Warning for younger mums about finances and career sacrifice in divorce

[DoctorMumDivorcee]

Getting divorced after 26 years. I gave up my career as a surgeon to raise the children and support my husband in his career. He earns four times my salary and can work remotely from anywhere. We have worked hard and built up businesses and renovated properties and made a significant amount doing this. He was always in charge of finances, completed self assessment tax forms for me, took my payslips, did household bills while I did kids renovated homes and kept my hand in working as a part time GP. I am 54 and have 13 years before I can start to receive our pension. I had expected the court to ask him to pay me some maintenance but he cleverly resigned from his job just as we decided to divorce so it now looks like I earn more than him. He has also spent a fortune in a very expensive lawyer and travelling the world with his new girlfriend. The court will not give this back to me as ‘add back’ and say the money has gone. I am posting because I want all you younger mums to be aware that if you give up a career you will not be supported. You might get child maintenance until youngest is 18 but spousal maintenance is much harder to get. Please don’t give financial control to your husbands. You must try to understand it and you can. I am understanding but now and realising what terrible investments my husband has made over the years - he always said I was useless and spent to much. Turns out it was the other way around!!

Good summary.

Thanks for posting so honestly, @DoctorMumDivorcee , and all the best for the future.

lol being a SAHP isn't 'living off someone else'. It's raising your own children as an unpaid job rather than paying for childcare or relying on free childcare from family members. Plus OP said she renovated houses too and worked p/t as a GP. She didn't sit around all day twiddling her thumbs.

I also think ( for myself others views will differ) that I didn’t study hard through high school and tertiary education to give it all up to press my doilies and have his slippers and martini ready at 7. Where’s the love if a career, the passion for a field, the ambition to climb the ladder and learn and become accomplished and for your children to see that? I can be a mother - that’s a relationship. A job is a career they are very separate but both possible in unison.

I think there is very little advice you can give younger women if they are minded to give up working / hand over financial decision making to their DH / DP. If you say anything about keeping some financial independence they will think your marriage is inferior. Just this morning a woman at the next table to me in a South London park was telling her friends she had just resigned and luckily wouldn’t have to repay her maternity pay. All her friends congratulated her.

Hopefully your husband will be financially generous to the children so you can just focus on your financial future, and as a GP you easily have the ability to be in the top 5% of female earners for your age.

Inevitably this turned into a bashing women who decide to stay at home thread. How many women can genuinely they say they wouldn't be financially fucked in the event of a divorce, whether they work or not.

I have a friend who works FT earning £45k pa and she would divorce her husband tomorrow if she could afford to keep the house on herself. I suspect there are countless other people in this situation.

My friend is going through this at the moment and it is truly depressing and horrifying in equal measure.

She is a SAHM but a very bright woman with a background in finance.

They had shared accounts which held a fortune of money from an inheritance and some very successful investments SHE made.

He transferred many hundreds of thousands out and bought a house and fast car in his name, he has fitted his new house out like a palace.

She is going through the divorce but it is so slow and she is apoplectic with anger and him spending money living the high life with his new much younger woman.

He hasn't bothered with his three young adult children since he left.
He also is about to receive a large inheritance from his parents which of course he will keep.

I actually feel unwell every time I meet my friend and hear the details of what he has done and continues to do.

His children are absolutely devastated too.

@ImMrsIglesias Divorcing when you have a £45k job is not nearly as bad as divorcing when you have no job and have not in years. Surely you can see that? The person with the £45k job will find it easier to rent and easier to buy a house even if it is smaller or in a different neighbourhood. They will also have more of a pension in the future. And more of an income to live on now. As well as finding is easier to get a promotion of another higher paid job. Its all round better. The person with the 45k job, even if they decide to stick the marriage out till the kids are grown, will know they are in a position to leave at some point after that. They have an exit plan to work towards that the person without a job does not.

This is not bashing SAHM,. Its just being realistic about the implications of being a SAHM if the marriage does not work out.

I’m so sorry OP, I hope everything works out.

I think even worse is having a child and not being married. Then I think a man can literally just leave and you get nothing. At least when married you get half the marital assets.

I’ve always been so pleased I stayed in work and have the financial independence to do as I please. Lots of women don’t but in fairness it has been very, very hard work.

Thank you for acknowledging this.
Nannies / aupairs etc make ALL the difference.
Let's not pretend otherwise

'The person with the £45k job will find it easier to rent and easier to buy a house even if it is smaller or in a different neighbourhood. They will also have more of a pension in the future. And more of an income to live on now.' I agree. That doesn't change the fact that there isn't one woman I know in real life who wouldn't end up renting a shit heap and be left with not a pot to piss in each month should they divorce. I'm being deadly honest about that, not a single one.

Every relationship and divorce is unique. Often SAHM have wealthier husbands so end up getting a larger settlement and larger CM if the child arrangements aren't 50/50.

You can't make statements like: 'The person with the 45k job, even if they decide to stick the marriage out till the kids are grown, will know they are in a position to leave at some point after that. They have an exit plan to work towards that the person without a job does not.' as though this is fact rather than your assumptions.

Yes there has been SAHM bashing in many of the comments. There always are.

Being realistic about the implications of being a SAHM is fine, but I'd point out OP admits to relinquishing all financial control to her spouse, which is extremely risky and naïve, and not something most SAHM do.

So maybe we should be realistic about how women should strive to safeguard themselves in the event of divorce rather than focusing on employment status. As I've mentioned before, working women get shafted too.

Also, it's important to remember that working and earning your own money affords you the freedom to leave if you choose to.
Worked well for me and I am so very glad I ignored my ex-husband who wanted to further his control over me by pushing me to give up my career. Zero chance.

Like, completely disagree. And actually, the data is there. If you want to look women that are unemployed and stay at home, mums in divorce are materially poorer, and they're statistically end up in real poverty. And I mean, real poverty, by the official measure, when they're going to retirement women that do work. And divorce do not follow that statistic everybody, including men, are in a difficult situation. When they separate, if there has been 2 incomes, that's just normal. Your life goes from 2 incomes to one but if you have no income, then you're going from one income to nothing. And as you know, everyone's experience it. Now, men do provide 50% care for their children. So not only will you not get maintenance, but you won't get a larger share of the assets because there isn't grounds for that. I think strongly there is a problem in women opting not to work for more than 10 years. Especially when their children are older, if they haven't thought about their financial future ahead of time. And actually planned what they're going to do to support themselves what their pension looks like? I hear what you're saying, and I agree with some of it, but actually no I think you're wrong. The difference between a stay at home mum. Being divorced and a working woman is huge. How many sahm mums do you see on mum's net? Absolutely freaking out because their husband has gone for fifty-fifty custody and got it. They have no way of contributing financially to their own life at that point. And it must be terrifying. Op isn't in that situation. So it's kind of a bad example, but having come from a low-income background myself and seen what happens to the women on the estate that I lived on. You'd be surprised at the most precious middle class. Women who have had a divorce never worked. And how they end up in life is terrifiy8ng. ? And Ill say this, it's not actually their husband's fault. It's actually their own fault. And rather than us kind of addressing it by working on financial literacy telling women, you need to actually understand what is going on with the money in your life. We kind of look to blame the man. But whether or not you had a husband if you were completely financially illitate, you were always going to run into problems. it is weaponized dependence.

Op this is mumsnet the yougest mums are 30.

If I were lucky enough to be in this position I would never leave a fortune sitting in a joint account to be fleeced by a man wanting to impress his young bit on the side. I would keep my money and my investments in my account and have a joint account for all household expenses. If I earned more than him I would have no problem putting a proportionate amount more into that account.

If there was an agreement that one parent would stay at home with the kids I would have no problem with contributing to their future independence and financial security, I would require the same if I were the SAHP but I would expect them to return to the workplace once the children didn't need a parent at home.

What I would never, ever do in a million years is allow a man to have control of my finances or my share of his finances.

It wouldn’t matter if it was in your joint account or your individual account. It would still be in the pot to be divided in a divorce scenario.
People think they’re oh so clever until the day comes

That's all very well, but then children come along and things are no longer 50/50.

@NameChangeMay2026 My husband and I share a little girl. We still retain separate bank accounts and contribute equally towards her financial needs. It works perfectly for us.

Yes, I do know that, but in this case the husband fleeced the joint account of hundreds of thousands to buy and furnish a house and spend on luxuries and as far as the courts are concerned, that money no longer exists to be shared out.

If the wife in question had her share in her own account he wouldn't have been able to take her money. She could have made her own arrangements with her money.

Fast forward to me at 52, career is thriving, I feel a real sense of purpose and a sense of me. I feel I have been a good role model to my kids (17 and 20) and don't worry about empty nest because I have so much going on

Oh bless you. You do realise that you don't need to work to be a positive role model to your kids, don't you? And most SAHMs return to work at some point ... and have lots going on.

I have repeatedly advised my young adult kids never to rely financially on a partner and ideally not to become SAHPs. They have got the message.

@TheBlissfulSloth For me, personally, I do think that keeping a professional career whilst raising my family has set the tone for my children. I wouldn't want my sons or my daughter to take the risk of becoming a SAHP, no matter the length of time.

Because she's sacrificed her career to support his and raise his children! She's not starting from the position she would've been if she hadn't done that.

He's had all the benefits of her hard work and efforts to support him over the years, and done very well as a result, and she's left trying to build up a career from nowhere near the same position she would've been in if the reverse had happened and someone had sacrificed their career in favour of hers.

Yes, she was a surgeon!!

And then in her marriage, after having given that up, made him tons of money though their various businesses and house renovations.

Nobody wants or expects betterment to use the Insurance terminology but I think what none of us expected was to end up in a worse position with children in tow than we started off as when we were 24 and fell in love In many cases.
I look back and I don’t know why I had stars in my eyes. I really don’t. I was better than him

She didn't sacrifice her career. She chose to stay at home and look after the children. And she was supported in this by him supporting her supporting the household and working full-time. That's the exchange.That's exactly what the exchange is whilst you're at home with the kids.Your partner is supporting you.Doing that once the relationship ends that support ends because you're no longer their partner.The problem is there's no financial planning that was done at all, which means that, at divorce you're always going to be in a worse position.There's no aloney for life.There's no spouse support for life.And I don't think there's any appetite for men and women that work to even engage in marriage.If that was true, I want to be able to be a high earner, have a relationship.And if it doesn't work out to walk away cleanly and fairly, I don't want to have a dependent for the rest of my life.When i'm not even with them anymore, that doesn't make sense that's not fair. Willing, I don't owe you for the rest of your life.Because we had children together.Look, i'm coming from a same sex perspective.But it's the same, I think it's the same.I just do not acknowledge that it was a sacrifice.A sacrifice is something that you don't want to do.And you have to do because of circumstances.If you can choose to not be a surgeon, that is not a sacrifice.That is a very amazing set of circumstances that very few people will ever be in.It's a privilege to stay at home and not work.To support yourself and it's a privilege to have a housewife supporting you.But it doesn't make me a debta to my wife because I have gone out and worked and she has stayed at home.