Mitigating the risk of losing 50% in divorce

[7Wannabe5]

I guess because I need some back story in order to enjoy sex and once you have some back story there is always the danger of entwining future narrative.

[Jason]

Maybe you should have bought a DeLorean instead of that smart car.

[Sclass]

Are there certain techniques or strategies you feel the most effective or appropriate fo 'hiding' assets?

No. I don’t do this personally.

I was shown a bunch of ways by guys I don’t respect all that much. They basically say people cannot take what they cannot see. So they keep their money out of sight.

These guys wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to wave around their money as marriage bait but didn’t want to lose it. Or worse, they accumulated the wealth during marriage and didn’t want to lose half in the divorce because they were greedy.

The basic idea was to keep the money out of sight and out of mind. Their wives (I witnessed the divorces) didn’t even do a sufficient asset search because they didn’t know what they were looking for. Some of the tricks were as unsophisticated as keeping stocks out of the account in certificated form. Another guy, our family dentist just hoarded a lot of dental gold at his practice. I met his wife and kids years later and they were destitute. Then there was the illegal stuff like keeping a bank account in another country...apparently this is difficult for U.S. citizens now but it was popular among family friends in the 1980s.

Good luck. My strategy is work hard at your marriage.

Edit - I got to think about this overnight and I’d like to add something. I think a lot of people rely on money a little too much to tip the mating game in their favor. If you go into a relationship using dollar bills as your colorful feathers you’re going to attract a specific kind of attention. If you hide your money and play stealth wealth the immediate result will be diminished reproductive potential if you don’t work on other dimensions of your value. But you’ll less likely set an expectation for a monetary payout from your spouse to be.

My sister pointed out that our sister-in-law deserves significant monetary compensation for having to mate with a gross guy like our brother. While I see her as a gal who has financially exploited the guy, my sister astutely observes that “she has to get something for that.”

And incidentally when she married my brother she demanded publicly that he disclose all assets to her or else if she discovered hidden money later it would be instant divorce. My wife found it humorous that my brother would comply with this tactic because it showed where my sister-in-law stood in terms of power. To this day he is very scared of her divorcing him and taking his piggy bank. SIL was kind of a mail order bride arranged through my parents. My wife suggested we throw her back in the water and try again but my folks already had too much invested in their heritage project. It was kind of a money for marriage deal from the getgo so it had these stipulations built in.

I guess what I’m getting at is if your scared of your mate taking you to family court maybe you have to look a little harder at your own behavior. How you attract. What you attract. How you love. What you provide.

When I say people cannot take what they cannot see I may have been silently thinking “how about not taping your financial statements to your forehead while dating”. Yeah, you may have to be a little more creative and charming but you won’t be advertising that you have something to take in case the marriage fails.

For me, I married my wife when I was broke. I didn’t have much personally and my wealthy family didn’t support me nor my choice of a mate. On a related topic, her dad formed a special set of corporations to hold her family money where she had control over them but no clear line of ownership. This was specifically done to discourage me from financially hurting her during a divorce. It doesn’t bother me if I don’t think about it and it is mostly out of my sight so I cannot take or even covet what I don’t see. And given that our fathers know each other I don’t blame her dad for trying to protect his little girl from my clan. So here I’ve had the tables turned on me and I may be speaking from personal experience when I say you cannot take what you cannot see.

My wife stayed with me for a long time before legally marrying me. This had a lot to do with our families not approving of our choice. We came up financially together and the least I can do for her is give her the money we made together during those years of intense struggle outside the protective (albeit controlling) sphere of our fathers.

Maybe I can refer you to my father-in-law to school you in clever ways to separate control and ownership of assets. I am disappointed that my wife’s sister does not have the same arrangement with her husband. Ironically she has an upcoming divorce that will damage her financially. Someday I should sit down with my FIL, get him drunk, and ask him how his convoluted lock box works.

[Laura Ingalls]

I am saying this from the perspective of someone that is happy in her marriage and has been married a fairly long time.

I find the thought of being amicably divorced with half of my current net worth way less sad not having DH in my life or our offspring’s lives.

Since we are both cursed with optimizer brains and as DH jokes neither of us being worth anything as a “trade in” neither of us are likely going anywhere. We still like each other too.

[The_Bowme]

@fiby41 -- Don't marry anyone who isn't worth at least half of your net worth to you (as in you'd give 1/2 of your net worth right then for the privilege of marrying them). Then work your ass off to make it a success.

This is a helpful framing, thank you.

[7Wannabe5]

My 100 millionaire friend never married, in good part for this reason. I'm pretty sure he ended up regretting his choice, and his death, with only me and a 25 year old nurse aide( who had just showed up that morning and was playing on her phone)present was pretty sad. My father's death, which was similar to the extent that it was also hospice at home for end-stage cancer, even though he had a bad marriage with my cuckoo-bananas spendthrift mother, was much less sad, because he had 4 daughters who loved him and gathered round. I know it seems pat, but Dickens was really sort of a genius with his creation of the character and story of Scrooge. So, all ye young neo-liberals beware!

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

Sort of??!

[Alphaville]

Sort of??!

he's ok on tv

[7Wannabe5]

Lol- My subtext should have been read as something like “Although “Bleak House” was a much better work...”