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!!

To be honest, I can't imagine ever relying on a man. Not financially and certainly not for the roof over my head if I had a child.

That's just asking for trouble. Yes, your dh may be your soul partner, but on the other hand, 50% of marriages end in divorce,a lot of them nasty and acrimonious. DV is appallingly common, as is coercive control.

No matter how lovely your dh, you always need a running away fund that he preferably doesn't know about), and the ability to earn enough to support yourself without any input from him. A deposit and a few months rent on a flat, your own car, and your career intact.

They won’t be separate if you divorce though. A judge will decide that ( unless you do a mutually agreed diy divorce. A friend did that and loved it, but OMG she got massively ripped off and didn’t seem to realise it. Her (ex) H must not have been able to believe his luck!)

@Meekinheritance My husband and I keep separate bank accounts. If we divorced we would simply retain those (not much in either of them!) We have nothing else to divide so all good here. I probably wouldn't have married if I'd have been far wealthier than him or had assets tbf.

All the marital assets have to be declares for a divorce financial settlement. So a woman doing all the house hold work and the majority of the child rearing isn’t disadvantaged. You can keep separate accounts and squirrel away whatever you want, but a forensic accountant will get to the bottom of it!

The reality is that this just isn’t always true, sadly.

I think if you’re classing shared care as 50/50 then this can be impractical but fathers who regularly travel abroad for work can still have a meaningful shared care arrangement. You only have to look at fathers in the forces to see this. The expenses for them to do so can end up not necessarily much cheaper than for a father who didn’t work abroad as they still usually want to have a decent house with a bedroom for the children (which is the main expense in most households) and usually end up having to pay the maximum or near maximum rate of child maintenance as they don’t get the reductions a father who is able to have their children for several nights a week has or even the nil rate as under a 50/50 arrangement. It does very much depend on individual family circumstances as to what is fair, for example if the woman who was a paramedic when they married and had children under the understanding that her partner would be around to cover the unsocial hours and now after several years of that arrangement and despite offering 50/50 shared care to him, he decides to go off and work on oil rigs for months at a time and she has to give up her career, this is someone I would have much more sympathy with than a woman whose career, life etc is already built around a co parent who works away. As for the financial side then I don’t think people are automatically entitled to maintain the standard of living they had or the same standard as their ex, there is provision already within child maintenance calculations which allows a child to benefit from the income level of their other parent. I would feel sorry for the paramedic who had to go and get a job in a supermarket paying half the salary but not really for someone who only earned 2k a month working full time anyway complaining that their ex has 4K a month left after he’s paid the correct CMS calculated maintenance, when he’s always earned 7k a month anyway. This just seems like they saw having a child as a meal ticket

If we are looking at high earners, then the cost of a house big enough to have the children to stay is irrelevant. A man like that is never going to be in a grotty 2 bed terrace anyway. Even if he were childless he would buy a nice house.

And I'm not saying that a man who works away a lot can't have a relationship with his children. What I'm saying is that he can pay a lot less in child maintenance than it would cost to hire a live-in nanny (even 50% of the time) which would be his only other option if he wants to keep his job.

Meanwhile the mother is not recieving enough CM to cover even 50% of her costs.

This. Our children never cost ex husband a penny more than he paid out in bills as a single man before or after.
They cost me 120% of my earnings plus the CM award. And we are/were still in substandard accommodation

I find it interesting that men so often moan ‘she took everything. She got the house and the kids’ when the reality is the women are left to pay for the home and the children alone. I think those men consider everything is theirs (they earned it) and are irritated that the discarded women get anything at all.

I’m another one left to house adult children as they aren’t considered but someone has to look after them! I do teach my girls to value their independence and be vigilant about partners. Looks like they’ve already made their own minds not to take one on if they can’t find a good one and so far they haven’t.

This thread has got me worried to be honest. I've been relying on my husband financially for a while because when I had our daughter I used it as an opportunity to get out of teaching which was destroying my mental health. I'm working towards a new career but at the moment whilst I'm training I'm only working part time earning just over minimum wage. I'm not paying much into a pension.

However, we are married, our names are both on our house which is paid off and we have savings which are spread across many investments and accounts of which half are in my name.

I do still have a career and could go back to teaching if I needed to, but my husband still has way more earning potential than me.

Should I be worried if he leaves me? What should I do to protect myself? Sorry to hijack the thread.

Absolutely. The courts didn't recognise financial control in my case. There's a reason we're still in privately rented a decade on whilst ex-husband's property is worth just shy of 1 million.
Still, no regrets 💪

You missed how much he took from her in advance of making it disappear in time for court.

If you are both on the mortgage and the deeds he cant sell it from under you, but register your home rights on the land register
Do not allow any remortgage for any reason

The house/mortgage is completely paid off.

You just need to register your home rights then because they will alert you if anybody tries to re-Mortgage the property.
Or sell it by forging your signature
Which happened to a friend of mine
Who basically sold the family home for whatever, took the profits for the new girlfriend a house in her name with all of the money acquired during the marriage
Got in front of the judge of the family court who I don’t dear he shouldn’t have done that but he has their money can’t be recovered.
so sad
next 😡

A ‘high’ earner earning 60k a year is completely different to a high earner earning 500k a year so just saying high earner doesn’t really say much in itself other than they earn more than the average. I certainly know people on 40k a year who can barely eat after paying their rent on a very run down flat with a room for their children and maintenance so someone who just earns more than the average is rarely living the life of Riley. Even 60k a year doesn’t go far after tax and current day living expenses and if they’ve got other commitments e.g student loans even less so, if they’ve dared to move on with their life and get married again they may be also supporting a new family (it’s fine when it’s the resident parent having more children?) I think it would be unrealistic and a ridiculous expectation to expect any non resident parent to fund the equivalent of a live in nanny for 50% of the time, unless they had an exceptionally high salary then fair enough. Like I said I would have sympathy with someone who had to give up their career as an ex completely changed current childcare arrangements but just expecting to have a huge chunk of an ex’s salary is a bit entitled

I can’t really understand why you’re now worried? I’m just intrigued by what you were expecting if you did separate?

Well this thread seems to give the message that if you're financially relying on a man then you're going to get screwed over if you divorce.

I have been to uni and cannot say I am more brainy that a surgeon but blimey.....when it is about money, I make sure there is enough for me if there is any floating around, no way I would give anything to a man

My understanding is that in a marriage all the accumulated assets are split 50/50 so yes the OP has been very unfairly screwed over and I genuinely wish her the best in any way she can get her share of the assets recovered but I find it so strange that some women seem to think they are also entitled to a share of their ex‘s future earning potential following the divorce too, I can’t get my head around this level of entitlement? I’ve worked hard for my career, he’s worked hard for his but I’ve chosen to take a bit of a step back so have let mine plateau, partly because I don’t think I’d be as happy working full time in my job and partly to have time with my children and a nice work life balance. It actually cost us quite a lot of money at one point to keep my career going but I didn’t feel bad about that or think we should have been doing anything differently at the time. Women really need to have a good think about what they actually want in life, if they really wanted to have children and go for a high level career then they need to discuss with their partner how they can each have a fair chance of doing that. It may even be that the partner decides he doesn’t want children/more children if he is being asked to make certain sacrifices

That’s literally not what anybody said.

So what are they saying?

The literal title is a warning to not do what she did and give up work and financial independence

What about all the talk of expecting to be entitled to spousal maintenance and people implying he should be obliged to continue in his job to fund that?