Would you stay in an unhappy marriage for the money?
That’s the reality for many women in the United Kingdom, who are avoiding divorce because they’re not being awarded with court settlements that measure up to their high financial standards. According to The Times, as many as 30 of the 380 divorce cases in the past year have been scrapped because women weren’t being awarded income for life and weren’t satisfied with their restricted financial settlements.
James Brown from the law firm Hall Brown, told the publication many women didn’t have a proper insight into their true financial circumstances and back out of divorce when they’re told how much, or little, money they’ll actually receive. In the United Kingdom, lump sum orders, where money is paid out in full, had risen by 10 per cent since 2011, while ongoing payments had fallen by five per cent.
The report also found it is now rare for divorced partners in the UK to receive ongoing payments for life, as was once popular, and the cost of fighting settlement decisions can exceed tens of thousands of pounds.
The new report comes after UBS Global Wealth Management figures released last month found the majority of married women leave their financial decisions up to their husbands because they think their partners know more about the matter. However, problems arise when these women do leave their husbands or become widowed, with 98 per cent feeling regretful that they weren’t more involved in managing wealth while married. As a result, these women tend to understand less about their money and don’t know how to properly manage it when left on their own.
More than 50 per cent run into financial surprises including outdated debts and wills when their marriages end. This information mirrors findings from a recent Australian Financial Attitudes and Behaviour Tracker that found 46 per cent of women find dealing with money stressful, while 26 per cent of men feel the same way.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 118,401 marriages and 46,604 divorces in 2016. The divorce numbers are actually on the decline, down by 3.9 per cent on the previous year. In most cases, males are older than females when granted a divorce, with 56.8 per cent of women granted divorces in 2016 under the age of 45.