An Offer

Math is not my favorite subject. Well, that's quite an understatement. I can have visceral reactions to math. I had many unpleasant mathematical experiences in school, not the least of which ended in me just wanting to pass Geometry in 10th grade. By the end of the school year I had completely given up any hope of understanding geometry and spent the time in the back of the class talking with Danny, who not only understood the subject matter but was ahead of the class. He was very bright, very self-assured, a talented musician, and has grown up to be extremely successful and wealthy. Ah, but that is not what this is about. I was supposed to be almost gifted in math but the gifts never unwrapped themselves, and my life after Geometry has been one of intentional math-avoidance. I have learned the hard way, that if you want your divorce to be over, you have to be the advocate for that. Otherwise, attorneys aren't tremendously motivated to bring things to a close. Courts have caught on to this and now set mandatory trial dates if divorces aren't finalized within a certain period of time. Case in point: Six months ago I told my attorney I wanted my divorce to be over in six weeks. And we still drag on. My divorce would, I knew, eventually involve some pretty advanced math. My attorney had me hire a forensic accountant to figure out what I was worth before the marriage, how much that worth grew during the marriage, what I was worth on the date of our separation, and what interest had grown on those portions after the separation. This required subpoenas, numerous phone calls, contact with experts, a lot of pushing from me, and more math than I ever wanted to re-encounter. What was such-and-such worth on the day you got married? What was the house worth? The tax-sheltered annuity? And so on. It took a lot of reconstructing. The accountant had to figure interest rates at certain times in the past, deduct previous values, talk to the retirement system. I had to meet with my first ex-husband for the first time in decades. It was a lot of work, work from which Bill will benefit and for which I paid. And I wondered, should I have had some kind of asset valuation on the date of our marriage? Will that be something that routinely happens in the future? California is a community-property state. Every penny you earn after your date of marriage then becomes a part of shared income. Everything you pay with your income after you get married is now considered community property. Every cent your retirement earns after marriage is community property as is every penny you put in any type of retirement account, except Social Security. If your marriage ends, the difference between what you are worth on the date of separation and what you were worth on the date you married is divided in two. You are entitled to half and your estranged spouse is entitled to the other half. So, in simple math, if you have $20,000 in a retirement account on the day you get married and $200,000 in that account on the day you separate from your spouse, the growth is $180,000 and you can have half of that. That means you get to keep $90,000 plus your original $20,000. Therefore, $110,000 of the account is for you and $90,000 is for your former husband or wife. If you owned a house on the day you got married and the house was worth $100,000 and you owed $60,000 on it on that day, then you had $40,000 in equity. If the house was worth $400,000 when you split up but then you owed $250,000, you have equity of $150,000. However, since you had $40,000 in equity when you got married, that is subtracted from the current equity of $150,000, leaving $110,000 for you to split in your settlement. That leaves you owing your 'ex' $55,000 for the house. But houses are tricky because house value is not determined by what the house was worth on the day you separated but on the date you settle your divorce. It's a weird inconsistency. Then there are cars and credit card debt and who is to pay them, whose car is worth more and the adding of the total value of those, dividing them down the middle, etc. It gets complicated. But in the end there is a fat number you offer your departed spouse and they come back with a counter-offer, I guess. It's a sad comment on unions and commitments, and the tenuous relationship many members of our society (apparently including myself) have with marriage, its promises, and the degree to which we devote ourselves to making marriage work. Early this week I was able to get a first offer to Bill's attorney. Since Bill is a wheeler-dealer, I figure I might have to go back and forth with offers. I figure his sense of entitlement will start with some demands I might consider to be outrageous, especially considering some of the things he has done thus far in this whole debacle. We have to return on his Order to Show Cause late next month, we have been assigned to a mediator sometime soon, and we will go to trial late the following month if we haven't reached a tentative settlement. I await a response from his side but guess they wouldn't have been able to get together this week to review it, or maybe Bill is too busy gambling, or his attorney was busy. There is a date by which the offer must be accepted They might let it pass but it helps get them going. In the meantime I wait and wonder.....what will he accept?......how much does he feel he is absolutely entitled to?......how desperate is he for a settlement? .......how well is he?......when, oh, when, will this be over?.....