How “Doing Nothing” Is Costing You In Your Divorce
You are getting a divorce. You want to move on and live your best life, and you know it’s not worth it to fight over every last cent as you divide your assets.
But you may find yourself getting fixated on a particular item or a number, almost without realizing it, and feel compelled to keep taking action to get exactly what you want.
That compulsion can take you on an expensive, fruitless detour that keeps you polarized and stuck—until you finally let it go. I see this often, so I’d like to share a cautionary tale.
“Just think of it. A million dollars….”
Say you’ve been flexible throughout the whole division of property and the valuations of your assets. Great. There’s just one thing: you want top dollar for your marital home.
You know it’s worth $1 million, and you want to be bought out for your share of its value. You’ve had that number in your head a long time, like a security blanket.
Then you hear from your attorney that your spouse doesn’t agree that the apartment is worth that much. What the hell?
Your attorney suggests that you could settle this with a neutral appraisal. So even though your wife makes more than you, you agree to split the cost of an appraiser, because there’s no question in your mind about the $1 million number. It’s a sure thing.
Appraiser #2 says the home is worth $800,000.
You can’t believe it. Your wife probably went behind your back to have them lower the price. “She’d absolutely do that,” you tell your lawyer.
“Unlikely,” your lawyer says. Appraisals are usually based on comps. But there was something a little off on those comps. “They valued your apartment, which is a one bedroom with a washer, dryer and a dishwasher, against one property that doesn’t have a washer and dryer in the unit.”
“See!” you tell your lawyer. “The whole thing was rigged.”
“Well, if you feel that strongly, you can get a second appraisal to verify the first one,” your lawyer says.
You jump at the chance, even though you have to pay 100% of its cost. You don’t pause to ask if a washer, dryer and dishwasher amount to a $200,000 difference..
Costs keep rising, and the boulder won’t budge
The second appraisal comes back at $850,000. WTF?! You need the extra $150,000. You’ve been counting on the quick cash a million-dollar buyout would give you.
Your lawyer tells you that with the appraisals you’ve gotten, there’s no way the other side will agree to a million. But you could list the apartment for sale rather than accept a buyout, and maybe if the broker helped with staging it, you’d get a price closer to what you want.
You fight with your wife about which broker to select, but finally you agree. This broker believes that you stage it properly, which will cost about $15,000, the apartment should list for $1.1 million. Your wife says she can’t afford to front the staging costs (“A lie!” you tell your lawyer), but finally she agrees to repay the fee as a credit against the sale of the house.
You have the apartment staged and list it at $1.1 million. And lo and behold, after just a few weeks on the market, you get an all-cash offer for the full amount. Bingo!
Your soon-to-be ex wife doesn’t even thank you, even though you single-handedly raised the value of the apartment by 20 percent!
The buyer stalls on signing the contract for a few days, but you hear from the broker that everything is okay, so you remove the staging. No need to keep paying that steep monthly fee.
The next call you get from the broker isn’t what you wanted to hear, though: the buyer found another apartment they like better.
So you wait. No other buyers make an offer—for months.
The broker recommends reducing the price. An unstaged apartment just isn’t worth as much as a staged one, especially now that rising mortgage rates are limiting demand. The broker suggests listing the apartment for $950,000, which means that after you pay the broker’s fee, you won’t come close to the million you want.
You go back to your lawyer to demand that the worthless broker be changed, and after you send an outraged e-mail, the brokerage house says that if they can’t sell the house in 45 days, they’ll remove the listing and let you go with someone else.
After about 30 days, the broker says that you do have an offer. It’s for $900,000, the new recommended price.
You won’t listen to experts, but the court does
You call your lawyer to reject the offer. But your lawyer says your wife made a motion to the court requesting that you accept the sale price, and you’ll have to be in court next week. You aren’t worried. After all, you had an offer for $1,100,000. They can’t make you take this lowball offer.
But things do not go well for you. The judge runs through the facts she sees: You had two appraisals that came in in the low $800,000s. Yes, you had a potential buyer at a higher amount, but the market is different now, especially since interest rates are going up. The brokers did a good-faith job with the listing, she says. She orders the house to be sold for $900,000.
You leave court dejected. All that work to get a higher amount was wasted. You could have gotten a buyout months ago at $850,000, and you would’ve avoided the brokers’ fee, the staging costs and the fee for the second appraisal. Now, with those expenses taken off the top, you’ll be getting $800,000, exactly what you’d have gotten if you had simply accepted the neutral appraisal’s valuation at the start.
“Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”
•A.A. Mine
The lesson: be wary of compulsions about issues that lead you to take a hard line on your position, AKA, “I want what I want and reality needs to bend to that.” If you’re fixated on your version of the million-dollar demand, pause.
Are your strong opinions out of line with the experts’ point of view?
Are your stubborn actions taking you down a dead-end road?
Do you keep paying more and more to chase your fantasy outcome?
Are you farther ahead than if you did nothing and accepted the other side’s position?
To gain perspective, try the following exercise, preferably in a privately secured place.
Have a written conversation with your smarter, wiser self that starts like this:
My position is not being accepted, and I need to gain clarity about why that is. What am I not seeing that I need to see to see? What are experts telling me that I don’t want to hear or look at? Why am I so attached to this particular outcome and so unwilling to budge?
Be as honest as you can as you answer.