Here’s a scenario that should have some women thinking, say family law commentators in a recent media article on post-divorce life.
You are a woman who worked hard to attain your professional working status. You went to school, applied your drive and acumen at the workplace to command respect and an impressive wage, and then you gave it all up to stay at home and raise the children.
In short, your family became a household of split duties, with your husband being the single wage earner outside the home and you handling all the diverse responsibilities inside the home, including child rearing.
Shouldn’t you be compensated for that?
Put another way: If you sacrificed your career — or at least put it on hold for many years — to create, nurture and guide a family, shouldn’t you have some downside protection in the event that your marriage unravels?
In other words, shouldn’t you have a postnuptial agreement?
The answer to that question is a resounding “yes,” say authors Jeff Landers and Ann Crittenden.
“I have seen too many women get the short end of the stick,” says Landers, noting that educated women who leave jobs and careers to raise families lose contacts and sacrifice networking opportunities. Their honed job skills also atrophy over time. The result is that they might not be as attractive to employers when they seek to rejoin the work force as they were when they left it a decade or more ago.
Crittenden coined the term “mommy tax,” which refers to the amount of earnings a working woman loses over a lifetime when she leaves her job to raise a family.
Both authors say that women should be compensated for their departure from the workplace in the event that their marriages fail.
A proven Florida divorce attorney with experience negotiating and drafting marital contracts can discuss what a postnuptial agreement — a marital contract executed following marriage — centrally entails and how it can help protect the interests of a divorcing woman who left the work force to raise a family.
Source: The Daily Beast, “Why stay-at-home moms should demand postnuptial agreements,” Keli Goff, Dec. 3, 2013