The business of separation ...

I did not intend to write much here about my relationship with my wife or "the ex" if you wish. For several reasons: One is that I do not want to get into writing about what did and did not work in the marriage and why it had to end. That tends to be a "he said/she said" kind of story, and it would be grossly unfair to let one side come out and not the other. Another is that in throwing this part of my life a little bit open, there is a good chance that eventually she would read it (or worse: have someone summarize it to her - incorrectly). But this week, one aspect of it was suddenly taking up a large part of my life, and it seemed appropriate to touch a bit on it.

While we are not expecting to ever get together again, we are not pursuing a full-on divorce at this time, primarily because that would leave me with no health insurance. My wife works for a large company with an excellent health insurance plan, while I work for a very small company with no insurance. We all have wives with excellent health insurance coverage (one works for a hospital, one for the local school system and one for a major defense contractor) so it seemed unreasonable to spend money on a benefit package that we did not need. Well, here it is 6 years later, and one of us could use it. But signing the company up for a group plan that only one of the 3 employees intends to enroll in, is not too different from signing up for an individual policy, and when I tried that, I would told flat out that I am not insurable as an individual. I have type 2 diabetes, and I am taking a blood-pressure-lowering prescription drug as well as a cholesterol-lowering medication. If anyone were to insure me, they would want to exclude coverage of the diabetes and "any complications thereof", which would include heart disease and possibly any stroke. So it is simpler to just say no, which under California law they don't have to give a reason for. We are hoping that the wording of the policy defines the dependents elible for coverage as "the employee's spouse, minor children and children under 25 enrolled full-time at a higher learning institution". But we don't have the text, and we are not comfortable going to the personnel office to ask; it just might trigger a review that gets me kicked off the plan there and then. So we assume and "don't ask and don't tell".

But in the process of living our separate lives and paying for our daughter's Ivy League university tuition, we find that we both need to pull some money out of our respective houses. With interest rates at an all-time low, it would probably be prudent to refinance anyway in order to lower the payments. But 15 years ago, when we last refinanced, we rewrote the titles to both properties to make them jointly owned. At the time, we wanted to simplify any inheritance issues. Now we need to undo that; make the real estate our individual properties again, and make the loans individual with no co-signing. So this week, we have been visiting a family mediation lawyer, a loan officer and a title/escrow office to get the mountain of paperwork started.

The visit to the lawyer was interesting. This a woman, who is a friend of one of my wife's former boyfriends. She does not do partisan divorces, only uncontested separation agreements, and insists that if it cannot stay friendly, she will hand us off to two separate attorneys and hand her notes to both of them as she walks away. Wonderful attitude, but she has also found that with such a non-mercurial attitude to her law practice, she has had to take a day job with the government. We talked a bit about what we want to accomplish, and she sent us on our way with homework: Make a list of all assets and liabilities and how we want to divide them. That will take several evenings, mostly for me, since I am the custodian of most of the records. Besides the real estate, there are multiple IRA accounts at 6 different institutions, 5 or 6 credit cards, etc, etc. Some of those existed before we were married, and who knows what the balance was 20 years ago ? The most memorable moment of the evening was when the lawyer said "It sounds like your husband makes more money than you do; you may be entitled to alimony." For a second, the memory of every ugly divorce story I ever heard washed over me. None of which has anything to do with us. And then she said the reassuring words: "We have talked about those issues, and we don't see a need for that". The truth is that it was her decision to leave, not mine. I may have more retirement savings in my name, but not a ton more, and I am also closer to retirement and in worse health, so I may need more. We will talk it over when we have the list. Meanwhile, we need most of the same data for the mortgage loan applications.