like that?
The moment to have your first child, and your husband doesn’t do his fair share, you should be walking out, and that would be presumably early on in the relationship, so not many assets to share, and the wife shouldn’t have been that long out of work.

Quit and become the primary carer for the divorce and then go back to work? Has the lawyer said whether that would help?

50/50 is the starting point. He may want 50/50 childcare in which case he's likely to get 50/50 assets if your marriage is over 10 years (under 10 they put more weight on what each party brought to the marriage assets wise). If he decides actually he wants an easy life and walks away from his responsibilities you may get a bigger asset split. But this is just a guide, individual circumstances are taken into account and couples are meant to try to negotiate a settlement, the court will go with your decision unless they consider it wildly unfair

I really wish I'd had access to this thread before marrying. Some very measured advice on here.

Sympathies OP. I'm in a similar situation (without the pregnancy). Feeling very stuck. I earn at 4x DH, not because I'm a stellar earner but because he's barely eaning school leaver rates, carry the mental load and feel correspondingly resentful. Our inability to resolve this has ended our marriage in all but name - separate rooms for 3 years - but I can't buy him out and am fucked if I'm losing the home I've worked so hard for. So on we plod. Fortunately we're friendly housemates and he's an active and engaged dad, so it's workable day-day.

This thread has made me think about sunk costs and future assets though...

@Gliderx

Tbh, I’d imagine a LOT more women than men have done well out of divorces.

Well, you'd be wrong. Divorce makes women poorer, particularly when there are children involved. Men become richer after divorce.

I'd put money on it that more women have become millionaires through divorce than men have.

15 yrs married, 2DCs pretty equal high end earners for 12 yrs - last 3 yrs when he started cheating I was overtaking him by quite a lot.

We had both agreed to max my pension on the extra I was earning ,as it was better than his - here ladies is a difficult lesson. Splitting my pension either effectively bankrupts me now as I need a 450K mortgage to buy him out now or he takes half my pension when I retire - leaving me with not a lot.
Unbeknownst to me he had stopped paying into his pension for 3 years.

Everything else we paid 50:50 so fair split - no issues - the pension was a kick in the arse.

I'd put money on it that more women have become millionaires through divorce than men have

I'd put money on it that any woman who 'became' a millionaire as a result of a divorce settlement, still did not end up with more wealth that the man she was divorcing.

@OneMoreForExtra

I really wish I'd had access to this thread before marrying. Some very measured advice on here.

Sympathies OP. I'm in a similar situation (without the pregnancy). Feeling very stuck. I earn at 4x DH, not because I'm a stellar earner but because he's barely eaning school leaver rates, carry the mental load and feel correspondingly resentful. Our inability to resolve this has ended our marriage in all but name - separate rooms for 3 years - but I can't buy him out and am fucked if I'm losing the home I've worked so hard for. So on we plod. Fortunately we're friendly housemates and he's an active and engaged dad, so it's workable day-day.

This thread has made me think about sunk costs and future assets though...

I would absolutely think about the sunk cost and future assets. Especially if he is not contributing at all. Because it sounds like he has a pretty sweet deal currently - he gets to parent in a lovely and comfortable home, doesn't have to do any of the heavy lifting (financially or mentally) AND has a lovely pension/retirement being saved for by you.

I'd be reconsidering your decision making pretty quickly at this point. If you earn significantly more, perhaps negotiate a lump sum payment from you to help him set up (or a portion of existing pension) and then boot him out. Because in 20 more years you will lose a lot more financially.

In our case their father chose not to have the 5 children even for one NIGHT a year after divorce presumably because he knew even though we both worked full time that would deprive me of his help with the children. We both worked very hard and full time. Had we not been married I suppose we might have put the house into joint names with different from 50/50 shares as I contributed more and myk life savings and all my shares would not have gone to him 100% but stayed 100% with me.

The issue is you cannot force a man to have the children 50% of the year or even 0.01% of the year and if you earn well above CSA rates and have court orders like ours eg whoever lives with the children I wife pay 100% of school and university fees for 5 children and the person with whom the children live pays 100% of their costs as our consent order says means the double shift of childcare or paying for full time child care falls on the person who is prepared to house and keep the children (me in our case).

If your partner doesn’t do much at home, is that a man you want to have children with?
This and this again. Or if it all comes out after one why, why oh why have more. We all agree that children are the biggest challenge to earning a decent income.

So either one needs to wait until they are high enough on the ladder before having children or stay at one and start then. If any women opt to have 3 children over 10 years +, with a man who is unwilling to do his share at home so that they can't consider a better paid job, then they need to accept some responsibility over the choices they made.