Matt, don’t worry about your concern about getting married in North America. Someone who has that much innate distrust and suspicion that 1/2 the US population is going to take advantage of you is not good marriage material.

You quoted some other website as saying that men are better at mathematics, and that women are better at shopping and finding good deals.

How in the world is a woman better at shopping and finding good deals if she is not good at mathematics? Wouldn’t finding a good deal, um, sort of require being good at mathematics in the first place?

You express bemusement elsewhere that people had a problem with this article. Maybe there are good reasons for that.

Geez, I sound like my aunts giving advice.

Hence the hesitation in getting married.

I think I’m a pretty responsible guy and when I have a family I will do everything I can to lead and support them. But the problems with the divorce laws in North America (as Andrew pointed out) scare the pants off me.

Because of that, I really can’t see myself getting married in North America. I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived abroad and I enjoy the foreign lifestyle. In a few years when I’m ready to marry I will probably move to a country which values families more than North America and raise a family there. It’s not just because of the divorce laws but also because family units are generally regarded as more important when compared to North America.

That just means you need to find someone (I’d recommend multiple “someones”) out there who talks about money in a way that you, individually, can relate to, regardless if you are male or female. For example, I’ve read “Your Money or Your Life” which Trent is currently reviewing, and frankly, it didn’t do much for me. “The Automatic Millionaire” when first read and “The Millionaire Next Door” spoke better to me, as well as the “The Wealthy Barber” (I think that’s the title).

Regardless, the point is that you need to read a number of books, view multiple sources, to get at least a reasonable understanding of what you want to do with your money. If you are in a marriage, it is a partnership and it is partly your money, regardless of who earns it or who’s investing it. You need to know because they may be gone tomorrow. Car accidents, industrial accidents, cancer, etc. can suddenly leave you alone. If you don’t know why your partner had $50K in this investment over here, you’re likely to yank it without realizing there might be a big penalty for doing that. Or you might leave it there when your partner knew they needed to pull the money before the end of next quarter. Point is, even if you leave the lion’s share of the money handling and choices of investment to your partner, you still need to sit down and go over things on some type of basis and know what is being planned.

Now, an excellent point was made with the 66% figure (that women are twice as likely to initiate divorce), and I think this is probably the largest cause of the modern male reluctance to marry (which I predict will become a growing social problem in the decades ahead, and is already an enormous problem for certain sub-groups).

I’ll relate an anecdote about my brother and his wife, who are not divorced. They both work now, but when their children were young, he continued to work and she stayed home with the kids, not because she was necessarily better at the domestic stuff (in fact, he continued to do most of the cooking and cleaning), but because his career was more remunerative (he’s an engineer, she’s a teacher). I have heard her threaten divorce, gleefully pointing out that children are always given to the mother. Believe me, this is the primary fear of divorce for men who have children, not financial considerations. (By the way, I’m not exclusively on my brother’s side here. At a guess, I would say he’s about 50% responsible for the problems in their marriage, perhaps even a little more, but he has never threatened divorce.) We can agree that women should be financially compensated for the sacrifices they make when they’re raising children. As a man, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the children and current inequities about how their time is divided post-divorce than about the money. Personally, if a divorce were to happen, I’d happily trade 100% of the marital assets in exchange for the children and child support.

Part of the problem here is no-fault divorce. I sympathize with courts that don’t want to get involved in untangling who did what when and figure out who was at fault in the end of the marriage, but this has led to cases of clear injustice when one partner has been obviously victimized and betrayed by the other with no legal redress. I would hesitate to say which gender is at fault more often. I’d guess it’s usually the man, but it’s not a blowout. Meanwhile, we do have a situation where a stay-at-home mother can run around and have affairs, treat her partner cruelly, fall in love with someone else, get a divorce, and still get to keep the kids and 50% of the marital assets. (On the other hand, we also have a situation where stay-at-home mothers can have the reverse happen to them and not get fully compensated financially for the career sacrifices they made in raising the children.) In my view, the solution to this is to treat a marriage like we treat any other contract. The person who violates the terms of the contract should be punished for this violation and bear more of the costs of the dissolution. Not only would this be more equitable, but it would cause more marriages to stay together. Part of the reason why people feel free to disrespect their marriages and spouses is because they suffer no punishment for it. Nowadays, they don’t even suffer social stigma. (Anyone for recriminalizing adultery and other marriage contract violations? I’m not talking about prison sentences here, but how about fines paid to the betrayed spouse?) My mother-in-law will talk about how she divorced my wife’s father simply because she was bored and wanted a change and, apparently, nobody thinks worse of her for this (well, except for me and my wife). And, you guessed it, she got to keep the kids despite the fact that she was more dedicated to her career and makes considerably more money than he does.

In Canada, the division of assets is based on what is accumulated during the marriage, not on what was brought into the marriage. I agree with the injustice of prior assets being split, although I can certainly think of cases where it would be appropriate.

So you think a woman should be compensated for her non-financial contributions to a marriage, but that it shouldn’t be 50-50. So really, you think the actual dollars brought in is the most important thing.

Oh well, since you don’t intend to marry, and I don’t intend to divorce, there is probably no point in arguing the point anymore, since it isn’t going to apply to us anyway.

Slightly off topic: With respect to Matt’s financial concern about marriage, I feel the focus is on divorce and the after affects. If the 30% divorce rate for first marriages is accurate, that’s 70% of marriages that stay together and that’s not a bad bet. Sure divorce is finacially tough, hell the only ones who are sure to make out moneywise are the lawyers, but marriage has some financial advantages:

Duel income allowing for greater savings potential

Longer life (based on studies of married couples) so you might have longer to earn, but also longer to burn.

Potential benifits of insurance (e.g. my wife’s health carrier was cheaper than mine for both of us and my auto insurance decreased).

I guess the ultimate advantage, is in the raising of children. If you don’t want, and never envision wanting, kids, then you’re probably right never to get married. Raising a child on your own, male or female, is a tough, finacially difficult road to travel down.

If you were to have kids with someone without marriage, things can go south as well, and as one example NY State has a 17% of your Gross requirement for child support up to 50% (so if you have three kids you and are in the 25% tax bracket, you get to live on 25% of your income). So if you have kids with someone, whether married or not, it’s going to hurt finacially if things don’t work out.

Additionally I look at my wife as a partner in this life. If something happens to me, she gets it all. So if we do divorce, why wouldn’t she get 50%. If you’re worried about assets before marriage, hey that’s what prenups are for. For us, we pretty much started from scratch.

You mentioned that most people wouldn’t sign a partnership for marriage based on a straight financial deal. I don’t necessarily agree, because it’s what you bring to the table and what the business is meant to cover that determines if the deal is worth 50%. He agrees to focus on the kids and stay home or work a part time job as necessary and maintain the household while she earns the lion’s share of the income. I’ve got some friends who work it that way. No kids and he earns three times as much as she does, but they agree to a strict budget which does include the same amount of spending (blow) money for each of them a month. You could claim she’s getting the better benefit, but her additional income is allowing him to retire early at 50 since they’re living cheaper together which he might not have been able to do on his own.

Let’s face it, from a strictly financial point of view the human race would die out because kids cost more than they return moneywise. Marriage costs more because there are inequities (percieved or real) in any relationship and someone is getting taken advantage of. But we don’t live life strictly based on what makes financial sense, because then we’d never really do half the things we do, because they cost money.

So, bottom line, there are pros and cons to anything. It’s the individual choice on which outweighs which.

If it’s true, it’s yet another disadvantage for a man going into marriage.

Margaret – “You say that if the woman runs off, she gets 50% of the money. If the man runs off, he gets 50% of the money. You seem to imply that both cases are a rip off for the man. Maybe I am missing something in your argument, but a 50-50 split of the assets of the marriage seems equitable to me.”

Generally a man will earn more in his lifetime so divorce is a losing proposition if things are split 50-50. Plus I have heard of divorce cases where assets prior to the marriage are also evenly split. Again this is a disadvantage to the man as men usually marry someone younger so he has had more time to amass more wealth.

Getting back to Trent’s main point I completely agree with him that men and women should be taught differently. Not just about money but education as a whole (although that is a completely different topic). Whether you believe the differences between men and women are nature or nurture there is no denying that there are differences. People should seek to understand these differences rather than pretending they don’t exist. My personal stance is along the lines of the commentor Andrew Stevens above.

I also find it hard to believe that the law is actually couched in terms of gender. If the woman had acquired more assets during the marriage, surely then the man would be getting 50% of “her” money.

And while you have heard the sad stories of your friends, I have heard the sad stories of my cousins, including one who was living out of province. She came back to visit her dad who was dying of brain cancer, then went home and found out that her husband had been having a long standing affair (kids knew all about it because he would take them with him on the visits, isn’t that lovely?), got her to sign a very disadvantageous seperation agreement before he would agree to allow the children out of province so she could return to our family for support and to see aforementioned dying father, then proceeded to break the only two terms of the agreement that were in her favour. Oh yes, she was pregnant with their third at the time. I have heard his side of the story, and it always mentions how she left him (only true in that he informed her they were getting a divorce, so she really couldn’t stay, could she?) and how hard it was on him to have to pay child support (only what was provided for under the provincial regulations, late, and some of the things he did not provide were, for instance, the childrens winter clothes and winter sports equipment, even though he only saw them in the summer, and, oh yes, the car that was pretty much the only asset she was going to get under their seperation agreement). Then there is the other cousin whose husband raped her then threw her and the kids out with literally only the clothes on their backs, then sold all the assets of the marriage out from under her for less than 25% of their fair market value, then never did provide her with ANY share of the assets or any court ordered child support. Certainly there are some whack job females out there screwing over their husbands, but don’t delude yourself that it is only ever the man who suffers injustice during a divorce.

I have found that most of what I have read is fairly elementary, being aimed at budgeting, saving, buying a house, and simple mutual fund investing. It is when you get into the real estate and stock portfolio arena that the BS detector developed earlier comes into play.

The problem isn’t generally in the thought processes. It’s in execution, otherwise known as work.