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In the Netherlands they finally changed divorce law to end the practice of alimony payments. This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest
by MomoXenosaga 5y ago
In the Netherlands they finally changed divorce law to end the practice of alimony payments. This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest you fall into poverty after divorce.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoYou have free medical coverage, good child care, and free education in the Netherlands?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AdrianB1 5y agoIn Romania alimony did not exist until a few years ago, so we are going in the opposite direction with the excuse "this is how it's done in EU".
- asdf333 5y agoi get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration
- toomuchtodo 5y agoOnly if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess. 67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time). [1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it/9uq1ytbcovr71.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...) [2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-are-becoming-less-common https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-... (edit: US centric)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway6734 5y ago>but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out. Exactly. It's greater risk for a greater reward. Also divorce rates are significantly lower (seeing ~20% on Google) for this with a college degree
- hamandcheese 5y agoWhat is the greater reward?
- dahfizz 5y agoHaving a real family?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoThere is some evidence that male marriage participants live longer and are healthier [1] than non married counterparts. Conversely, there is also evidence that single, childless women are the happiest subpopulation [2]. With regards to data about happiness, you can make a case for whatever your position is based on picking your choice of longitudinal study. Happiness is a crapshoot. [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html [2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...
- pempem 5y agoHappiness is a caveated crapshoot I'm fairly certain we are all capable of the google search and you can and will find the multitude of studies, anecdotes, memes and conversations about: - women's unpaid labor at home, with their children, in their community and for aging relatives/relatives who need care - women's thwarted ability to get promoted - women's inability to negotiate as easily for a raise bc when you're aggressive you're a bitch and when you're not you dont get a raise - women's emotional labor in relationships as men in our specific (NA/Euro) societies tend to have limited social circles as they age Single childless women are happier for structural and social reasons. It is not in fact just a crapshoot.
- 01100011 5y agoI can only speak to my reality, which is that I am paying $40k/year to someone who never had kids, never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles). I can try to reduce my payments, but lawyers say there's a risk they'll actually go up because I'm making more now(because I couldn't afford to live in my old town due to alimony). The other party has an inactive form of cancer, but the primary tumor was removed over 30 years ago while I was still in junior high school, and a vocational evaluation , which consulted with their doctors, found there is no reason not to work full time. I've been paying for over 5 years now and there's no end in sight. The system is forcing me to pay a lazy person to sit at home all day long without any obligation to work.
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y agoI’m curious about what circumstances stop payments to them? Does it require you to have zero income?
- 01100011 5y agoId have to have a valid excuse for not working, like a medical condition. If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.
- throwawayarnty 5y ago
- paxys 5y agoI think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. Of course this also requires further investments from the state (mandatory parental leave, cheap/free childcare, good early education), which I assume Netherlands also prioritizes.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. I do wonder about our priorities here. It seems we are choosing economic output over everything else.
- vasco 5y agoNetherlands doesn't, it costs around €1.3k/month for a 5 day a week daycare. It's very expensive to raise kids in the Netherlands and most women work only 3 days a week, and some men 4, making it so the child can stay at home with one of the parents so the costs are lower. This makes it difficult to raise kids if both parents want to work full time.
- odiroot 5y ago> i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. Is this some "western developed country" thing that I just don't get? All throughout my childhood, both of my parents had to work. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to support me and my sister. But I was growing up in an (post-) communist state and it was quite the norm. It had nothing to do with ambitions or building your career, just pure economics.
- tsol 5y agoAgreed, this seems like an older relic. If anything you see this situation more often in non- western countries where women aren't as involved in the workforce. In America, for example, it's not uncommon that not only do both spouses work, but they both must work to support the family. The assumption that one spouse is unable to work feels like a rather dated convention. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it certainly does, but it's no longer the default.
- treis 5y agoIt's also a relic of a time when maintaining a house was a lot of work and reasonably analogous to a full time job. That is when chicken soup involved plucking and preparing a chicken instead of buying stuff from the store and throwing it in a instapot.
- Leherenn 5y agoWho took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Here in Switzerland, "full-time childcare costs are around two-thirds of an average Swiss salary" apparently, so quite often people prefer to do it themselves rather than work mostly to pay someone to take care of their child.
- odiroot 5y ago> Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free. Mostly my grandma. And once I was 5 or so I went to kindergarten. This was already in the post- times. But my first 3 years were still in a communist state.
- yason 5y agoDivorces still work out in many countries without any adult-to-adult alimonies. You get divorced, you split your combined assets (excluding prenups), the child support vector will be based on the relative net income of each parent (and beyond certain basic level of income the vector just settles at 50/50). The stay-at-home parent will find work or failing that gets unemployment/welfare benefits. The standard of living is expected to drop for both spouses after a divorce because it's cheaper to live together in any case. Nevertheless, securing the children's upkeep comes first. If one parent can't or won't pay child support the state provides it for the other parent so that the kids can live on something, and later collects the payments from the first parent the same way it will collect other debts such as back taxes. For the stay-at-home spouse it's still a choice with pre-known potential disadvantages, and thus smart couples can draw a contract at the decision time to even out the tally. They can split the income of the high-earning parent at point each month, or they can formulate a mechanism to give the stay-at-home spouse a higher proportion of the combined assets in case of a divorce, and have that indexed by the number of years that spouse remained home, or anything else that works out well. It's all doable so that upon a divorce both spouses get their fair share. The worst thing is not to pre-plan anything, then get divorced at once and find yourself in a completely new situation with no preparations. But there's nothing that prevents either partner from being proactive regarding this. The law doesn't need to enforce any hand-holding here: it's not the fifties anymore. Most people, both men and women, have their own career and get married as adults and divorce as adults.
- cowpig 5y ago> This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest you fall into poverty after divorce. Strikes me as a negative.. raising kids is a lot of work
- klipt 5y agoDepends where you are on the income spectrum. If you earn enough, there's a point where hiring a full-time nanny becomes cheaper than marrying a stay-at-home spouse and then getting divorced. Nanny costs have an upper limit, alimony and child support can grow unbounded with your income.
- coldtea 5y agoFor 90% of the population this is unrealistic, so it's not like it would be a good public policy
- DoreenMichele 5y agoIt depends on a lot of factors. The Netherlands seems to generally do a better job of supporting women's rights. For one thing, they seem to do a better job of providing healthcare coverage for all residents than we do here in the US and that's significant in terms of protecting people from financial hardship, regardless of their socioeconomic class, and making it easier to leave a relationship than the American policy of providing coverage through the employed spouse's job without providing real protection in that regard for financially dependent a stay-at-home parent.
- refurb 5y agoExactly. It’s like rent-a-kid. Just outsource all the work and enjoy a couple hours of play each week.
- JCharante 5y agoIt's best not to have your own pet dog. Find a neighbor with a dog and befriend them. You can be there for all the fun without having to pick up the dog's excrement. Plus you'll be your own kid's cool uncle.
- Gibbon1 5y agoIn California I think alimony for marriages under ten years is usually half the duration of the marriage. Expectation is that the dependent partner is expected eventually to support themselves. That seems generally fair to me.
- ashtonkem 5y agoYes, but the Netherlands also has a pretty strong social safety net, which is certainly a factor when they changed the law. Nobody wants to see their material circumstances get worse, of course, but there is a big difference between having no career and no alimony payments in the Netherlands and in the United States.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoThat is quite important: It is harder to be homeless in the Netherlands than it is in the US.
- Muromec 5y agoWait what? When did it happen? I know the cap was changed from 12 years max to 5 (or until younger child turns 12, or whatever else), but definitely not abolished alimony completely.