Reply to What is Just Compensation for a "Life Lost"?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What if you give up your career after a decade to stay at home, and this enables your spouse/SO to have his career take off and accelerate as you follow him with the kids all over the world for the next fifteen years.  At the end of which your spouse/SO is earning many, multi-millions.

No way can a man (or woman) who has not worked in more than fifteen years get a job in their late forties that earns anywhere near $100k, much less the multi-million dollar lifestyle in which they have lived for at least a decade.

In those cases, the stay-at-home spouse often is awarded generous alimony for many, many years.[/quote]

Agree.  In big-money cases, very long-term marriages, where one spouse has not worked in decades, and is on the older side to successfully jump-start a career (has anyone employed or unemployed tried to get another job in their fifties lately?  It is not easy!), the non-working spouse does often make out well.  The judge in those cases may be swayed by the fact that the working spouse had the freedom, energy, and peace-of-mind to go all-in on their careers for decades and decades because the at-home spouse spent decades and decades out of the professional work force and taking care of their home and family life.  Also when bigger money is involved, starting at least five million net worth, the courts often feel that there is enough money available to distribute the wealth equitably long-term among the spouses.

Some do this by agreeing to some very large, lump-sum payout, where the working spouse gives the other spouse everything, but earns so much annually that they can quickly make it back.  Others do this by agreeing to very large alimony payments, ten or hundreds of thousands a month, for a period of many years, often for as long the 25 or 30 years they were married.  And in big money cases the working spouse agrees to cover all the ciosts or private college and graduate school.

You can basically only feel that it is fine to stay home financially if your spouse is a big-income earner, you give up your career for decades such that it is not recoverable because you are too old and have been out of the workforce too long, and your marriage was very long-term.  Now athletes and other big-money celebrities often pay large alimony to spouses they had for much less time, and who in many cases married them for the money in the first place.[/quote]

+ 1.  Yes, as PP says, a spouse in this situation may find themselves at 50 or 60 and unable to get anything other than a minimum-wage paying job.  That is why spouses in this type of situation are often generously compensated during a divorce for a "life lost". [/quote]

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