2000

Divorce

The divorce process had been moving along slowly. Julie had hired an attorney to handle the legal paperwork and I agreed to pay for the attorney fees. I didn’t get an attorney for myself as Julie and I agreed on how things were to be divided and I didn’t want to spend additional money. Even so it cost more than I expected. It started out not too bad, Julie would give me an invoice from the attorney every couple of weeks, $200, $150, but a few months into the process, $400, $800.  They billed for every phone call, 15 minutes per call no matter how long it took, one invoice listed ten phone calls, one to me which I knew didn’t take more than a minute. At $50 an hour that was an expensive minute.  The attorney would also send me papers to review at $2.00 a page copying fee, outrageous. It ended up costing me more than I expected but from what I had heard from others it could have been worse. The final divorce decree was finalized and filed with the courts on November 3rd, three days before our 20th wedding anniversary.  

One thing that didn’t work out so well for me was the retirement fund split. The attorney totaled up both Julie and my retirement funds and then split it 50-50. I was fine with that even though of the total, 75% was money was that I had saved. The problem was the amount was determined in May then the “Dot-com bubble” crash hit and by October tech companies lost 78% of their value.  My retirement funds were heavily weighted in tech stocks and so come November my retirement accounts lost about 40% of their value. Because the amount of our retirement account split was fixed and filed with the court, it was too late to change it, so Julie ended up getting about 75% of the funds. I probably should have had my own attorney. Oh well, live and learn as they say.  On the positive side I kept the house, buying out Julie’s portion of it, which in the long run ended up a good decision.

December