Had to see a pretty sad situation today where two couples were in a dispute and it resulted in one of those “Divorce me now” type of scenarios. The sad thing too is relationship wise nothing is there anymore. However, they have been married for like over 30 years and have just recently retired.

This is not exactly a millionaire couple, but they have fully paid off everything in life such as a house and were going to live off the savings from then on. The thing is, both of them were so concerned about the lifestyle change since they just retired and life was pretty much planned financially to live at this house and all. Therefore, that seemed to be the only real thing that floating in the mind regardless of the health and well being factor. One even commented how the house was the “life savings” in many ways.

People often say that getting divorced is a double whammy in terms of finances as it is more then just splitting assets in half. The new lifestyle such as having to pay more for items as you won’t buy in volumes too are another factor. Especially at that age where you have pretty much mapped out your financial map, it will probably be a huge setback.

I have never seen a couple actually stick with it like this though simply for the financial reasons. Again, the only thing that is really holding them back it seems is the agony of having to sell a house that they worked so hard in paying off together that it is hard to let go. I suppose in the end both of them have to go back to work to a certain extent if it did go through and this comes down to a your health and well-being or money type of scenario.

I was just reading this interesting article that talked about China’s implementation of a one child policy at around the early 80’s in order to control the growth of its population. The main topic was how being an only child in a family increases the likelihood of the child being spoiled and growing up with a mentality that things should be handed to them.

It went on to talk about how this has created a new generation of thinkers where things like a marriage is viewed more like a tool where one finds the right mate to achieve wealth and power as oppose to focusing in developing a nurturing relationship. Of course, it then dived into how so many people now see a divorce as simply a process to go through if one finds a more lucrative scenario to be in whereas before it was viewed as a disgraceful act.

Some of the comments I read were kind of amazing such as a person saying how it makes no sense to do so much work and planning in life financially when she could simply marry the right person and be worry free. I see this with people even if they are not the only child though. For example, it could even be a family having a lot of girls and so they tend to spoil the only boy in the family who then turns out to be the one who is always financially dependent on others.

Sometimes I would say the most important point to learning good financial management skills is to start from square one and to learn to appreciate the things that you already have while learning to genuinely respect others. That might sound cornball for a lot of people, but that attitude goes such a long way when it comes to money.