In the round of Boston-area holiday parties that I attended, a couple had been paid for by divorce lawsuit defendants not in attendance.
The alimony-fueled party was particularly lavish and fully staffed with caterers (at parties hosted by rich people who got their money by working or from a property division lawsuit, the cooking and serving was done by the hosts with help from guests). Although adults in Massachusetts are more likely than average Americans to have advanced degrees and earning abilities sufficient for self-support, alimony cash flows in Boston are 330 percent higher than in an average U.S. city (New York Times Dec 12, 2014 analysis; I am pretty sure that this is adjusted for the difference in incomes from city to city). Thus it is common for someone to have a $200,000 per year income (3X the Massachusetts median household income) and yet be officially dependent on a former spouse, from whom an additional $200,000 per year is collected and spent annually. Here’s an excerpt from our book that explains why the money has to be spent shortly after being received:
Attorneys report that both winners and losers tend to become profligate with money. “The defendant might have been a saver before the lawsuit,” said one attorney, “but then he’ll see how the courts penalize parents for being prudent with money. His plaintiff’s lavish spending on herself will become a ‘need’ used by the judge to justify higher child support and alimony awards. After mom wins she spends like a drug dealer because she’s spending someone else’s money and also because she doesn’t want to lose a modification motion on the grounds that her banking money every year demonstrates that her ‘need’ was overestimated. The father spends whatever he can too because he realizes that his plaintiff and the court will take away whatever he tries to save. Children who would have been very comfortably established in life end up with nothing from their parents.”
I already thanked the hostess of the catered party but does etiquette require me to track down and thank the guy who paid for the house, the caterers, and the $2 million in legal fees (in 2014 dollars; the divorce started decades ago) that opened the alimony taps?
Separately, one of the parties I attended was both to celebrate the New Year and also a housewarming. The approach was up a driveway that was the same length, width, and quality as a secondary highway in England or Wales. This terminated in a 50-car parking lot at the top of the hill. Given that the parking lot looked like the result of successfully robbing a BMW/Audi dealership I was confident that I had not arrived too early. Once inside I learned that part of the renovation of this house had involved the installation of a three-ton circular marble bathtub. We were all awed by the resulting Homeric scale of the master bathroom. The host intruded on our reverie, however, by pointing out that three tons of marble has a lot of thermal mass. “After you fill it with hot water, the water immediately becomes too cold. So you have to drain it and fill it up again.” He has been taking showers.
Related:
- “If I borrow your car and donate it to charity, does that make me a charitable person?”
- from a reader, “Make divorce tougher on women, says leading lawyer” (Independent (UK), December 31, 2014) where “the outgoing chair of the Bar Standards Board” notes that young women in England would likely realize their maximum spending power by remembering “Never mind about A-Levels, or a degree or taking the Bar course – come out and find a footballer.” (From our book: A professor of economics in Massachusetts, a typical “winner take all” state, said “The best career advice that I could give to a female freshman would be to drop out and stop paying tuition. Get pregnant with a medical doctor this year. Get pregnant with a business executive two years from now. Get pregnant with a law firm partner two years after that. She’ll have three healthy kids and a much higher after-tax income than nearly all of our graduates in economics.”)
I am sorry to hear about the architect fail on the marble tub. That’s the sort of detail that a great builder (or great architect paired with a so-so builder) would know about. The hot water would be piped through the marble, possibly with an in-line heater and a pump. So you would only fill it once.
Your book sounds so depressing. A fellow I knew in New York lost his wife to Cancer. Someone offered sympathy and he said, “If I killed her the first time I thought of it I’d be out of jail by now.” I hope your book will include a chapter on that calculus. Clearly some of these people would be better off murdering their children’s mother and spending fifteen years out of the workforce while their accounts grow fat with unpaid rent.
There’s a lot of reading time in prison, I hear.
Colin: You thought that the lawyer quoted in our book was depressing? I.e., that getting more money than most Americans will earn in a lifetime following a one-night encounter in a bar or a short-term marriage is depressing? To paraphrase Garland Greene in the movie Con Air: “What if I told you depressing was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn’t you consider that to be depressing?”
When you attend a party for a wealthy CEO type, do you ask whether etiquette requires you to thank the many worker bees that did the actual work of the business? Or maybe after Bob the Plumber’s party etiquette requires you track down all the customers who paid for his services?
As a party attendee, where the money comes from ceases to be your business when you accept the invitation (and probably wasn’t prior to that anyway).
You should send a handwritten thank you note to each state legislator who voted to enact the law. So should the gamete receiver.