Monday, May 5, 2014

Continuing negotiation over assets

I finally today got a reply from Wife to my asset proposal.  It was pretty long, and started out as follows:
First, thank you for your asset allocation proposal. I honor the fact that you've put a lot of time and energy into it, and that you've made every effort to assure that it was fair in your eyes.

I realize I have owed you something more comprehensive than this for a long time. There are several reasons you haven't gotten it, but that won't make you feel any better. The primary one is that, about a year ago, ... you told me that if I ever used the words "fair" or "right" again, you would take me to court, and thus divorce me and take away my medical insurance. Of course, at that point, I would die. So that rather puts me between a rock and a hard spot. How do I even convey to you my thoughts on this issue?

I will be more explicit in my following e-mail to you, and I admit that I've taken too much time in answering you. In brief, my concern is that you seem to have allocated to yourself assets that are easily liquidated, while allocating to me a lot of items that I don't believe I can sell at the value that you have assessed them at. That means they aren't really "assets" at that level at all.
There follow nine paragraphs, or somewhere over 1300 words, of specific disagreements ... over precisely the spots where I figured she would disagree.
Rather than send her back a detailed response, I sent her a short note -- the gist of which was as follows:
You have left out half of my comment about not using the words "fair" or "right" ... and by leaving out that half you have totally distorted the meaning of the comment itself.  What I said was: Never use the words "fair" or "right" BUT INSTEAD feel PERFECTLY FREE to use the word "want".  So in other words, don't say "That's not fair."  Instead, convey EXACTLY THE SAME CONTENT by saying "I want this instead."

In concrete terms this means: if you don't like my allocation, suggest another one that you like better.  It doesn't have to be "fair".  All that matters is that you want it.
  
As you sit down to work out an allocation that you like better, think about the following.  The total assets that we are dividing add up to something in excess of $500,000.  You have expressed objections to specific allocations of this and that which add up – all told – to maybe somewhere around $10,000 in very round terms.  That's 2% of the total.  While you should certainly feel free to express your opinion about what allocation you'd like to see, it might be worth it to think how much time you really want to sink into debating how we allocate a mere 2% of the total assets.
There was more ... but not a lot more.  We'll see how long it takes before I hear anything back.

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