Blog Comment on Divorce from Hell

By Attorney Gregg Herman
April 14, 2013

Today, I received a notification that a Terry Powers had commented on my Friday blog post entitled “Divorce from Hell.”

Simply put, Terry had two problems.  First, his wife’s proposal for support came close to or exceeded his actual income.  Yeah, that could be a problem!  Second, he is in the finance business which got hit extremely hard by the stock market plunge.  As I said in my initial post, there is one valid reason for negotiating backwards and that is circumstances change, which seems to have occurred in this case.

Some people may not believe the first problem – that a proposal could be that far off reality, but I have seen it happen – not frequently, but it does occur.  I recall one client telling not to bother responding to an offer which constituted about 125% of his income.    His wife did not miscalculate – she was just unrealistic (which is the mildest adjective I could think of…).   My client told me that it was not worth paying me to even respond to something so ridiculous.  He was right.

Terry tells me that the result was his wife getting substantially less than she would have had she negotiated in good faith.  That reminds me of saying used by stock brokers:  Bulls and bears make money.  Hogs get slaughtered.

Terry ended his comment as follows:

I encourage folks to settle their divorces and be reasonable about it. That’s hopefully the only good thing to come out of my mess. If you don’t, both sides will be destroyed by a system that only benefits the attorneys and their cronies. And you might end up as a story online 🙂

To which I can only add:  Amen.

Attorney Gregg Herman is a founding partner of Loeb & Herman, LLC in Milwaukee, WI. He practices family law exclusively, and can be reached via e-mail or by calling (414) 272-5632.