Category: Divorce, child support, custody, family law

This is the time when young people begin looking for their first jobs out of college and/or high school. Where are these jobs likely to lead 40 years down the road? A friend sent me this article from MarketWatch:

My 59-year-old retired girlfriend is well-off. Her lakefront home with an extra buildable lot, her Florida condo, and her residential and commercial rental properties are all paid off, and she has over $3 million in cash and investments. She is also collecting alimony from her ex for a few more years.

I am 62 and employed, and have just under $1 million in cash and investments. I have no debt other than a car lease, I manage my finances prudently, and I’m a man of simple pleasures.

Looks like some career paths pay better than others….

Related:

• Real World Divorce (the girlfriend’s career as a family court entrepreneur might have yielded a very different profit level in another state)

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How did the U.S. end up with double the percentage of children living without two parents compared to a lot of European countries? (link to some data) “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love” (New York Times, 9/30/2021) and similar celebrations of the path to bliss starting at the local family court might be partially explanatory (the cash incentives are very different too!).

Let’s see if the article is convincing:

… I’ve learned that divorce can also be an act of radical self-love that leaves the whole family better off. My divorce nearly seven years ago freed me from a relationship that was crushing my spirit. It freed my children, then 5 and 3, from growing up in a profoundly unhealthy environment.

Profoundly unhealthy environment? Dad was beating the wife and kids while smoking crystal meth and without taking any breaks to inhale “essential” (in Maskachusetts) healing cannabis?

There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.

The mom/author says that she wanted more time to work:

I made choice after choice to prioritize my career because I believed fervently in the importance of the work I was doing, providing legal representation to wrongfully convicted men and women.

I have spent much of the pandemic interviewing working women who are diverse across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, geography, class, age and profession for a book I am writing about ambitious mothers and the benefits to their children when they prioritize their careers.

Talking to the subset who are divorced, I found a common theme, even a sisterhood: Divorce is painful and heartbreaking. But it can also be liberating, pointing the way toward a different life that leaves everyone better off, including the children.

One 38-year-old newly single mother who works full time and attends graduate school at night told me with pride that for the first time, she is living with her 9-year-old in an apartment she picked out, decorated and paid for on her own.

… for unhappily married women who are able to support themselves and their children, breaking free can also be like plunging into a cold ocean: a shock to the system that is at once brutal and cleansing. They can emerge stronger and clearer-eyed. Their children benefit because happier mothers are better parents.

That last one is my favorite. According to the author and the NYT editors, it is safe to assume that a person who is unhappy in a marriage is guaranteed to find enduring happiness just as soon as the divorce lawsuit is filed. And then the children will bask in the reflected glow of that enduring happiness as they shuttle back and forth between households, watch their college fund being spent on lawyers for both sides, etc. Certainly there is no possibility that the person dissatisfied with Situation A will become dissatisfied with Situation B. (A friend’s wife recently hired a 50ish woman to be her assistant. The woman complained that previous employers had mistreated her, sexually harassed her, etc. After a few weeks… she quit the assistant job.)

The first sentence in the above excerpt is also interesting. Mom says that she didn’t want to invest too much time in her kids because it was important to help the wrongfully convicted and the only way to truly focus on helping out in criminal court was via a trip to the local family court. But, unless the real answer is that she wanted to spend time have sex with new friends from Bumble, wouldn’t the optimum solution have been to dump all child- and household-related tasks onto the husband/father(maybe!) and hired help as necessary? The dad sounds like a total pushover: “He rarely travels and actively engages with nearly every aspect of our children’s lives no matter how mundane.” and “My ex-husband and I make a point of spending time together with our children, having regular dinners, watching sports and going for bike rides as a foursome.”

Overall, if it is this easy to use children’s feelings and words for one’s own benefit, almost any selfish adult decision can be justified. Imagine someone who identified as a “man” writing “I knew that my 5-year-old would be better off if he/she/ze/they could vicariously share the joy that I experience when out on Tinder dates with women 15 years younger than his/her/zir/their mom.” This was a popular perspective in the “do your own thing” era circa 1970 when no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce was being made available. According to the academic psychologists, this perspective is simply wishful thinking on the part of adults who are pursuing selfish goals. See “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: Report of a 25-Year Study”, in which 131 children of divorce were followed; they did not fare well compared to adults who had grown up in intact families. The PDF is available:

Hardly any of our subjects described a happy childhood; in fact a number of children told us that “the day they divorced was the day my childhood ended.” … By the 25-year mark, the majority had decided not to have children.

No child of divorce in our study was invited by both parents, either separately or together, to discuss college plans. … Only 57% of the divorce group achieved their bachelor’s degree as compared with 90% in the comparison group. … Unhappy, [those who did attend college] settled for fields of study that were not their first choice, at lower ranked institutions than their parents had attended. It was at this time that one young person, echoing the emotions of many others, commented bitterly, “I paid for my parents’ divorce.”

The central finding of this study is that parental divorce impacts detrimentally the capacity to love and be loved within a lasting, committed relationship.

A subgroup of over 20 women from the divorced group sought out multiple lovers. … Their sexual encounters seemed driven by anger at men, which even their close relationships with their fathers did not seem to mute.

(i.e., a mother’s alimony-fueled escape to Tinderhood can result in daughters who are passionate Tinder users as well)

I find this a fascinating cultural artifact, not so much that the law professor would justify reorganizing her own life for her own reasons as something that benefits her children, but that these rationalizations would be of wide enough public interest to merit publication in one of our biggest newspapers. That says something about how passionate New York Times readers are about living their best life, regardless of the consequences to children and others.

Related:

• the author, Lara Bazelon, was able to take time away from helping the wrongfully convicted to write an editorial for the New York Times complaining that Amy Coney Barrett wouldn’t be enthusiastic about abortion (“the heart of the long, continuing march for gender equality”). This is consistent with her more recent NYT piece (above), since the best way to avoid being bothered by children is to abort them (legal right up to 36 or 37 weeks in Massachusetts if one doctor thinks the child who pops out will irritate the mother and therefore impair her mental health). Thanks to Professor Bazelon, we now know that a judge appointed by a Republican doesn’t love abortion as much as a Democrat-appointed judge would love abortion!
• “Female Voters’ ‘Marriage Gap’ And The Midterms” (NPR): “Married women tend to have more conservative beliefs and vote more for Republicans, while single women tend to be aligned more with Democrats.” (i.e., one way to boost votes for Democrats is to encourage women to file divorce lawsuits)
• Facebook uses a Malibu-flying engineering manager to promote careers in engineering… (we celebrate the mid-life gender ID change of a married “man” without considering the effects on the middle-aged wife and on the kids)

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Someone earning $700,000 over a 6-year period seeks alimony from a spinal surgeon spouse earning substantially more over the same period ($3 million in one year alone). For purposes of calculating alimony, does the court assume that $700,000 will be earned over the next 6 years by the lower-income spouse? The U.S. Sun raises what is perhaps a novel question. (Thanks to four separate readers who emailed this to me!)

Kim claimed in the documents for years he didn’t know that Turner was working as a high-priced call girl.

The divorce papers, which were filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in July, reportedly allege that Turner earned nearly $700,000 in cash from her clients.

They go on to claim that Turner had clients including a New Jersey-based real estate executive and an award-winning lighting designer, New York Daily News reported.

Dr. Kim only first became aware of his wife’s double life in December 2020 when he came across an explicit iMessage intended for Turner, which detailed a sexual encounter between her and another man, the court papers reportedly state.

“Not to belabor the obvious but the defendant clearly committed material fraud upon Dr. Kim by concealing her sale of sexual services in exchange for money prior to the marriage,” Dr. Kim reportedly states in the court documents.

This particular case was settled so we’ll never find out, but it would be interesting to see if a court would allow expert testimony on the question of what the future earnings of a prostitute might be.

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Today is the first day when a “parent” can get a $3,600 per child fully refundable tax credit from the U.S. government. This is a fully refundable credit, i.e., it turns into $300 per month Given that roughly half of American children don’t live with two biological parents, that means that the cash implications of winning “primary parent” status are more significant than ever. If there are two children, for example, and the parents have equal incomes, a 60/40 parenting split might result in a 2:1 different in spending power between the winner parent and the loser parent (state-by-state differences in child support formulae are substantial).

For plaintiffs who were on the fence regarding making a domestic violence allegation, for example, in hopes of enhancing prospects for obtaining primary custody, now there is an additional $7,200/year at stake (comparable to working 1,000 extra hours per year at the current federal minimum wage). For comparison, $7,200 per year is more than a Swedish plaintiff could obtain by having sex with the richest billionaire in Sweden. It is also more than a plaintiff could obtain by having sex with the richest defendant in Germany.

(The current wave of inflation that is washing over the U.S. also makes family court litigation more critical. See “Profits from Marriage and Child Support Depend Heavily on Inflation Rates” within the Quirks chapter:

Nominal rather than real (inflation-adjusted) investment income is included in every state’s child support formula. Consider a defendant with $2 million in premarital savings and a 2-percent real return on those savings. With inflation at 1 percent, the nominal return will be 3 percent or $60,000 per year. If inflation goes back up to a Jimmy Carter-era 10 percent, the nominal return will be 12 percent and investment income for child support purposes will be $240,000 per year, four times as high despite the fact that the real return on investment is the same. The effect of inflation in Wisconsin, for example, with its 25 percent of gross income rule for two kids, is an increase in the child support plaintiff’s share of investment income from $15,000 per year up to $60,000, far exceeding the $40,000 in real return.

The value of property division can also be boosted by inflation. Consider a jurisdiction where a divorce plaintiff is entitled to a roughly 50 percent share of any appreciation in the value of premarital savings. If the real value doesn’t change, but inflation is 10 percent per year, the separate property will double in nominal value over a 7-year period. A plaintiff who sues for divorce after 7 years will thus obtain 25 percent of the value of the property by collecting 50 percent of the appreciation. In a no-inflation environment, the share would be 0 rather than 25 percent.

If we’re going to have inflation plus extra government-sent rewards to the parent who wins custody, might the second best career choice in the Biden era be divorce litigator? (first best, of course, is child support plaintiff after having sex with a high-income partner!))

Related:

• “New $3,000 child tax credit could raise issues for divorced parents” (CNBC, a little out of sync with the fact that never-married-to-begin-with is a common status for plaintiffs and defendants in U.S. family courts)
• A section asking whether it makes sense to run a court system to pick winner and loser parents: What does [Linda Nielsen, professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University] think of the winner/loser custody system that prevails in most U.S. states? “A lot of social scientists say that a court cannot possibly pull together enough custody evaluators and psychology experts to accurately predict what is going to be the best parenting plan for each child in a particular family ” responded Nielsen. “The premise that custody evaluators can always give an objective recommendation is flawed. It is not like a driving test or a math test. There may be no standard set of credentials for custody evaluators. There is not necessarily consistency from one evaluator to another and many of the measures used in these evaluations were not designed for that purpose.. A psychologist can’t walk into an intact family, do an assessment and determine which parent is better for which child at which age in that family – or who will be the better parent four years from now. So why bring that difficult task into family court?” Nielsen says that a deeper problem with courts picking the “better parent” at the time of divorce may be that the judge is answering the wrong question. “It doesn’t matter who is a better parent at the time of the divorce,” says Nielsen. “I ask students [in a Wake Forest University Department of Psychology course] ‘Was your mother or father the better parent when you were 6, 10, 16 years old? Now answer the same question for your brother or sister. The answer is different at each age and, with siblings, depending on the personality of the siblings and the parents. The importance or effectiveness of each parent will go up and down as the child ages, which is one reason that children who are in shared parenting arrangements do better than children who spend less than 35 percent of their time with one parent.”

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Happy National Paperclip Day (apparently popular in the Florida Free State; see this Orlando Sentinel article).

Until recently, as far as anyone knew, the worse decision that Bill Gates ever made was to launch Clippy.

Now we find out that Gates has a family court plaintiff who will be harvesting roughly half of what he earned prior to encountering her.

Consider that Bill Gates beat Xerox and Apple in the desktop computing market. He triumphed over IBM and its technologically superior OS/2 in operating systems. He defeated the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark antitrust case (ran out the clock until George W. Bush took over!). He escaped the Internal Revenue Service and taxation by stuffing every share of stock that he wanted to sell into the Gates Foundation where it could be sold without attracting capital gains tax.

The one enemy that he couldn’t defend against or prevail over was his family court plaintiff.

(What if he’d stayed single, but periodically had sex with cash-motivated individuals seeking to make bank via pregnancy and child support? Washington State family law makes it tough for a plaintiff to obtain more than about $400,000 over 18 years. Suppose that Gates’s current plaintiff collects $60 billion. That would have been sufficient to fund 150,000 child support plaintiffs at the top of the Washington State child support guidelines. Maybe some of them could have moved to Massachusetts or California or Arkansas prior to giving birth and availed themselves of unlimited child support, as Hunter Biden’s plaintiff did (sex in D.C.; lawsuit in Arkansas). But “unlimited” doesn’t necessarily mean that sex partners would have been paid anywhere near $60 billion.

What if the Melinda entanglement was more about sex than procreation? If Melinda took advice from Betsy Salkind (“Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ’em right and you can walk all over them for thirty years.”), there would have been a short period of evening excitement followed by decades of deep freeze. A friend who is “familiar” (as the journalists say) with the rates charged by legal escorts in London and Germany says that the maximum that Bill Gates could possibly have paid for the highest-end all-night companionship is $2000 per woman per evening (London rates; substantially cheaper in Germany). A $60 billion fee to an American plaintiff would translate into 30 million evenings of top-class escort service in London or 82,192 years of every-evening companionship with one woman (more than 40,000 years of every-evening companionship with two women). The same friend says that Jeff Bezos’s situation breaks his heart. “He was the richest guy in the world. What is he doing with a 50-year-old who already had kids with two different men?”)

Maybe the most helpful thing to say to someone considering marriage to a less-wealthy lower-earning potential future plaintiff: “Do you think that you’re smarter than Bill Gates?”

Related:

• “The Tragic Life of Clippy, the World’s Most Hated Virtual Assistant”
• Immigrant Dad’s tutorial on the “real hidden figures” in Hidden Figures (Operation Paperclip)
• Melinda Gates inspires women in the workplace (2017)

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We are informed that sex between a high-income senior worker at a company and a lower-income junior worker is bad. Yet MacKenzie Scott, then a secretary (“administrative assistant”) at D.E. Shaw, turned sex with Jeff Bezos, a vice-president at the firm, into a multi-$billion fortune. And recently we’ve learned that Melinda Gates, who had sex with the founder/CEO at her employer (Microsoft), will soon join the ranks of strong independent female billionaires. Nobody is saying that it was a mistake for these women to have sex with their respective bosses. Nor is anyone criticizing the bosses for having sex with subordinates and then paying them $billions.

(What if the boss is already married and only “high income” rather than rich? Sex with the boss can still be far more lucrative than continuing to work, depending on the state (see Real World Divorce for each state’s child support formula and this calculation of how much better Ellen Pao would have done by having sex with her boss compared to suing Kleiner Perkins).)

How are people supposed to distinguish between bad-sex-at-the-office and good-sex-at-the-office?

An immigrant friend has been writing about Melinda Gates pulling the ripcord. A sampling:

[14-year-old] read Bill Gates’ divorce tweet and reacted: I so hate it how Americans always describe these things in this annoying sugary way: “we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple” or “we’re no longer a perfect match.” A Russian woman would have said directly: “He got boring” or “He is crazy, I don’t want to deal with him anymore” or “he is running out of money” or “screw him, I am out of here.” In fact, I don’t think any European would talk like Americans do. They wouldn’t probably even say anything because who cares?

I am anticipating a firehose of stories: “Melinda Gates is the real founder of Microsoft, while Bill with the rest of the white men took all the credit”, “Melinda breaks the next layer of the glass ceiling in philanthropy”, “The rising tide of female billionaires: here is how divorce can empower you too”.

From a U.S.-born friend:

So I heard Bill Gates is having a massive parasite removed. The surgical process should cost about 65 billion dollars.

The actual complaint for divorce (“petition” in Washington State) filed by Melinda Gates:

Related:

• Bill Gates Just Taught a Big Lesson to Every Husband in American ‘Moment of Lift,’ Melinda Gates explains how the couple make their partnership work. (Inc., January 2020): “… having both partners share fairly in household work and emotional labor is a very worthwhile goal.” (i.e., the spouse who identifies as a “man” should be responsible for earning 100% of the money and also 50% (as determined by the spouse who identifies as a “woman/plaintiff”) of the household work). Bill Gates apparently adopted a craven posture of submission, but his obeisance wasn’t sufficient to appease the person who ultimately became his plaintiff.
• “Bill and Melinda Gates Shared a Profound Secret to Their Success. It’s a Lesson in Emotional IntelligenceThe Gateses’ ability to deal with disagreements reveals major lessons for teams of all sizes.” (Inc., August 2020): “They exercise empathy. … They give valuable feedback. … They begin with respect. In a world where women are afforded much less opportunity than men, Melinda says she is thankful that she and her husband have achieved true equality–both in their marriage and work relationship.” (but how many people who identify as “men” had the opportunity to have sex with Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates and harvest $billions via divorce?)
• “Bill and Melinda Gates reveal the secret to their marriage success and the topics that are off limits on date night” (Business Insider, February 2018): By their own admission it’s an ‘intense’ setup, but it ‘works well.’ … Melinda said that even though they have disagreements, they always maintain a ‘united front.’ … “Working together as well as raising a family together, there’s a certain intensity to that. But we’re very lucky because we mostly see things the same way, the goals are very much the same,” he said, adding that the couple are now 25 years into learning how to listen to each other. “It works well,” he said.

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