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

[Shades]

Stop getting married because you think "its what people do". No. Screw that. Thats IMO a huge reason why so many marriages fail. Pressure to get married in the first place. Being married is not "work". Not in the way some make it out to be. If you feel it is, you probably have a shitty marriage. You probably don't enjoy the company of the person you married. You probably got married to someone you like, not someone you love. Maybe you felt you were getting to an age where you "gotta do it, all my friends are". Stop it. Be together for a good looooong time before getting married, see if you still enjoy each other by then. Live together for a loooong time before getting married. See if its still a good idea.

Me and my fiance have been together for 15 years and have lived together for 10 years. We got engaged 8 years ago to no fan fare. No newspaper write ups. We have been through more together then many of these divorced couples could dream of and are still going strong in large part because we have each other.

Someday we will probably file the paperwork. But who really cares? We have other things to focus on for now.

 

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[DreamsCameTrue]

Some people get married because they want to have a party and get lots of attention. Little do they know, you can do that without a marriage certificate.

 

[Journey2Million$]

I recommend to read this article. It is very long article but I think every young male should read this.
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html

That's an awesome article. All of you married guys, your wife can call the police any time and have you kicked out of your house FOREVER just by telling the police that she is worried you might hurt her. No evidence needed. No due process. No recourse for you whatsoever. It's right there in the VAWA law and I read a story about this happening to a guy before. He was a great husband. He had worked long and hard to support his family. He was happy. Then he found out his wife cheated on him and she called the police just to get rid of him forever, while collecting child support and alimony and everything. He kept paying the mortgage and lived in a 1 bedroom apartment. Enjoy your slavery.

There are laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that blatantly declares that violence against women is far worse than violence against men. VAWA is very different from ordinary assault laws, because under VAWA, a man can be removed from his home at gunpoint if the woman makes a single phonecall. No due process is permitted, and the man's Constitutional rights are jettisoned. At the same time, half of all domestic violence is by the woman against the man. Tiger Woods' wife beat him with a blunt weapon and scratched his face, only to be applauded by 'feminists' in a 'you go girl' manner. Projection can normalize barbarism.

This could easily happen to you. All your wife has to do is pick up the phone and you're toast. Then after that comes family court, alimony, child support, and your life is over. But if a man gets beaten by his wife, the police won't do anything. These days a woman can do just about anything to a man except murder and the cops will do nothing about it. I heard about a guy who is in a maximum security prison because he threw his remote control in his girlfriend's direction. It didn't even hit her. I heard a guy say that his wife stole $300,000 from his bank account and ran off with it. The police probably did nothing because he didn't mention getting his money back.

Feminists have been waging a huge war against men for the past several decades with no opposition and there's now a ton of anti-male laws which women can use to crucify us at their whim.

New feminist definition of Mysoginist: a man who cares about his rights and doesn't want to be financially raped or go to jail and be raped by violent criminals because of a false charge by a women or because he was unable to keep up with alimony and/or child support payments.

Every so often I think about moving to another country, but this article makes me want to get out of here more than ever. Besides all the rampant male persecution in America, the taxes are extremely high for people who earn 6 or 7 figures when you add together federal income tax, social security tax, and state income tax. Why should I stay here?

 

[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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[H. Palmer]

I'm hearing more and more of these horror stories of the courts being against men these days.

2 questions.

1. What about a prenup? What does Esquire think of a prenup?

2. Most of the horror seems to come out of California. Is this a hotbed of anti-men courts or is this trend USA wide?

 

[Serks]

Very interesting discussion!

I can understand why some of the guys are quite strong on this topic as the law is geared towards favouring women. My belief is that those in control want to keep the masses of men down so that we stay crippled as slaves or cogs in their precious system.

That being said, I strongly believe in marriage. Some of the most successful people in the world attribute it to picking the right partner to marry. With the right woman in your corner, you can kick a$$. Tony Montana said this as well:
"Okay, here's the story. I come from the gutter. I know that. I got no education...but that's okay. I know the street, and I'm making all the right connections. With the right woman, there's no stopping me. I could go right to the top. Anyway... what I got to tell you is this: I like you. I liked you the first time I laid eyes on you. I said, "She's a tiger."She belongs to me." Anyway... ...I want you to marry me"

Now it's very easy for a guy to say that marriage is unnecessary. It's important to women because this gives them rights, protections and reassurances that they would not have without the marriage. Unfortunately, there are many women out there who are taking advantage of this but this doesn't mean that they all are.

What I suggest is this:
-prenups should be standard for everyone (this gets rid of the relationship/trust arguments that can come up.)
-choose character over chemistry
- each to their own on this one but I would strongly suggest avoiding someone who is superficial and materialistic. This person will find it very difficult to ever be happy. Always chasing after the next shiny object and comparing your success with the apparent material success of others.
-stay away from the expensive rings, weddings etc (stop being a consumer of the massive wedding industry).
-surely there are ways you can protect your wealth if it is of big concern (setting up trusts under business/trusted family members etc- surely as entrepreneurs we can figure out how to have our cake and eat it too).

 

[Wal-Mart Vendor]

Really...do you not have anything better to do with your time?????

 

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[GIlman]

I'm going to chime in here. Mostly because I have been through all sides of this and have some things to offer from my experiences. I am not pro or anti marriage, but here is what I have learned from experience and the nearly thousand hours of reading I did while going through the process. @Esquire correct me in any error you see since you actually have professional experience here.

First and foremost, the "error" many people make, and the reason so many people are angry or caught off guard if they get divorced is because they do not understand what marriage is. I am not saying it is a mistake to get married, that is up to each person to decide for them selves.

What I AM saying, is that you have to understand what marriage IS.

Marriage is a business contract, plain and simple. You can believe that it is about love and devotion and whatever you want, but do not ignore the fact that in the eyes of the law it is an equitable partnership agreement exactly the same as starting a business 50/50 with a general partner where you both invest 100% of your assets.

You are trading 1/2 of everything you own and all your future increases for 1/2 of everything the other person owns and all their future increases. Oh, and don't forget that you are also probably accepting 1/2 of each others debt as well, although some debts are excluded. Once you are married, you now have a business, Family INC.

This business then goes along it's way.

If sometime down the road the marriage falls apart. Basically the courts then go through and value the business, and each person gets their half of all the assets and value out of the business. Which in many cases involves one partner buying out the other partners theoretical 1/2 valuation.

The reason that there are court fights are because there are not agreements on the valuation of the business. Or, if there is no value in the business then often the fight is about distribution of the human capital of the marriage (i.e. children) and the associated financial impacts of this.

For slow-laners, this is painful..for fast-laners this can be down right catastrophic to your business and life.

You see, if you own a business, the valuation of that business will NOT be based on the value of the physical assets owned. It will be the assets plus non-tangibles including goodwill. This is the SAME as any business would be valued if it was being sold. But if you wish to keep your business, assuming that it is the source of your income, this may mean that your business is valued as a high multiple of revenue and that to KEEP your business you have to payout 1/2 of this value without actually selling it to raise the capital.

Now, this does not mean that the business can fetch this much money if you sold it on the open market, it just means it is the theoretical value that you are being held accountable to pay 1/2 of to keep the business. The only way to PROVE the value of the business is to ACTUALLY sell it on the open market since the market is the ultimate arbiter of value This can be very difficult, and many people are put in a position where the business has to be sold (often in a fire sale) because they can't possibly come up with this valuation to buy out the other persons share, and to add insult to injury the 1/2 value the business actually fetches is substantially less that was being demanded that you pay.

Here is where divorce diverges from a typical partnership, and where it is poses the greatest risk to entrepreneurs. Now that you have paid out your 1/2 share of the business, the courts will often expect you to also provide support (e.g. alimony) on the theory that your ex should be able to maintain their lifestyle without having to use their distribution from the business to do it. Basically what they are saying is that the person should be able to sell their shares in Family INC, but still receive dividends from Family, INC as if they still owned a large share of stock in it.

To put some numbers to this. Say that you earned 1 Million a year from the business, the value may be pegged at 3-4 million for the business including non-tangibles like goodwill, so you would have to come up with 1/2 of this so 1.5-2 million to buy out their half (which is post tax money). On top of that, your spousal support will be based on calculated earnings of 1 Million, so you can expect to probably be paying out somewhere around 300,000 a year in support. And on top of that maybe even child support, which is post tax.

You can see where this is leading fast....basically you may be paying out WELL in excess of 50% of your earnings for a prolonged period of time, so you can buy out the other persons 1/2 of the business that you build, to pay for their "reasonable" living expenses so that they don't have to use their savings to live, and post tax child support. You may literally end up with 15-25% of your income per year for a long time to satisfy all of these demands.

Again, I am not anti-marriage, but I think that people should at least be aware of the real risks they face in marriage, especially in situations where one spouse does not work outside of the home, etc, etc.

Approach marriage exactly the same way as you would a business partnership, because if you ever have to that is exactly how your marriage will be treated by the courts.

One other side note, I have been peripherally involved with friends who were going through breakups of financially successful businesses and I can tell you that the process was pretty much just like a divorce with all the stress, drama, games, etc...so whether in business or life, choose your partners and your business contracts and agreements carefully....if at all.

 

[biggeemac]

Hmmmm, seems like a problem that needs a solution to me (for those that discovered this information too late and need a REAL exit strategy).

 

[Bila]

I am curious @Esquire ....I ( we ) used a mediator instead of lawyers for my divorce....And it went actually very well, in 3 sessions, everything was sorted out ( we agreed on most things, so i guess it helped ) .....Why do people dont use them often ?? ...Ohh and it was free ( a provincial service )

 

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[drilonnn]

Hell of a tip! Spend your life lonely, rich and sad as f***. Why do you even live?!

PS. Didn't even read the post nor the replies. The title itself got me furious.

 

[RHL]

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.

 

[GSF]

@RHL that was epic, best post I've read in a while

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

@RHL that was epic, best post I've read in a while

+1 for epic. Rep transferred to the user formerly known as ENDEKA! $$$$$!

 

[Even Steven]

@RHL, I regret that I only have one 'Like' to give to that post.

 

[biggeemac]

@RHL , now THAT is a rebuttal.

 

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[Vigilante]

RHL= winning. I'd close the thread but MJ would kill me and nobody else would be able to tell you how epic that post was. I have nothing to add. Thanks for a clear and definitive correction.

 

[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.

 

[Bila]

@RHL thanks for your articulate, intelligent intervention

 

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[csalvato]

Brilliant rebuttal @RHL. Summed up exactly what I was thinking without me having to do anything! That's a good feeling.

Also, just because things have a chance to get messy doesn't mean they should be avoided like the plague. If that were the case, none of us would be pursuing our Fastlane businesses

 

[AlterJoule]

 

[Andy Black]

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.

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.

I only popped into this thread because of the good comments I was seeing in my feed. Glad I did and saw your post @RHL. Definitely epic.

 

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[Journey2Million$]

Do you guys understand that the whole legal system has been changed because of the feminists and that you men no longer have any legal, constitutional, or human rights with regards to women? They have all the power now and they can get away with doing almost anything to you. I'm not saying we shouldn't be with women. My point is that we should fight to get our rights back. If you don't care about your legal rights then I don't care what happens to you anymore. I thought you guys deserved to live in a free country where your rights are respected, but I guess not.

Here's a message for Vigilante:
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”- Voltaire

 

[Vigilante]

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






And I'm still married.

 

[csalvato]

Get a pre nup. Or just get married in spirit and get a cohabitation agreement. Problem solved. Let's move on.

thanks @Esquire

 

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[pickeringmt]

Truth is, most people not emotionally capable to have a successful marriage, just like many don't have the grind to run their own businesses.

It is really funny to me that I never realized how similar my business experience is to my marriage.

I've been in business for about a year, and I been married for about 10.

I jumped in thinking I knew what i was doing. I had a plan. Once the "event" had passed, I realized there was no plan.
I struggled.
I screwed up, regularly.
I had to learn to suck it up. Take it on the chin. I had to become a man and take responsibility not just for my actions, but the results that they produced.
I almost quit. Several times.
I spent time alone, thinking I had made a mistake.
But I kept going.
I started to realize that my problems came from.... me. My weakness reflected off of my mistakes can look a lot like other people.
I started to focus on growing. On learning. On producing the results I wanted.
And things shifted.
I started to become who I knew I could be, in spite of the circumstances that I used to blame for "holding me back".
The person I am today was forged in the fire of figuring it out. Making it work.

So am I talking about my fumble through entrepreneurship, or marriage?

Both. I know I approach getting what I want differently than most, but I think there is something to knowing what you want and doing what it takes to make it work, even when it hurts like hell and you look like a damn fool trying to figure it out. That is growth. I am not the guy to ask how to avoid creating problems for yourself, but I am a guy that can get you through some s*** by solving them.

Which would you rather be?

I find it funny that we all look at the "fear of failing" in business as a character flaw, and yet we look at the fear of failing in marriage as a positive characteristic.

You can easily lose everything with both - and you could die tomorrow either way.

 

[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.

 

[pickeringmt]

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.

Holy balls, man - this is one of the most tremendous responses I have ever seen
Rep transferred

 

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[MasterOfMyFate]

Well, I think it's pretty clear that there is a lot of bias on both sides.

But really, there has been no true argument for marriage. As I see it, there is nothing you can gain from being married in the eyes of the state except from a few small tax breaks depending where you live and the opportunity to take half of your spouses assets if you so choose (whether you are a man or a woman).

You do not have to be married to provide support you your partner or to stay with them for life, marriage is purely a social construct.

And 50% (or whatever figure you want to use) is an average of course your chances can be below that, just as they can be above it. (Although clearly, the people that this forum is aimed at seem to be lower)

However, one can reference as many studies as they want, as there are endless amounts with different findings. The facts are that the number of marriages are decreasing while the number of divorces are relatively increasing.

And of course everybody thinks that it won't happen to them, until it does. Those of you who have good marriages will say that it's just down to finding the right partner and working hard, but there will always be situations where you just cannot foresee the future.

And comparing it to the risk involved in business? I don't see how they are related. With business there is clearly something to gain from the risk that could not otherwise be gained. But with marriage, what do you actually gain, "legal recognition" ?

Anyway, I am neither experienced in marriage nor business, this is just how I see it.

 

[AllenCrawley]

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.

Well... there is that.

Seriously, Thanks @RHL for taking the time to post that. Seriously. Thanks for the balance here. Rep+