Asset negotiations

Gosh, here I thought I was going to get to bed early.  I'd finished eating, put away the food, left the dishes to soak, brushed my teeth, gotten undressed, turned off all the lights in the apartment except a candle by the bed, and was just settling down to doze off when I heard myself say, You haven't written anything today. For your blog. Nothing.

Well, OK fine, but I posted something today. Doesn't that count?

You wrote it last night. You told me – that is, you told yourself (but that's me) – that you would write something every day. You haven't written today.

But I wrote two posts yesterday. No, wait – three!

That's very nice. Congratulations. But you said you would write something every day. And you haven't yet, today. 

All right, all right, I get the picture. Let me fire up my computer. But no more than half an hour. After that, I'm going straight to bed, even if I'm in mid-sentence!

That's fine.

Which is how I find myself here sitting on the floor with my laptop perched on my bed, typing.  For no more than another twenty-one minutes, please note.

Actually it's not quite true to say that I wrote "nothing" today ... it was just nothing that I posted here.  Some years ago I had the fantasy that I would keep you up to date on the progress of my separation by posting everything I wrote to Wife in the process of negotiating terms, and so forth.  But I think in reality that wouldn't be too interesting to read.  For one thing, it would be even more drearily repetitive than I am already, because I wouldn't occasionally just summarize.  Anyway, the point is that Wife and I are currently negotiating how to divide up the assets, and I wrote her a long e-mail today containing a second proposal.  My first proposal ... well, it had some things in there that I expected her to complain about, where I valued at their purchase prices various pieces of furniture and jewelry that she had bought over the years that I had never wanted us to own.  An independent appraiser would no doubt have knocked off a certain percentage for age; but my thought was, "If you hadn't bought that crazy-assed thing in the first place we would still have had the cash, so yes we should consider it worth the amount of cash we exchanged for it."

But the only thing she objected to was that I offered to split the premiums on her life insurance in a way that she thought left her payments higher than she could afford.  So I looked at it to see if there was some other way of handling it.

One way would be to cash the policy out.  It's a whole life policy so it has some cash value.  And she got it when my previous company shut down and laid us all off, and we were all given the chance to sign up for group insurance without a medical test.  (Wife has so many lethal medical conditions that no insurance agent in his right mind would write her an individual policy.)  At the time she figured she'd be dead in five years, and this would give me a nice big chunk of cash to use raising the boys.  But that was in 2003 (we were on rather better terms back then) and in fact she hasn't died yet.  So is it still worth keeping?  I don't know.  Some people convert their insurance policies into annuities when they get old enough; maybe she wants to do that.  Or maybe she wants to take the cash and invest it in Google, or go to Vegas.  I have no idea.  Neither does she, really.  One thought that worries her is that she won't have enough cash for when she reaches retirement age ... or, more exactly, for when I reach retirement age and stop paying alimony.  It's hard to say how much she's going to need, of course, and I'm already planning to give her the 401K I built up from ten years at my last company.  That should help.  But I think in fact the whole topic of money shows up for her as a big cloud of anxiety, in which she really can't see her way.

Anyway, without going into all the dollars-and-cents details, I made a proposal that would allow her either to keep the policy or to cash it out, and that would involve my paying her another couple hundred dollars a month for the next five years (to make all the other assets balance).  I suspect by her reckoning that won't really be enough to pay the insurance premiums for her, so she may decide to cash it out.  On the other hand she might take it and then strive really hard to find a way to get some more income some time in the next five ....  [Time for bed. Nighty-night, all.]