Everything is negotiable

Early in my second career I took a 5 day class on negotiation. It was pretty good and started the foundation of my current career to where I’m at now. I’ll do a write up on it in a sooner or later, but the biggest take away I can talk about here is two points: everything is negotiable, and know your walk away point. In a sense it was another view on the age old Abundance mentality.

I’ve stated over and over again, that every man should know the terms of divorce in his marriage. It may have been a mistake to get legally married but it’s an even bigger mistake to not know how to undo it once you’ve become Redpill aware. Time and time again, noobs come to this sub and state some form of “I can’t stand my marriage but I can’t get divorced.” If you are unwilling to get divorced, you have no walk away point and will always be under the will of the other party, remember the one who cares the least has the most power.

I started down my path of improvement with the goal that I would have a great marriage, with or without my wife. Gym, check, home check, career check; All of these were in order and she still wasn’t towing the party line. The story ends that she came to me a few weeks before I pulled the plug, and we’ve been on an upswing ever since. But it’s a good lesson and something I keep in my back pocket to remind me not to let me or her get complacent.

 

Logistics

 

So what do you need to do to get divorced? Operational security should be your highest priority. In my house I’m the IT guy so for me it was relatively easy, my wife does not use the house laptop and I have a non-existent IT policy from my work. My work laptop is secure with a password login used at all times. I use two pieces of security software, Keepass and TrueCrypt (Truecrypt is unsupported now, but there’s other options). The key here is to not tip your hand. If you pull the trigger, it should be a complete legal surprise. Get a burner email address and a google drive for keeping documents. If you don’t have control of your phone or good privacy, get a google voice account with the burner email address. Google voice can be forwarded to any phone line, so if you work at a brick and motor office you can use, forward it to that. You can also use it to forward to your cell or whatever. You now have a clean cell phone bill with no ties to all the phone calls you’ll be making. Be aware, if you use the cloud and iPhone that these apps may show up on all the i-devices on the common account. I knew a guy who got busted because he installed tinder on his phone and it showed up on his wife’s phone. Only use the incognito version of web browsers, and clear memory and passwords every session. If she’s already suspicious you are cheating beware of key loggers. There’s ways around these but that’s beyond the mission scope for this discussion. Be aware of your wife’s abilities and how to look for them and you’ll be safe.

Your next step should be to start going to lawyers for visits. I work out of the house when I’m not travelling so I can do this relatively easily. If you can’t because you work at a regular brick and mortar office, take a personal day, a vacation day or whatever it takes. Set up a consult; be prepared to spend some money and visit as many of the local lawyers as you can. This is a legal tactic called conflicting out, and it has its plusses and minuses. The upside is you just made it hard for your soon-to-be-ex to engage a local attorney. The downside is you can force them to choose an attorney who is a poor negotiator a tactic that can draw out the proceedings. I ultimately settled on a lawyer that specialized in men’s divorce and made me feel confident they understood all of my issues, and weren’t looking for billable hours just for the sake of billing.

This is a good place to find out what the divorce environment in your state looks like. I’m from NJ and it’s not very favorable to men. We have long term alimony and no fault. She can be a cheating whore and you’re still fucked if you’re not smart (on a plus side, you can be a cheating whore and it’s not going to affect the outcome substantially). My state uses guidelines for all its calculations but these are not mandatory. Realistically I was hoping for short term emergency alimony and child support. It was possible to face long term alimony and child support; 10 years for the former, and up to 15 for the latter. Child support is actually pretty favorable in NJ and is heavily weighted based on percentage of custody. Based on my six figure base salary I was looking at $1000 a month in child support and up to $3000 a month in alimony. My goal was to get out with temporary alimony and child support at $3000 a month for 2-3 years. My opening window was 1 year.

Money is a tough one. You need to build a war chest to get through this. I don’t know how your special snow-flake would go on this one. I’ve had friends who had their ex over the barrel legally and financially and they still went into divorce thinking “Ima get paid!” and I’ve had friends go into it thinking, “She’s a reasonable woman only to end up in a royal cluster fuck. Your lawyer will tell you what this thing may cost you, so you need to be ready to pony up. In my state, I was looking at up to $10,000 in legal fees. This was before any assets were divided, house sold etc. At the very least you need a slush fund for legal consults. There are lots of clever ways to keep this out of view, things such as visa gift cards, cash back on purchases, etc. IANAL so my simple advice on this is, don’t get caught hiding assets. If you have more nefarious attitudes proceed with caution. It took me about 2 months to save up a thousand dollars. That covered my initial consults.

Your finances should be addressed because that’s part of your MAP. You should absolutely know that status of every credit card, mortgage statement and bill coming in and out of your house. If you can have an alternate email address assigned for statements or when a password changes do this. Get a standalone checking account. Personal finance can advise you on several good online versions. Find out your direct deposit policy and in particular how many cycles it takes to get it changed. My office can do it instantly but my old work, it was like one pay period, and verification time.

Once you’ve settled on your lawyer you should have them draft two things, a temporary separation agreement and a divorce agreement. The first is so that you can start the process without being accused of abandonment and as a legal separation for things like finances and child support. In negotiation we have a term and that’s the “opening window”. It basically means setting your terms in a realistic way that you know wont offend your counterpart yet doesn’t betray your intended outcome. If you walk into a car dealership and announce, you’ll pay five dollars for that 7 series BMW they won’t take you seriously, but if you walk in and tell them you’re looking to buy and you’d be willing to pay a fair value based on how the test drive goes, you’ve opened up a window that they may see a possibility through. It’s not about fair at this point; it’s about getting the best possible deal you can without spooking her. In my case I was willing to accept minor debt and trade home equity for my 401k. To me that was the thing I wanted protected most, and was willing to protect it or trade away other things. She was going to get a portion no doubt, but the portion she got I wanted to minimize. So I offered the house equity in lieu of 401k equity. On paper it looked like a fair trade, but for me it was future money versus present money. The alternative would be to sell the house and split the equity and other assets equally, which would be disruptive to her and the kids. I had a good bet which she would take. As a skilled negotiator I knew all of the alternatives and had gamed out how it could go.

 

Sitting across the negotiating table

Now I never got to the point where I needed to pull the trigger but I was damn close. She came to me and saved herself, so I put it on the back shelf. If it had gone down my plan was simple. I was going to serve her myself over lunch at a public place; she was a SAHM. I was going to ask her to get a lawyer and push for arbitration. I was going to make it clear that long legal battles would mean losing the house and disruption for the kids. At this point I would have had my check direct deposit changed and all credit frozen and cards frozen until the separation agreement was met. There would have been cash in the main account for household maintenance and food. For custody I was looking for: kids in school with her, shared weekends and summer with me. My intent was to find a place nearby and be available outside of my travel for work. My goal was to leverage the fact that she’s a good mother and we need to keep that as undisrupted as possible.

Every person has their pain points. My wife was a product of divorce, and her biggest fear in life probably stems from this. She absolutely despises uncertainty and no safety net. She told me how embarrassing it was for her to try and buy groceries as a teenager but the credit card her dad gave her was declined. She absolutely fears being in that place in life again and in particular for her kids having to go through that. She blames her mom for that as much as she does her dad, because in her eyes, her mom’s constant legal battles fucked her dad to the point he was destitute. It’s a powerful negotiating point that was going to be the main focus I highlighted. I intended to use it to mask my biggest risk, garnishment of future earnings. Go into it fully knowing what your risks are, and more importantly what hers are. If she’s a stay at home mom, lifestyle maybe her biggest pain point. If she’s a career woman, her upward mobility maybe her pain point. If she’s a family girl, her reputation with family maybe it. Everyone has it, so know what everyone’s is. This is high stakes poker and you need to mask your intentions. She may very well be fair, but once lawyers and bitter divorce girlfriends get involved it can all go to hell.

Be prepared to protect yourself. Get a cheap voice recorder and try to keep all conversations over email or recorded (know your local laws, NJ is a one party consent state). If she becomes hostile, don’t stay in the same room alone with her, and don’t turn that recorder off. Even in two party consent states, it may get your ass out of a false assault claim. If you have a BPD wife or the like I can’t tell you enough how important this aspect is. Do not tread lightly on this one.

My wife came to me in tears. The dread was showing, and more importantly it was authentic. A woman’s nature is she’s a covert communicator and she knew the jig was up because of my actions. I had left emotionally and couldn’t ‘fake it till I made it’ that level of dread. She was genuine about making it work, not compliant. She confessed her lack of involvement and owned up to her faults and actively agreed to fix them. She’s near close to the woman I married; kids make that a different proposition, so in the end I’m happy with the outcome.

From my part the deal was pretty clear. Divorce would cost me right out of the gate $10,000 and most likely about $100,000 in alimony. I don’t consider child support on this one because it’s money gone either way. So for me I put two hard years of work into myself and saved $100,000 grand. Could I find a better woman? Always. Do I need to? As long as my wife holds her end of the bargain, no.

In the end the guys on TRP are correct, the first instinct should always be to next a woman. If I wasn’t married to my wife it would have been a much simpler value proposition. But I had already made the critical mistake of legally getting married, so now I needed to make the best decision I could, given the game I was given, not the game I wanted. In another adventure I found that yes, AWALT; no matter how good they are in bed or what they tell you, all women are the same. They end up pulling the same shit, and giving you the same problems if you aren’t on top of your game all the time. So I decided that the wife I was with added the most value to my life. Did I make the right decision? For me, yes. My mission is still intact, and my wife is back to adding to it.