dsnuh

How it works (unless you settle for some amount, which I did, which ended up biting me in the ass when our stock took a 30% haircut, but I digress...) is that there is a community property interest in all assets earned during the marriage, regardless of future vesting schedule. It's all based on when the options were granted, when they vest, how long you worked there, etc.

If you have RSUs, you get to go through the fun process of either giving some value to these RSUs and paying off the other party's community interest in that valuation, or you can try to argue that RSUs have a zero dollars value until granted. Good luck with RSUs and stock options either way, as it can become a complicated mess of laws and formulas.

No offense taken! Divorce is a shit sandwich, no matter which end you are on.

If I may ask, were attorneys involved on either side in your case? I suspect that is the main differentiator between my experience and others that I have talked with that were able to settle on a sane number with their ex.

My ex-wife and I did the homemaker thing too. A lot of my peer group did. I don't think it works these days. No offense intended, but just like you never hope to be financially dependent on a man, I hope to never have a woman that is financially dependent on me again.

Look, I'm bitter and angry about my situation, so take this with a grain of salt...

I feel like the incompatibility we had in regards to savings, financial discipline, etc., should have been a much bigger red flag to me. If you are having these sorts of doubts, I would think long and hard before making the commitment that goes along with marriage. If you do get married, and it doesn't work out, just make sure you divorce before the 10 year mark, or you will have no set end to spousal support. If you divorce before 10 years, you will normally pay spousal support for half the length of the marriage (about 4 years in my case). If you have kids, all bets are off and you will likely be on the hook for spousal, child support,(plus half of medical expenses, extra-curricular activities, and child care costs while your ex-spouse works - this is on top of monthly child support), you will be required to maintain health insurance for the children, you may get your wages garnished, you may get Smith-Ostler riders for 12% of any bonus or unexpected income towards more child support, legal fees, therapist fees (very easy to have a therapy order in place for children and/or the parent(s)), etc.

That said, anything you have saved before marriage is yours to keep if you divorce, so there's that aspect to keep in mind.

If you are expecting logic to rule in this domain, you're in for some disappointment.

Edit: I'll give you a concrete example - let's say my ex-wife decides to marry the systems engineer she is dating, who is also a high-earner. In that case, she can sue for more child support because it will move her up a tax bracket.

San Diego, and yes, bought a home in 2006 (smart move!) before we got married. The mortgage, deed, title, everything was in my name only, as my ex-wife (girlfriend at the time) had shitty credit, and zero savings. The house was deeply underwater the entire marriage, up until we split in 2016, when it would maaaaybe break even money if I sold it. I was renting a tiny studio apartment at the time, while still paying the mortgage, plus child and spousal support. I decided to try to stay in the house, since I didn't have the $3000-$5000 it takes for security deposits to rent, and I was hoping that if I could hold onto it, the value would increase to a point where I might come out with some money. I can't afford it at all, but so far I have been able to piece together payments before going into foreclosure, so I guess that's a win.

The thing about divorce that I didn't realize is that making the decision to get divorced in the first place is the easiest and least painful of many choices you will need to make as a result.

Please see my response above, I wasn't clear in my original post, my apologies.

I honestly doubt I am that far off an outlier based on this being HN...

Edit: To be clear, I mean that I suspect that there are a number of high-earning individuals on this forum that have assets like property, retirement accounts, stock options, RSUs, bonuses, etc., and that many in my situation would be paying similar amounts.

Keep in mind that I am talking about divorces involving lawyers on each side. I have no doubt that others make out much better if they have a sane ex-spouse that just wants to move on with their life.

It's almost three years out, and I still feel hopeless about being able to salvage my life financially.

Those all applied in my case, and I simplified my original statement too much (I lost more than half because that's where I had saved funds that I had to use in the divorce to "offset" the other party's interest). My apologies.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that I don't know if everyone realizes that if you are the only one in the household saving away for the future, that those savings are not "yours" if the marriage ends, even if your ex-spouse was absolutely frivolous with money, they will get half of anything you saved, and speaking from experience, that feeling absolutely sucks and was one that I am still trying to recover from years later.

Sorry, I was sort of vague here. Basically, I had to give $105,000 (half) of the 401K to my ex-wife, I had to pay her out for potential values of my stock options and RSU's (have fun valuing those!), I had Smith-Ostler riders attached to any bonus income, I had three more years of spousal support ($1800 per month), legal fees to pay, etc. I used the 401K to pay these things, so technically, I did get half, I just had to immediately use it to pay it all to my ex-wife.

Yes, I kept the house, which was my separate property with a community property interest, since it was purchased in my name only before we were married. I cannot afford the house, so I am trying to play the foreclosure avoidance game and give my kids a nice place to live that provides them with some continuity.

I also had $1700 in child support (this is two kids, with a 60/40 custody share) that I offered to give her more money in the settlement if she would agree to $1400 instead. She agreed to that, and then before that judgment had even been processed, had me back in court to get $1700 per month, which she did, since the court will use whatever Disso-Master spits out. She owns her own business, and of course her personal and business accounts are mingled, so there is no way to pinpoint what she actually makes, but it was at least $3,500 per month part time when we were married.

But none of that matters if you earned a lot more than your spouse. Divorce is no joke, especially if you are the high earner in the relationship. A lot of people are under the assumption that if you split custody, you don't pay support or the support is a nominal amount. This is absolutely not the case. The court (in CA, at least) looks to maintain the children's standard of living DURING THE MARRIAGE until the child is 18 or emancipated. This is the case even if your divorce left you in very different circumstances.

That's just child support, which is only one of the many costs associated with divorce.

(I want to make it clear that I have no problem with paying _reasonable_ child support, but I'm sorry, the current child support calculations can leave you with an egregious amount of support payments)

It was 10 years ago that I was 32, but at that point in time I had over $100K easily in my 401K. By the time I divorced three years ago, I had over $200K in there.

After the divorce, I have about $20K left after having to split it with my ex-wife, who had saved a grand total of $2.00 during our marriage.

I don't really have a point, except that some people are very good at saving, even from a young age, and some people will never save a penny. The key is starting young. As soon as you are able to contribute anything, even 1%, you get the advantage of compounding interest over time, which is the key.

No, I don't see "social bifurcation" (which I think needs to be defined) happening over drivers licensing requirements. Over race? Sure. Over systemic income/opportunity inequalities? You bet. But over driving? I just don't see it.

First, how is this 30% cut going to be enforced? At the licensing test? Is it that if you get a single ticket or report for unsafe driving, your license is revoked? You are going to look at existing drivers license holders and determine their fitness to be operating a vehicle, how exactly? Is it a lifetime ban from driving? How many times can I take the test of it just didn't come naturally to me?

Second, there's already a portion of the population that for whatever reason (DWI is a common one) aren't allowed to drive, and I don't see them rising up in the streets.

I don't think anyone is arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to do things that have costs to society, they are discussing whether or not taxation of the behaviors is effective.

It wasn't obvious to me either. It sounded like you made an argument that at least 30% of people shouldn't be allowed to drive, and then leaping to that leading to some sort of societal bifurcation? Your argument or point isn't obvious or clear at all.

Yeah, when I hear "bad neighborhood", I think more of property related crime, graffiti, loitering, abandoned/neglected houses, etc.

Norton, Kasperky, Dell, Wolfram, HP, Cray, HTC, Bose...

Not attempting to discount your experience, just wondering why you refer to being mugged as a "gender-fueled hate crime"?

I was trying to make the same point, I think? I was just trying to note that I have done the single contact lens thing as well, and even after just a few hours, your brain starts compensating for it.

This is the feeling I get as well. Tighter integration with Kubernetes gets more people interested in using GCP and GKE.

Did you play with only one eye open, or just one contact lens? I have worse vision than you (-8.0, -7.50), and I know that I can still function with just one lens in of needed. You definitely still have stereo vision even if one input is blurred. Your brain does quite a bit of compensation, and I can imagine if you operated this way for months that your brain would be even better at assimilating the noisy information from your "bad" eye.

For #2 - Maybe try setting up your own Kubernetes cluster on a cloud service provider, without using shortcuts? Perhaps etcd and the Raft protocol would be interesting and helpful in some cases, but leans more towards #1.

For #1 - CAP Theorem, read through aphyr's blog, google concepts/details/jargon you find in white papers on different of the various distributed consensus protocols, etc.

Reminds me also of the opening of John Dies At The End.

https://imdb.com/title/tt1783732/

Are you forgetting about POKE and PEEK?

I understand what you are saying, places are whatever people agree to call them, but I don't doubt that real estate agents, developers, etc are eager to have places called by new names when they are gentrifying the area.

There's also divorce. Trust me, it can drop you down to 1 in a heartbeat.

I've noticed this before too. It has all the real names for these areas that people use, but with so much noise thrown in.

I'm happy to see my old stomping grounds of Golden Hill are regulated to about 6 blocks now in Google Maps. It's all Golden Heights and South Park now. "Golden Hill" encompassed everything now known as South Park at one time afaik, but it had a reputation, so they started calling part of it South Park and selling properties for a lot more.

I'm in San Diego, and with the housing prices, I'm sure it's a constant search for areas that gentrifiers can afford. The last neighborhood to pop was Barrio Logan, which used to be a very rough neighborhood. Now it's yoga shops, art collectives, kombucha, and other stuff hipster yuppies need to have around them.

Sure, there's still graffiti and taco shops, but it's commissioned art and mango-chutney-glazed-pork-belly-kimchi tacos now.

The guy's apartment building isn't called Silver Lake Heights, what he did was start using the term "Silver Lake Heights" to describe an area previously known as "Silver Lake".

Realtors often drive the naming of new "neighborhoods", especially if it is lower class area that they want to gentrify. You know, branding.

It is really even that. Just because it may not be logical or make sense, family bonds amd familial love are still a thing, even in families with lots of problems.

What are your criteria?

Are you sure you're not actually saying "poor parents shouldn't be allowed to raise their children"?