Lane Anderson of Matriarchy Report reached out to me in the wake of all the controversy over Belle Burden’s divorce memoir, Strangers. It is a book about divorce, marriage, and how little value men place on the caretaking that their wives do. Here is what Lane had to say about it on her Substack:
Burden’s story is not so much a financial thriller, or “financial cautionary tale” as many have dubbed it. It’s a cautionary tale about heterosexual marriage itself.
We aren’t here to discuss all the ins and outs of her story but instead what her story illustrates. The precarious position even wealthy women can find themselves in upon divorce if they have sacrificed careers for children.
Burden did what so many women do in marriage. Set aside her career to tend to the kids. Yet she also signed a prenup that said all the money her husband earned during the marriage would remain his (to be clear, her lawyer advised her not to sign it). She came from money and had several trusts she would inherit. But money in a trust is not easily accessed. It is not cash. It comes with a lot of levers you have to pull, and sometimes you literally cannot access any of the funds until someone dies. She also used funds from her trust to purchase the two homes their family lived in over the course of their marriage. And she put her husband on both deeds. So, he had legal claim to both of them.
Lane took the opportunity to ask me all about prenuptial and postnuptial agreements and what kind of financial protections Belle Burden and so many of us need when we take a step back from the workforce. I’ve written extensively about how important these agreements can be. Essentially a prenup or postnup is designed to set the terms of your divorce before you two hate each other. As divorce lawyer Aaron Thomas, The Prenup Guy and author of The Prenup Prescription says, a prenup or postnup is like car insurance. You have car insurance in case you get in a car accident. You hope you never have to use it.
One of the reasons a postnup can be so important if you take a step back from the workforce is you can put in a stipulation ensuring spousal support will be granted for the same number of years you took a step out of the workforce upon divorce. Here is why this is important:
But you can also put in a stipulation taking spousal support off the table if you are the high earner in the relationship, your spouse did NOT take a step back due to caretaking demands and you also shoulder most of the caretaking and holding of the mental load. Essentially a postnup is choosing how things would go in a divorce while you still have goodwill between the two of you. This saves a lot of strife and legal bills should you divorce down the line.
You can watch our entire conversation in the video at the top of this post or enjoy highlights from our conversation below. Thank you Lane Anderson for the opportunity to talk about these important topics! (Read her searing take on Strangers below and to read her recap of our conversation, go here).
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Cindy: Let me tell you what you need in order to get housing. If you want to get approved for rentals, you need income. If you want to apply for a mortgage, you need income. I think one of the hardest parts of taking a step back in your career is you are no longer are a W-2 employee, thus it’s really hard to get approved for anything.
Cindy: If you were in a long-term marriage, which is anything over 10 years, you’re usually entitled to spousal support for half the length of the marriage. If you’ve been married for over 20 years, you are entitled to lifetime spousal support. But spousal support is only guaranteed if you go to court. Most men do not want to pay spousal support. They say, why should I have to keep paying you?
Now, just a word on spousal support. Because typically in heterosexual marriages, it’s the male paying the female because a) men tend to make more and b) women are more likely to take time out due to caretaking, it can feel like with spousal support, well, he “gives” me money. But if you have been supporting your spouse’s career, like Belle Burden did, like I did, for 8-15 years, you have been supporting them. You have been enabling them to rise in the ranks, to make all this money. That support is now coming back to you. You actually deserve a percentage, just like an agent, right? A percentage of those earnings are actually yours because you helped them attain it. So that’s one way to think about it.
The other way to frame it for an ex who doesn’t want to “pay,” is he is finally compensating you for all of that unpaid labor you did during the marriage (read The Math of Motherhood: Unpaid Labor Edition for actual numbers). All the childcare, cooking and cleaning, the pickups, all the doctor’s appointments that you just did for free, it’s not free anymore because you’re not married. So he’s paying you back that loan he received of unpaid labor.
So, if it’s a prenup and you haven’t had kids yet, there should be a clause that says if one of us takes a pause due to caretaking, that person will receive spousal support for the same number of years they took out of the workforce or downshifted their career. Point blank. You can’t put the amount of spousal support, but just to say spousal support is guaranteed. That’s something you want in there.
Say you didn’t have a prenup and now you’re married and you both had careers and one of you took a step back. That is your moment to say, It maybe makes sense for our family for me to take a step back. However, because of that sacrifice, I want us to do a postnup. I want us to put some stipulations in. Because child support is something, but it’s often not enough to pay your bills. So, if you have spousal support and child support, you can then use those numbers to qualify for a rental, for a mortgage application. Without both, you often don’t have enough.
Lane: Only about 15% of people have a prenup. So talk to us about what the postnup is, specifically, and how one goes about getting a postnup so that it's not like, oh well, already got married, guess it's too late. Because I think a lot of us are relieved to learn that's actually not true.
Cindy: At any time in your marriage, you can get a postnup. It would typically be done with a family law professional. I’ve worked with Aaron Thomas, who’s called The Prenup Guy. We collaborated with Eve Rodsky and Fair Play and created The Fair Play Guide to Prenups and Post-nups. And he has a website where you can find someone in your state (they have licensed attorneys in 31 states).
In The Feminist Case for the Postnuptial Agreement, I even include a script for you to use with your partner because I totally understand that this is tricky stuff to bring up. I liken it to the Fair Play discussion. It’s a similar conversation. Aaron, in my interview with him, said the cost can tend to go from between $2,500 to $5,000. So, it is an investment. The reason why you’re doing that is to avoid a lengthy contested divorce. A contested divorce is when you do not agree. Nobody’s seeing eye to eye. And so you end up having to go to court. It’s so much time. It’s so much in legal fees. So it’s an investment on avoiding that down the line.
please note I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice. I highly recommend consulting a family law professional or go to lawyer Aaron Thomas’s website here for guidance.
Cindy: What was one of the other issues that Belle Burden had? No woman should ever cede financial decisions fully to their husband and we should always have transparency. So one of the things that happens when you get either a prenup or a postnup is there is a process of financial disclosures where you have to open up and be like, these are all of the accounts. These are the debts. These are the credit cards. Oh, gosh, I didn’t know we had a home equity line opened. If you are not a couple that sits down every year and does that, it could be the first time you’ve done it in a decade. And that is healthy on its own because you should always know where your money is, what you’re invested in. That process can be very good for a relationship. It unfortunately can reveal some problems. Like undisclosed debt. Or perhaps he’s resistant to doing the financial disclosures process. That’s a red flag.
In a postnup, if there’s debt that you didn’t know about, you can carve out your own solutions to it ahead of divorce. Because otherwise you are just at the mercy of what the courts say and that debt is shared. And now you don’t like each other anymore. The point of doing a postnup is to do all this negotiating while there’s love and goodwill and camaraderie and partnership. Have these conversations when you still like each other. Let’s craft a way that, were we to split, it would feel okay to both of us. Let’s just do that now and then put it in a drawer and we don’t have to deal with it and hopefully we’re married for another 50 years. It’s just for peace of mind because if you don’t do that and then you split and you’re in animosity land, nobody wants to concede anything. You’re done compromising.
It can literally change your relationship and make your marriage feel so much more open and like you’re on equal footing because you talked about if we split, this is what we’re going to do. And we both feel okay about this. Why wouldn’t you want to give yourself that peace of mind and do that exercise as a couple?
Lane: Part of what the Strangers discourse reveals is that there is this undercurrent in most heterosexual marriages of I know this relationship is unequal in various ways, but we’re conditioned to not talk about it. Because that seems not romantic or it seems not trusting. In some ways it’s galling that Belle Burden let all this happen and that she had no idea how much money her husband was making and then was shocked to find out that he had been hoarding it from her for years. But also, this is exactly what women are conditioned to do in relationships.
Cindy: There’s so much underneath these decisions we make that aren’t truly discussed. I spoke to a financial advisor and she said: no woman should ever step out of the workforce. Point blank. I would never advise anyone to step out of the workforce. It’s not a good choice. Economist Corinne Low talks about your job as your money machine (read my interview with her here). If you are not continuing to update your money machine, it isn’t going to make as much money. Meanwhile your husband’s money machine just gets more evolved and upgraded while yours is sitting in the garage stagnating. I know it feels like we will have our children forever. But we don’t. We have them for 18 years and then they leave. And so what are you doing then? I think it’s very healthy for women to have careers not just so they are less vulnerable in their marriage but so that when their kids are gone, they get to go into this whole new phase of their lives and not have that identity crisis.
I understand that there are some women who want to stay home and raise their children. And I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have that choice. I am saying get yourself a postnup if you make that choice. Make that choice but protect yourself. Because you do not want to find yourself in a situation, as so many women do, where your husband has this high-powered career, they don’t want to pay spousal support, and you just have child support coming in and it’s not enough to pay your bills and you do not have a career to fall back on. So give yourself a little runway. That’s what spousal support can do for you.
What else do you want to know? I’ll do my best to answer in the comments.
The Feminist Guide to Money in Marriage with Cindy DiTiberio, The Love & Money Podcast.
The Math of Motherhood with Cindy DiTiberio, Women & Money: The Shit We Don’t Talk About Podcast.
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