Belle Burden’s “Strangers”
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Anonymous
She kept her money which was inheritance or money she made prior to the marriage; he did nothing to contribute to enabling her to make that money, so why should he get any of it?. They both contributed equally to household expenses even though his income from work appeared to be far higher than hers from inheritance. Although on paper she was worth tens of millions of dollars, something like 5/6 of her potential inheritance was obligated first to her step-mother’s care, so there was no way to know whether it would be 2 years or 2 decades. She spent multiple millions of dollars which she got from 2 trusts she controlled and “emptied”, she took that money and used it to purchase 2 homes they lived in - a primary manhattan residence and a vacation home. Those homes had mortgages on them for less than half their purchase. So, at best, the husband was contributing 50% of 50% of the value of the homes and yet, because she had put his name equally on the title without any paperwork agreement about how to fairly value their relative contribution to the asset, he stood to get a far bigger equity share from the sale of his 50% of the home than the share he put in. There was also a lost opportunity cost to her putting her money into the homes - her money was not then at work in more liquid and higher return investments, while her disproportionate contribution to housing freed him up to put more of his money into investments. |
Anonymous
This is interesting. So you think it's both because of their money/high social status and the influence they have on each other? |
Anonymous
NP here. I know someone of my extended family who behaved like this until they had a family crisis. They’ve settled down, but they’re still difficult. That said, my own ex-husband, still high net worth, but not that high, so the exact same thing to me. He had everything he knew he had everything and yet he was still unhappy. So he left. Sometimes I wonder if they work so hard to get to these spots because of some sort of like childhood issues and then when they realize it doesn’t resolve those childhood issues (that they aren’t aware of) they declare themselves unhappy and since I don’t have any financial constraints, they figure why not go check out the other side of the grass. |
Anonymous
My opinion is that they simply get bored with the lifestyle. I know some women in these circles and everything is superficial. You say he had “everything,” but what about love, respect and free time? If you define “everything” as a fancy apartment, country house, kids in TT privates….well, some people get bored with that and want more. Some people get so engrossed with the lifestyle that they can’t understand some people tire of it. A lot of the focus of strangers was the private club, properties, lifestyle and I wouldn’t be shocked if Henry/James simply got bored with it all. If you’ve lived your entire life in a monied circle you don’t even know that there are people out there who don’t care at all about private clubs and private schools. |
Anonymous
Two things stand out to me: I think these men's egos get bigger thanks to their disproportionately high socio-economic status and hubris makes people even more jerks than they already are and 2) I think their wives as you mentioned are loving the traditional arrangement of upper class lifestyle provided by DH's job and think it's all great when the husband starts to think life is boring/wife is boring. |
Anonymous
| Apparently the mistress’s marriage still endures. |
Anonymous
Wow, I thought people hadn't figured out who it was. |
Anonymous
Belle Burden mentioned the bit about the marriage on a recent podcast, without naming names. |
Anonymous
She did not keep all her money to herself. She put most of two trust funds (in her name only) into real estate then titled in both her and her husband's names. So, as soon as she did that, her money was not in her name and he could expect to get half of the house's value in divorce, especially if he paid any of his income toward bills on the house, which she acknowledged he did. The inheritance became "commingled" and thus marital property. Her lawyer told her not to do it. It's unclear to me why she did it, except for cultural reasons -- that's the way marriage worked. He, however, never titled any of his assets or income in her name, and was not transparent with her about his income or savings or prospective partnership timeline. There are reasons to want to have a husband be able to stay in a house with kids after your untimely death, but there are other ways to do it rather than outright titling the house together. Put the house in a trust controlled by Belle or her family. Give the husband a right to live in the house until the kids are 18 or 21 or 25, and then the house is sold and the proceeds are held in trust for the kids. Or have a contract which states what part of the increase of value of the house is apportioned to Belle or her husband based on when and how much each put into the house. It sounds like she didn't have enough guaranteed income to pay for the entire mortgage of both houses and still be able to support their lifestyle. This is a problem that many couples experience after divorce - not being able to support the joint house and same lifestyle, albeit most people are not at this high an income bracket. Because he ended up becoming a partner (in part due to her SAHM life and her family pedigree), he had a future income potential that she did not, so I can understand why she didn't believe it would be prudent to keep both houses if he insisted on taking half of each. I find it frustrating that articles incorrectly say she is worth $60 million. Something like 2/3 or more of that amount is tied up in a life estate for her stepmom. It could be decades before she inherits anything from that and there is no certainty of the worth over time. Meanwhile, the issue is can she support the lifestyle at the time of divorce? I'm in a similar situation, although not at that high an income bracket. I ended my marriage due to my ex-husband's serial infidelity. He chose to walk away without parenting our two children, and he chose to pay minimal support because the law won't force him to pay for college or any extras and because somehow he believes that because my parents are wealthy I am wealthy even though it is obvious I am not. I may inherit a substantial sum in a day or decades, or I may not, and meanwhile he impoverishes me by making me the full-time parent and making me pay for all extras and college. Having gone SAHM due to his extensive work travel schedule, there is no way I can earn enough to support my kids without his equal contribution. He also gets away with it because I kept the secret of our divorce, telling only my parents, siblings and a few friends why we were separating. At the core, the men who do this are sociopaths - using other people for their own advancement. They get away with it as long as they can manipulate people and still maintain their public face. That is why what Burden has done is so extraordinary -- to break the silence on this sociopathy by telling the truth of the infidelity and abandonment in a way that doesn't make her the "crazy one" is really a rarity. And the book is successful because many women recognize themselves in it -- having husbands who walk away from the parenting responsibility and full and equal financial responsibility for the kids in proportion to their income. |
Anonymous
How do you think she paid “her half” of the family’s shared expenses for 20 years? She mentions this in the book several times. She had significant income from trusts beyond what she into the two homes. The book doesn’t make this clear, but the prenup and the divorce documents do, both of which are in the New Yorker article. Her ex is a soulless psycho and what she endured was terrible, but she was not then nor was she ever in danger of being poor or even middle class. |
Anonymous
Henry James! That’s perfect, because it’s the same social set he wrote about and the plot (a long con?) is a little like The Golden Bowl. |
Anonymous
The misleading part of her book is how she presents the properties as her trusts having paid for them in almost entirety. Except there were decent sized mortgages on both properties. He paid for those mortgages and upkeep for decades. The “small mortgage” part was misleading as I assumed the mortgage was say $1 mm and the purchase price $9 mm. If I were to marry someone with tens to hundreds of millions and they came to me with a prenup to protect that money, I’d absolutely want to keep my own earnings separate. He would have been foolish had he signed over 50% of his future earnings to her. Doesn’t at all seem unreasonable to me that he protected his money in the same manner she did his. |
Anonymous
You impoverished yourself by quitting your job. No one made you do this. I get that at the time it made sense and you felt like you needed to and you could, but you really did not have to do this. There are millions of women who go to work daily with husbands who travel extensively. You go on saying he’s a sociopath and impoverishing you, but nowhere do you take any blame or suggest you had anything to do with any of this. You did: you quit your job! |
Anonymous
The irony is that he would have happily married without a prenup, which she forced on him, as she was obligated to in her family. She would have done much better without a prenup in almost every U.S. state, except I believe CT and MA. I think those are the only states that consider her kind of trust/inheritance assets as part of the marital pot. But even in CT and MA a lot of the money that comes to her when her stepmother dies would probably be irrelevant to the asset division imposed by a judge in a trial. |
Anonymous
| These men simply want to be worshiped. They feel their wives take them for granted and they want the high that comes with a new relationship. Plain and simple. |