Preserving Wealth, My #1 Tip. Don't Get Married! (Or Maybe You Should?)

[Vigilante]

I count myself as one of the lucky ones who married right. She married a middle manager, not an entrepreneur, but when I changed my focus, she took it all in stride. She was with me as we climbed to the top, enjoying the country club, private airplanes, boats, horses, and the condo overlooking the Vegas strip. She stuck with me when it all collapsed and we were reduced to living in an 83 Accord. She stayed with me while I did it all again, this time selling before the dot com crash would have had us looking for another Honda to move in to. Along the way, she became an entrepreneur herself (she decided it was fun) but helped me achieve my current success. I get it though. I walked into the casino with empty pockets and came out with them stuffed. And I count my blessings every day.

Cheers,
O-2

It's NOT luck.

 

[Rawr]

So much fear and drama in this thread. You won't change anyone's mind on MARRYING someone they think they love with divorce rates and videos. And those who are single figure they'll marry the right person anyway. Best advice is what MJ said - find someone, live with them, go through some hard times with them. THEN marry. An old professor once told me you have to see your gf really angry before you marry her - you must see what she's like. (goes for both parties)

 

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[Esquire]

the odds of you experiencing those negatives has been exaggerated. First and foremost is a failure to understand how statistics work. Just because 50% of people get divorced (or, in reality, more like 43%), does not mean that every person has a 50/50 shot at getting divorced.

No ... but as @GIlman aptly noted ... if your number comes up ... you feel 100% of the effect.

I mean ... suppose I stick one bullet in a six shooter ...

Would you stick it in your mouth and pull the trigger ...?

Odds are only 16.6% your head doesn't get blown off.

You've got an 83.4% of walking away.

Are YOU going to pull that trigger ...?

Not me.

Two unmarried people can live their lives together "happily ever after" just as easy as a married couple.

Difference is ... no bullets in the chamber.

I'm not taking that risk.

A divorce may take 50% of your stuff, but if your business crashes and burns (whether by fate or by the deceit of partners) you stand to lose everything. Yet most of us take this gamble, and lose, and get back up, and lose it again. I shared with some people at the meetup that I lost $4,000 in a period of about 24 hours when I was first starting out. And that's just a gentle rap on the knuckles compared to the absolutely savage a$$ beating people have suffered when their whole company went down in flames. Lots of us here are familiar with the feeling of surplussing yourself beyond requirement, I've taken out loans worth 50% more than my net worth before. If shit goes sideways, I have no recourse to repay it, I lose everything.

Some of you guys are too fearful.

If a business creditor gets a million dollar judgment against me ... I spend $1500 on a bankruptcy petition ... and just like that ... four months later ... I am 100% debt free.

And there is a 90% chance (or so) that I walk away from my debts ... AND keep all of my stuff.

Not so bad.

Start again.

And ... as @GlobalWealth will tell ya ... there are all sorts of things you can do with corporate entities ... insurance ... and liability waivers ... to minimize your exposure to risk in business ... even if you do not go the bankruptcy route (which you can file every eight years).

But ... if your ex gets a million dollar alimony award ... or a million dollar stream of payments via lifetime alimony (or similar) ... you are terminally F*ckED.

For the rest of your life.

It never goes away.

And if you can't pay it ... but the judge "thinks" you can ... you go to jail.

Indefinitely.

Getting married is 10x more dangerous than starting a business.

Not even close.

I don't care if the odds are 50% ... 25% ... or 10% ... I am NOT sticking that gun in my mouth.

It is reckless.

There is NOTHING a married couple can do ... that Sharon and I cannot do as a couple.

Wear a ring. Change our name. Buy a house. Whatever.

We are together because we WANT to be together ... and no other reason.

The government is NOT welcome in my bedroom.

We prefer FREEDOM.

 

[RHL]

+$700 rep bank in less than 1 hour smh I'm ditching this automotive shit and writing books.

 

[Vigilante]

I dont want to go to details or start a new thread but marriage ruined me... specially when the person has mental issues which she hided during the relationship.
You will "finger" your life with the wrong person from A to Z.
Im happy that i didnt make any children it would get much more worse.

Im Currently on divorce and payed already the sum of a Good equipped BMW.

Marriage didn't ruin you.

Your inability to choose wisely did.

We are a sum total of the choices we make.

It's too easy for you to put the blame elsewhere.

You made a bad choice. "Marriage" didn't ruin you. You ruined yourself by not being able to find a better mate.

Unless you understand that you're destined to repeat it again. In the United States we call this "thinking with the big head."

 

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[Even Steven]

And there is a 50% chance ... that's where you'll end up.

I've always heard the 50% statistic, so I went to look it up the current rate and found this article: http://www.divorcesource.com/ds/main/u-s-divorce-rates-and-statistics-1037.shtml

Also, this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02/divorce-rate-declining-_n_6256956.html

Check the links above. Things are not quite as doom-and-gloom as you guys paint it. The divorce rate is less than 50%, and has been declining slowly. Having said that, it's still high (estimated ~40% for young couples getting married for the first time).

Bad Foundations

"Ninety percent of all new businesses fail within five years, and I know why they fail. They fail because they fail the Commandment of Need."
(MJ DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane )

A lot of businesses fail because they are built on bad foundations. Same as a lot of marriages. However, a business or marriage constructed with care and knowledge have a much better chance of succeeding.

If someone came here to this forum, read all of the gold posts, had talks with the successful members, and understood and took to heart all the things they said, how much better would her odds of succeeding be?

If someone wanted to get married and, prior to tying the knot, talked to people who have been successfully and happily married, talked to those he trusted about his potential spouse to get honest opinions, and waited until he was a little older, how much higher would his chances of success be?

For those who don't want to get married, don't get married. I've known plenty of great people and some really good friends who have chosen not to get married. That's each person's choice. But please don't put up warnings of imminent doom to those who would like to. There's a lot to be said for marriage, and there are a lot of successful ones.

My wife and I were a little older than average when we got married. I was 26, she was 30. We've been together almost 10 years and have 2 kids. We fight at times, sometimes a lot. But we've got a pretty happy life together. We work together toward common goals, we support each other, and we each, in the end, admit to fault when we've f*cked up. Before we got married, we each consulted those who were close to us to get their opinions, and we went through a few sessions of pre-marital counseling before the wedding. That's not to say we're free and clear. You always have to work at it. But there's a way to go about it that drastically increases your odds.

Also, vasectomies!

 

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[Vigilante]

Last I checked this thread is still open. And you're still here.






And I'm still married.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

C'mon folks, there's no need to be combative in this thread.

If my married friends don't want to have kids, I'm not going to argue with them why they should. This debate is kinda like that -- its nice to hear opposing viewpoints so the "undecideds" can judge for themselves.

And hey, look at this, the thread actually included comments from a divorce attorney and an asset protection specialist, plus from those happily married.. I'd say the thread has been valuable for both sides of the debate. Let's please keep it civil. Gracious.

PS: Title edited, notable tag added (Basically SILVER, LOL.)

 

[Esquire]

Alright guys ... what is the best country to get married in?

This a easy.

Make glorious Kazak nation. Women there strong on plow. Vajheen worka well. And my sister is fourth best prostitute In village.

Is a nice!

 

[Roland]

Interesting to read the different points of view.

I think most of the main arguments have been said already so I won't come back on that but let me tell you my story. Even if it doesn't make you change your mind on marriage, it will definitely entertain you for a while.

Once upon a time, ten years ago (almost to the day), I had just started an engineering university where classes were given in French, Spanish and English. A few months after having started the academic year, I decided that I needed to practice my Spanish and went to see one of my teachers to ask her if she knew people who would be happy to talk to me. Her response was basically: go online, there are a lot of chats and forums, you should be able to find what you want.

So I did just that. I found a Spanish chat and started to "talk" to a lot of people. Actuallly when I say talk here I mean trying to read what people were writing but it was going up so quickly in the small window that my poor Spanish skills were not enough to catch anything. So I prepared a single "catch phrase" that went something along the lines of: Hi, I am a French student and want to practice my Spanish, if you want to talk to me please PM me. And I just copied and pasted that again and again every 30 seconds or so. That's how I started talking with about 50 people.

Among those people was one girl. She was from Colombia, from a country I would not even have been able to locate on the map at that time. Nothing happened really, just a few chats where she was telling me that I was probably a liar pretending to be French when I was probably living in her city or country. Then after a few months, I figured out that it was almost like having a friend, discussing more or less every day about what was going on in our life and so on. My Spanish was improving with all these people I was talking to and I was starting to think that talking to people online was not such a bad idea as I initially thought I was.

Fast forward a few months, one night after my day at university, we were talking about how it is to live in Colombia (I had done some research in the meantime and discovered what the medias show of this country) and out of the blue she told me: if you really want to see how it is here, find your next intership close to my house and I will accomodate you. The idea sounded nice but SCARY. I was 20 and the only thing I knew about Colombia was what was broadcast by the media.

But then I decided to give it a try as I would still be able to reject the offer for an internship if I ever found one. So I emailed all the big-ish companies in the cities asking for a intership (I realized much later that such a thing didn't exist there) and none of them even answered. Then not knowing what else to do, I emailed all the universities of the city asking them if they had an internship service or a list of companies I could contact as it is usually done over here. None of them answered except one actually whose answer was more or less along the lines of: tell us what you can do, what you want to do, how much money you want and we will find you something.

Long story short, three months later, I had won all the bureaucracy battles and I got my visa for Colombia 5 days before my flight was due for take off.

I spent 6 months there the first time I went and this was the biggest eye opener of my entire life. In terms of relationships, in terms of ways of living, at pretty much all levels. Nothing at all was as I knew it... and I loved it for the very first second.

During those 6 months, I became obvious pretty quickly that my relationship with this girl was getting much deeper than the one between two friends and we decided to try and get her a visa so that she could come to France and see how it was and if she liked it as much as I liked Colombia. But how do you do that when you are a student with massive student loans and on her side a broke third country girl belonging to a broke family? (By the way one thing I discovered there is how it feels to wake up in the morning without having enough money to buy food for lunch, that teaches you a few lessons as well)

Again fast forward a few months, we tried getting money from everywhere we could, I launched a company there and made some, she worked in another company and made some, we got friends to help us etc... every way was a good way and finally just after I had to fly back to France for the last year of my studies, she applied for a visa and two weeks after it was denied. Lost the money of the application and all the documents and we didn't even know why. We assumed it was because for applying for a tourist visa you needed to have a certain amount of money blocked on a bank account (not specified how much) and we guessed that amount we had was not enough so we tried to get some more and re-applied a few months later, to have it denied again and loose again the money and documents.

Long story short once again, 18 months later and 5 visa requests denied (tourist, student, au-pair... we tried everything) there was no money left and no option.

In fact there was only one, namely: getting married. But for me it was a big no-no. I was only 23 and coming from an old catholic family, I had no idea how to manage this with my relatives. On her side, she was rather pushy on the fact that it was the last option and that we should go for it which I tended to explain by the fact that I was probably a good European catch for a south american girl (quite pretentious sorry) but then it became so much pressure that I just told her to back off. I asked her to give me one full month without even mentionning the topic and when this delay had passed, I would tell her what we would do.

Let's put it that way, I have had some difficult decisions to make in my life but to this day, this one is still the most challenging I have ever had to make. I litteraly spent three weeks hardly sleeping, trying for figure out what to do. It wasn't so much the question of whether or not I should get married but much more how I would handle the family topic.

At the end, I came up to the conclusion that I only had to options. Either I did it and it might not go well but at least I would have tried it or I didn't do it and I might have regretted it my whole life. So I decided to go for it.

Again in three months I had all the paperwork done (finished two days before taking off) and on the day, I took off alone to get married. I had only mentionned to my parents that I was going to get married and they didn't really accept it, to the day they still say that they discovered it when the city published the paperwork of the marriage project. Even my siblings didn't know about it. That was the only way I found to deal with the situation. I broke the news to my brothers and sisters three days before the wedding by email. They weren't really happy

Ok, so three years after first meeting her online, I got married and I spent the rest of the week queueing with my wife to get stamps on documents, translate those documents, go back to the 10 hour queue to get the translations stamped. I could even give you more funny detailed but that's already too long for one post

I flew back to France again, alone, dealt with my family who didn't really believed that I was married and one month later, she got her spouse visa and arrived. At this stage, she couldn't speak a word in French and my family didn't speak Spanish. The day I introduced them to each other was the most awkward moment of the whole story. Each party looking at the other in the eye without being able to say anything and me in the middle translating in both ways.

6 months later, she could speak French and started to train in book production (what she had studied in Colombia but her degrees weren't valid in France), she trained during one year and worked in parallel in a company producing books. And at the end of the year, her boss told her that she could have a job in the company but that she wasn't going to use any machine because "you are a woman". She laughed and quit on the spot.

Later that day when she got home, she started thinking about what to do. As we could live on my salary at that time and as in Colombia you work in what gives you money and not on what you want, I told her to chose something she really wanted to do. And she said she always wanted to be a beauty therapist. Don't ask me why, that is still something I don't fully get as I can't see how waxing people's hairs everyday is any kind of fun but anyway The only thing that was worrying me was that there is a lot of competition in this field so I told her ok but if you want to go in this industry you have to be the best.

So we looked for the best private school in France and we were lucky enough that the start of the training was only 5 months down the line so she took a job cleaning toilets and washing dishes at night in a restaurant and made enough money to pay for the training. This training was 2 hours away from home and she was commuting every day.

With the poor French she had at the time, she still managed to graduate from this training within the top 3 and then came the time to find a job.
Again, I told her to go for the best so we figured that the best Spas in our area was on the south west coast (so about 2 hours away from home again) and we took all the addresses and I drove her there one day, she dressed up and we decided to try the best of all first as there was no way she could be accepted there... well half an hour later, she came out and told me that the manager said: I like your balls so you have a job.

I know this seems to be a little bit off topic but stay with me, it will make sense at the end.

A few months later, she had an opportunity to go to Paris for an beauty exhibition and again I told her, if she wanted to be in the best places in the country, she had to go to the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris and try to get a job. She did that and half a day later, she called me saying that she had a job in one of the best salon of the best location in Paris...

Again fast forward, I had an opportunity to move to the UK for an interesting job (I didn't know anything about business at that time as it was long before I even read TMF so I was just working a job like everyone told me I had to do), we talked about it and decided to move abroad. Once again, if my English was poor at that time, her was nil. Not a word and again she started from scratch, learning on her own, then six months later finding a job waiting tables to practice and eventually landed a job in the best salon of the city we are living in.

When she decided to go for being a beauty therapist, I promised her one day I would give her a salon of her own (remember I didn't know anything about fastlane at that time) but last year, I thought that it was time to do what I had said and give her her salon but now that I was a bit wiser in terms of business, I wanted to do something that could benefit me as well and create a scalable business. So I thought that we might be able to adapt some hypnosis techniques that used to be used for surgical operations before chemical anaesthetics were discovered and use them to reduce the pain of the painful beauty treatments like hair removal. So I trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and managed to get a few people to help me do what I wanted to do. In the meantime, I had launched a company to deliver mobile beauty services and we used some of those customers to test our technique. In a few months we were able to buy her a car, we doubled the turn over every month during the first 6 months, then we found a place, I spent all my nights and weekends refurbishing it and 5 weeks later, we were opening our first salon.

It took my wife three weeks to be fully booked 70 hours a week, then I hired another therapist to help her who she trained to her standards, three weeks later, they were both fully booked and we have now been opened for three months and I am looking for a third therapist and my accountant told me yesterday that I should start considering opening a second one to reduce the profit and pay less taxes.

So all this wall of words for what?

Marriage for me is not an event. It only is a step in a life long project and as any other project it has to be worked on every single day.

You have to choose wisely every single path you decide to go down whether it is who you decide to make your life partner, whether it is what industry you decide to go into. There is no difference, it is all down to how you make your decisions.

Do you think I would be where I am today without my wife? No, definitely not.
I would probably be richer in money yes but all the crap we had to go through to have the little things we have today have taught me much more than any money could ever pay for and my wife is my business motivation. I don't get up in the morning for me but because I chose to give her what she has never been able to have before and on the way, I am enjoying the trip. I took an idea and I am making it bigger and bigger every day and it works much more than any stupid business idea I had before when I was thinking of making me richer.

So please don't tell me that marriage is statistically bound to failure. It is not marriage which is bound to failure, it is the weakness of people personnality and the bad choices they make. Without marriage, I wouldn't be where I am today.

A life with a good life partner is like anything else, it is like the business project you are currently working on: you want it bad enough? They go get it... period!

 

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[Bila]

Curious to see what others think .......personally, i see your point and understand, eventhough, culturally it's difficult for me to imagine a long term relationship without marriage or living together without marriage ( my poor mom would have a heart attack :-(

 

[OscarDeuce]

It's NOT luck.

You're right Vigilante, it wasn't luck. A lot of it was hard work. Most things worth having are worth working hard for. We made a commitment to each other, and neither of us takes it lightly.

Cheers,
O-2

 

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[DreamsCameTrue]

Wealthy entrepreneurs of tomorrow, just remember when you're getting wiped out by lawyers....I TOLD YOU SO!

You read it right here in 2015. If your spouse and the lawyers wipe the floor with you and take every cent you have YOU WERE WARNED!

There's a full 90 minute documentary on the topic, and you passed on the chance to watch it. Remember that.

There's a divorce lawyer sitting here on the forum telling you that it's all true, and if you choose to ignore this, do so at your own peril.

You think you can "choose wisely" and get around divorce that way? Well that's what everyone thinks. No matter how smart you think you are, you cannot predict what another human will do or how another human will feel 20 years from now. Are you some kind of psychological expert? I don't think you are.

You think you can "work really hard" on your relationship to avoid divorce? When your spouse is bored, wants more money, or just has massive financial incentive to divorce you, there's gonna be no amount of "hard work" that will save you.

You think you can hide your money offshore? Guess what....they will find it and they will take it.

The good news is you can have a totally fulfilling relationship with all perks of marriage even if you don't get married. It's not just about protecting yourself from financial ruin, it's also about protecting your spouse and your kids. If lawyers take all your money with the help of judges, who's gonna pay for your kids' college? Who's gonna pay for your kids' first house? What will there be for them to inherit when you're gone?

The smartest men and women in the world have been victimized by divorce, if you think you've got a better shot than them, you're no different from a gambling addict sitting in a casino blowing tens of thousands of dollars, insisting that he can beat the house at their own game.

 

[AlterJoule]

 

[Esquire]

Esq., I came into this as one of your biggest fans. However, this thread has gone off the rails. Your last couple quotes have been ridiculous, borderline delusional and spawned by your own poor experience. Your relationship with your live-in is 100% distinguishable from other relationships, namely my own. Your past scars and hurts betray you. In the interest of maintaining a respectful relationship with you, this will be my last post in this thread that I can't continue to watch. I have respect for your legal analysis, respect for you as a person and a contributor to this forum, but your viewpoints on relationships as seen through the lens of your legal practice are warped. Aspects of this thread with regard to the legal mitigation have been healthy. Other aspects of this thread with regard to disparagement of traditional values are disgusting. In the interest of harmony and not prolonging the life of this thread, I'm out.

Well ... you are correct. I view marriage as "nothing more" than a legal relationship. A material adjustment of legal rights in favor of the state.

I view marriage no differently than I would any other legal relationship.

Well ... no different in the legal sense, that is.

And you are also correct ... I have no respect ... whatsoever ... for "traditional" values.

Tradition ... the long-standing sentiments of society ... is (imho) a poor reason to adopt any line of thinking.

I prefer to exercise my own reason and judgement ... free of any social convention.

My values are ... admittedly ... very different from that of mainstream society.

No question there.

But that's part of what makes me unique.

And ... arguably ... dangerous ... to the status quo.


No offense taken Vig.

I'm a lawyer.

I argue for a living ... enjoy stirring the pot ... and relish in a good debate.

Just another day at the job.

 

[Vigilante]

Yes you can sit in the wrong plane that you choosed.. but which will crash in few hours.
Probability ? almost none.. you think. So you will get in the plane.

On the serious note, if i have any relationship in the future i will do a "stress test".
And i will more rely on Logical answers then "you know it better darling".

You're too easy on yourself.

You sat on a plane with bolts coming off, a pilot that smelled of alcohol, and the engine was smoking before takeoff.

Then you got surprised when it crashed.

The same girl you married is now driving the BMW you paid for.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Yes you can sit in the wrong plane that you choosed

Wow, classic example on how we like to blame externalities on our circumstances and build a narrative that excuses it.

You sat on a plane with bolts coming off, a pilot that smelled of alcohol, and the engine was smoking before takeoff.

Then you got surprised when it crashed.

The same girl you married is now driving the BMW you paid for.

Bam! Zing!

But, the sex was good right? She was hot and all my friends liked her! It just made sense to get married after 2 months eh!?

Sorry to be facetious, but the dance of circumstance is often waltzed in the puddles we create. Take responsibility-- marriage didn't ruin you, a poor choice did. And a good choice will get you back on your feet.

 

[FastNAwesome]

Want to stay together until you die? You can do that without marriage.

Where I'm from, living together for a while gets treated like a marriage if there's any dispute. So my recommendation is to always check local laws.

 

[Esquire]

Yeah say no as long as you want until a girl tells you " Baby, this is not negociable....your money ? Fair enough ...toss it in an offshore account, prenup, wherever you want, i dont care .........being husband and wife ? I do care ......" .....talking from experience .

"She" might say that ... "whatever you want" ... but a divorce court judge ... may be of a very different mindset.

Putting your money in an offshore account does you no good. The judge can place you under arrest for civil contempt indefinitely. Whenever you feel like making a big fat ATM withdrawal ... is the day you get released. There is no limit on how long they can keep you locked up.

Offshore accounts mean nothing when you are in prison.

If your sweetheart says "I do care" ... you say "so do I" ... and hold your ground.

Cohabitation agreement ... or nothing.

I'm not turning over the keys to my future because "someone else" is "sentimental" about marriage.

Worse case scenario ... plenty of fish in the sea.

 

[GuestUser113]

Alright, so as some people noted, there's something fishy going on here. Marriage is something that has real risks. What @Esquire and @GIlman were saying should be taken into consideration.

However, the odds of you experiencing those negatives has been exaggerated. First and foremost is a failure to understand how statistics work. Just because 50% of people get divorced (or, in reality, more like 43%), does not mean that every person has a 50/50 shot at getting divorced. Just like the statistic that "1/3 of black men have been to prison" does not mean that there is a 33% chance that the black son of two black Yale Law grads with a 3.9 GPA and 96th percentile SAT scores will end up in prison some time in their lives. Factors matter. All men (and women) are not equal.

So what are the factors known to affect divorce?

1. Age of the participants in the marriage. If you're both over 23, your odds of divorce go down, and it continues to fall as you get older.

2. Age differential between the participants. If you're close in age, the odds of divorce go down.

3. Educational attainments and divorce have a curvilinear relationship, meaning that your odds of divorce are lowest if you either have no higher education or lots of it. The rates seem highest for college dropouts (sorry, no graph this time).

4. Equal educational attainments. If you and your spouse have graduate degrees, the odds of divorce goes down again.

5. Race. as of the middle of last decade, whites are less likely to get divorced than blacks. Hispanics are less likely to get divorced than whites, and Asians, especially Asian women, are less likely to get divorced than all those groups. Remember again that this is likely a result of the conditions and values that are likely to surround each individual during childhood (wealth vs. poverty, strict nuclear family values vs. broken homes, etc.), so if you're black but from a rich, well educated family, the "average" is going to represent you very poorly.

6. Being a baller. A 1995 study found that the divorce rate for the highest income group is about 18% lower than the lowest income group. Contrary to the scaremongering in this thread, the more fastlane you are, the less likely your spouse is to leave:

7. History. If neither of you came from a broken home, your odds of getting a divorce are lower.

8. Finances and debt. If you don't fight about money (I hate self-reported metrics, but that's what we've got) and don't have debts (objective) your odds of divorce go way down.

9. Recidivism. Unbelievably, if you get divorced once, your odds of getting divorced again are higher than average. If you've never been divorced, odds go down. Estimates say that second marriages may be around 66% probability of getting divorced, third are up around 75%.

So what's all this mean? Well, if you're an 27 year old Korean with a master's degree and no debt who just got hitched to a 26 year old Korean medical doctor with no debt, and did not begin cohabiting before age 23, and both your parents are still together, and you're headed for the top income bracket (as all fastlaners should be), your odds of getting divorced are not 50%. They are, in fact, nowhere near that number. What are they actually? it can be hard to combine cross-factors and figure it out, but you can see how much just a single factor affects the rates, then guess what that would be compounded. 10% 5%? Less?

Then comes the hard part. You need to sit down seriously and ask yourself what you're doing here. The 50% divorce statistic is definitely inflated, as prior posters pointed out, but you know what isn't inflated? The failure rate of startups:

Ask @Vigilante, or if you haven't yet (for the love of God, why?) listen to his Mind Your Business Podcast: A divorce may take 50% of your stuff, but if your business crashes and burns (whether by fate or by the deceit of partners) you stand to lose everything. Yet most of us take this gamble, and lose, and get back up, and lose it again. I shared with some people at the meetup that I lost $4,000 in a period of about 24 hours when I was first starting out. And that's just a gentle rap on the knuckles compared to the absolutely savage a$$ beating people have suffered when their whole company went down in flames. Lots of us here are familiar with the feeling of surplussing yourself beyond requirement, I've taken out loans worth 50% more than my net worth before. If shit goes sideways, I have no recourse to repay it, I lose everything.

Some of you guys are too fearful.

When you see that the odds are 50% of success, if you say "I'll probably be in the half that fails, I should avoid that" you're banking on failure. That gets even worse if the actual odds of failure are 10-12% and you still say "Why bother? I'll probably still fail." Almost all of you talking with your mouths like you're trying to join the "1%," but your actions say that you're F*cking banking on being the bottom 50%, as you trip over yourselves in a frantic mob to figure out how to get your sign-up for Odesk approved after somebody waved in front of you the oh-so-tantalizing-prospect of ten dollars an hour, in what was supposed to be a last-resort move to save yourself from being broke. Are you kidding me? Did the masthead on this site change to the "Sidewalk Forum" while I wasn't looking?

I already shared this, but a couple of years ago I was reading an article in Wharton's alumni magazine with ten billionaire alumni. Seven of the ten had one common "success factor" that they named independently. Learning to code? Good education? Compounding interest?

No. Their spouse.

It stuck with me even as a teenager. I can remember closing that up, then going out to skateboard and just chewing on the thought over and over...

Wow.

It was their wife, not their Penn degrees (I was raised to think that your degree and educational institution was the be-all and end-all of your success) that they saw as crucial in the end.

You guys want to become billionaires, but you won't listen to what they have to say. You won't take risks. You see the danger and you bow out. Yeah, you can lose 50%. You can end up in prison. You can end up with $300K/yr in alimony and another $300K/yr in child support. For each of those seven billionaires whose wives were integral in their success, there might be a could-have-been-a-billionaire who lost big in a marriage. But if you want safe, what are you doing here? By picking up TMF and doing what it says, you stand a very small chance of making it big, but you stand a very big chance of loosing everything. Am I taking an imprudent risk by being married, and by not divorcing my wife now when my net worth is below $1M and we have no kids? You goddamn right I am. But I'm not an employee. I'm not the 99%. It's why I'm already expecting to retire THREE TIMES sooner than I would have if I'd stuck to my old path, and why I'm staying married. I'm an entrepreneur. I always bet on being the 1%. I always bet on being the anomaly. I always plan to be the fluke.

Taking statistically imprudent risks is what I do for a living.

 

[RHL]

And I bet that relationship wasn't perfect from the start.

They had to work at it together until they made it work and they were stronger together because of it.

Militia est vita hominis super terram. [Life is warfare for humans on earth] -St. Jerome, misattributed to the author of Job because he didn't understand classical Hebrew that well.

Everything worthwhile is a fight. That's life, so let's get to it.

Or just get married in spirit and get a cohabitation agreement.

Yes. Also, most people on here probably don't know this, but religious people (or people concerned about the opinion of religious relatives) should know that pastors and priests, especially from what's often called the "main line" (Episcopal, United Methodist, Presbtyerian Church (USA) United Church of Christ, etc. and rabbis (especially Reform Jewish), and probably imams, but my dealings with them are pretty minimal so I'm not sure, if someone knows they can chime in, are often open to doing the full religious portion of the wedding (so your wedding day would be visually identical to a typical religious marriage ceremony to all attendees) while privately agreeing with the couple to not file the paperwork to make it government official, which is often seen as a modern inconvenience, addition to what god requires, or aggravation, at least for a sizable number of clergy. This is actually something they do very often for elderly couples, where God's blessing and obeying (usually) prohibitive religious doctrines concerning extramarital sex is important, but where a legal marriage in the eyes of the government would cause the widowers to lose the pensions that their deceased spouses busted their behinds for decades to earn. So the result is that the parents (or you) are happy, and you minimize or eliminate the legal risk (but forfeit health care, shared life insurance, etc. benefits) too.

 

[throttleforward]

I just wanted to chime in that after coming home and describing @Esquire 's presentation to my wife, we agreed that it was in our and our son's best interest to get a post-nup that fairly protected both of us and our son and got any future divorce proceedings out of the family court system and into the hands of a mediator to the greatest extent possible.

Interestingly, having this conversation with her actually makes me feel closer to her. It confirms that she is willing to forego what may be a future financial windfall because she cares about me, about our son, and about fairness.

I wanted to throw out to the group that there are options for those of us who are married.

 

[Bila]

Overheard " This economical crisis is worse than a divorce, i lost all my money and still have my wife " ......sorry, was dying to use it somewhere.

 

[Esquire]

The problem with this is that you're trying to put a price tag on something that isn't tangible (love / tradition / oath to another person / etc)... If someone grew up and all they wanted to do was marry someone and raise a really amazing family, how can you put a price tag on that?

Sure if you don't care about the title and your special someone doesn't, then by all means don't get married. But if your special someone has dreamed about it since they were 5 years old like you did a Ferrari, who are you to kill that ?

The value of marriage is set by the people engaged in it, not your bank account.

No ... I'm not.

Sharon and I have been happily "together" for close a decade ... going on a projected forever.

I've got no shortage of love here ...

What I don't have ... is the government.

My relationship with Sharon ... is indistinguishable from anyone else's relationship (with whomever) ... with one notable exception -- what happens if we break up.

I can walk away.

No divorce here.

No alimony. No property division. No debt allocations.

Nothing.

Just walk away. Free will.

Divorce, on the other hand ...?

Pay ... or go to jail.

Bye-bye stuff.

How much stuff ...? How much money ...?

Depends on the mood of the judge that day.

No ... seriously ... it is about that scientific.

Can I put a price tag on that ...?

You bet your a$$ I can.

That's the difference.

Same love. Same relationship.

Free will.

And nothing else.

 

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[GlobalWealth]

Because, and this is the only pearl I offer here (from my own experience - echoed by others)...if you EVER do divorce, the person you go through divorce with will be a person you have never met, they will be completely unrecognizable to you....

I could not possibly agree more with this statement. (And the entire post from @GIlman for that matter).

I am about 3 years into a nasty divorce. 6 months after our separation one of my best friends warned me that this divorce will get crazier than I could ever imagine. I laughed it off.

I cannot post details on a public forum as I am in the middle of it (there's a huge hint for you), but I can say we are at about 6 figures in legal fees, my kids are completely disgusted, we have pending cases in 2 countries and my lawyers expect this to take at least 2-4 more years just to finalize the divorce. I expectthe custody battle to finish on my youngest's 18th birthday.

And we were married 18 years. Never saw this level of craziness. Ever.





Sent from my SM-G900FD using Tapatalk

 

[Vigilante]

This thread is one more ridiculous post away from being closed. It has been an interesting discussion but it needs to return back to the original topic.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

I'm a bored millionaire

Tell ya what...

I'll keep this thread OPEN, but Ill ban you from commenting on it further.

Ill unban you from this thread when you contribute value to another thread, or start your own. We typically like "bored millionaires" around here but in your case, it seems like this is the only thread you care about. Again, it implies you have connections to the video in this thread.

And BTW, before you try making a case that I'm biased against your position, you should know I've never been married or divorced.

 

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[theag]

That's why we ,people outside the USA, come here because we don't have that in our countries.

We don't have forums like that and I have never heard of money gurus, anywhere but in the USA.

Wizards of money live in the USA. You , american people, are the smartest entrepreneurs... until the dollar crash.

wat

 

[G-Man]

People are unhappy in marriage because they expect marriage to make them happy. Two people, each expecting the other person to to make them happy. Kind of surprised even 50% of marriages survive.

It's a pretty shitty thing to do to another human being if you think about it. "Hey baby, I'm making you responsible for my happiness for the next 40 years"

Maybe, instead of thinking about what we want from marriage, we think about what we bring to it. Maybe, instead of thinking about how we can get others to meet our needs, we think about how we can meet others' needs.

It's a shame that there's no other part of this forum where we approach problems by thinking about meeting other people's needs

 

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[Lex DeVille]

Also I'm probably more defensive against this because I'm already married (twice haha).

Would probably see through different lenses if I was on the other side.