He invested 350k in the stock market without my knowledge or consent!

[SoleMate]

California is a community property state. All of the earnings (and losses) of either partner during the marriage are to be equally shared. That is the LAW. (Maybe some people think the law should be different, but that's an argument to take up with the Legislature, not just by your own personal fiat.)

 

Furthermore, in a California marriage, each spouse owes the other the HIGHEST FIDUCIARY duty, good faith and fair dealing, which includes both full accounting and joint decision making if desired. If you feel your spouse is mismanaging your community assets, or just keeping you in the dark, you have the right to demand an accounting. If the accounting shows gross mismanagement, then you most likely will have the right to legally force a receivership or some other way of preventing the assets from being destroyed. Obviously, you'll need legal help for this. (Divorce is NOT required for you to enforce your rights to community assets.)

 

Please have a legal consultation with a terrific family law lawyer ASAP. It will be money well spent.

[She's_NotInLove_w/Me]

Please have a legal consultation with a terrific family law lawyer ASAP. It will be money well spent.

 

First thought that came to my mind when I read the above sentence; If my wife was working with an attorney to control my paycheck and what I do with it... I would rather be done than deal with that fight. Time to retain my own attorney to file for divorce.

 

Then I thought, well, if my daughter were in this situation down the road, how would I feel about it then - and I thought, perhaps it's reasonable advice...

 

Again, I think the bottom line comes down to communication and it becomes obvious to me there is so much more here than just how he is spending / investing his money (or should I say their money?).

 

I don't believe it could be an issue for me personally though, as I would never spend and/or invest thousands of dollars without the explicit knowledge and consent of my wife - not unless I was looking for a backhanded way out of the marriage....

[onward]

I divorced in CA, did a lot of research, talked with several lawyers, and we structured our own settlement.

 

Bottom line is that earnings during the marriage are THEIR earnings, not His and Hers. That's the law.

 

It is also common sense. The guys spouting otherwise are simply un-educated, with 19th century ideals. I don't say this lightly, I say this because your view of marriage is clearly one where one person is effectively paying the other a stipend, a wife is a kept dependent or an employee. The law, and most of this country's society does not share your view. Sure, you'd rather keep all your paycheck and not split it, but you should have read and understood the basic premise behind marriage -- this isn't new, and has been the case for a handful of decades.

 

Money and assets that were his before the marriage (or hers), are not community, they belong to the one that has them. And... in California, this includes the down payment on the house (if it can be shown that one party paid more than the other with their personal property, that they had kept separate since before the marriage).

 

I don't think that she'd have much of a case about him losing the money in "the stock market". I think that there's a lot that goes into this loaded statement that we simply don't know about, and it is not at all clear that he did anything wrong.

 

Many women are not active nor aware of their family's finances and investment activities. In my situation, no matter how much I tried to pull my X into it she was not interested. Then when she decided she was done she started being very antagonistic about how I managed money. She even claimed she did not know about certain transactions, when in fact she and I both went to the financial planner together heard explanations together, and both SIGNED contracts. There was no case there anyway for her, because 100% of my investments were my assets which preceded the marriage. All I did during the marriage was divest and bring her into some investments. My paycheck, though large, paid for a comfortable lifestyle for both of us.

 

In the past 2 years MANY portfolios saw declines of 40 or 50% or even more. This includes many "safe" and balanced 401K, IRA, and mutual fund investments. The fact that the OP's husband lost this much does not mean that he was negligent, nor does it mean that he is a gambler. Was he day-trading? picking individual stocks? or was he simply invested in well balanced mutual funds? There's no way to know based on the information.

 

In my case I saw similar declines (40%), but also much higher in absolute $ amounts. My money was manged by well respected money managers, it was mainly invested in balanced mutual funds (stocks, bonds, REITs), etc. It was a text book diversified portfolio. It did not matter, the markets crashed, and pretty much every investment class got hit. At that time I received lots of advice to take it all out, or to convert to cash large portions. This protects from further losses, but also prevents as meaningful of a participation in a recovery.

 

Many investors took this advice by the way and did get out around the bottoming out of the market. The OP's husband may have done the same, and therefore today they are still down a large amount.

 

In my case I stayed invested, rode the upswing, and have seen the losses paired in half, so now I'm just down 20%. I also borrowed to keep my house, last thing I wanted to do was sell under duress. The house value recovered nicely too.

 

The divorce took its financial toll as well, but today, 7 months after physical separation and 3 weeks before final decree, I'm happy. I didn't want the divorce, hated what it did to my child and I. I certainly hated the financial hemorrhaging from both the failing economy and the divorce.

 

But... as someone here said to me once in jest "Do you know why getting a divorce is so expensive?

Because it is worth every penny!"

Edited February 14, 2010 by onward