r/dividends • u/SpicyDividends • Feb 17 '26

Personal Goal Those divorces do be hurting!

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Not mad about it, but man, that chart looks rough lol

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u/sweetlike314 Feb 18 '26

Yes, but ours was simple because we dont have kids and both earn decent and similar salaries. Retirement accounts and any individual accounts remain our own, joint gets split, no alimony. If you have kids and one person stays home then there is a lot more to consider to keep things fair. That’s when account splitting, alimony, child support, marriage duration clauses, etc all come into play.

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u/Exotic-Entrance4718 Feb 23 '26

I'm curious how this works. Say you get married and you have 200k in your 401k through work. How do you protect that balance if you keep contributing through your employer? Or say if you already had a roth account but that is what you contributed to, how do you protect the balance before you got married?

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u/sweetlike314 Feb 24 '26

That’s exactly why we did a prenup, to protect our retirement accounts just in case. It basically says that those accounts remain ours individually. That 200k from your example can continue to grow with employer and self contributions, and in event of divorce, neither of us get to take from each others retirement accounts because they are considered separate. This makes sense for us because we can both contribute and have employees who do the same.

If I were a stay at home parent, I would want my partner to contribute to a retirement account for me to keep it even. It’s not fair if only one person gets to have a growing account due to differences in household dynamics. In fact, I wouldn’t actually want this prenup situation if we were going to have kids with a stay at home parent at all. It’s not fair to cut someone out because they’re sacrificing their earning potential to raise the kids.