Options for a separating couple in relation to property values are pretty grim during a recession, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
A RECESSIONISTA is a modern sort of girl who is trying to survive the credit crunch the best she can. We're all recessionistas now. Recessionistas make their own arrangements, according to their station. In Ireland it is already a cliché that even the richest recessionistas are joining the rest of us in Lidls and are gamely attempting to perform their own manicures. However, in America, very rich women are dealing with the economic downturn in a more radical way - by getting divorced.
You have to love these girls. They don't waste any time hanging about the place agonising about the future of the West, about how their children are going to survive the putative petro-wars, or about how lucky they are to still have their health. No. They're ringing their lawyers.
There is an old saying, which declares that if you marry a rich man you work for the money. Anyone with even the briefest of acquaintance with very rich men knows that this is almost universally true. You have to admire the women who have both the patience and the ruthlessness to endure such marriages. But it is also true that when a woman marries a very rich man there are always going to be three in the relationship. And now the money is leaving, or has already left.
In New York an unprecedented number of married couples with assets worth more than $10 million (€6.3 million) are getting divorced.
The lawyer Raoul Felder, who specialises in the divorces of the super-rich, told the London Timeslast week that he has not seen such a big jump in his caseload since 1980. Twelve months ago he was handling 250 divorce cases. Now he has 300 on his books. (This does not seem such an enormous increase to the rest of us. But presumably there aren't all that many enormously wealthy married couples, even in New York.)
The explanations for this seem varied. On the one hand, people - in New York that means psychotherapists - are saying that the divorces are coming because money is a distraction, like drinking or gambling, and, if I understand this correctly, that when the money dries up, along with the holidays and the trinkets, you are left with the stark reality of the person you are actually married to. The rest of us can only speculate about at which point this horrible new dawn breaks through. After your husband has lost $5 million? After he has lost $15 million?
Another explanation is that these women, experienced realists that they are, are grabbing the money while they can by divorcing before things get any worse. Any normal person would think this a spectacularly bad time to get divorced, with property in a nosedive and assets being wiped out all over the civilised world. If these uber-wives are so smart, why didn't they get divorced last year?
Perhaps it all comes down to what our grannies used to call their nerves. People are frightened when they are losing money. In New York some of the big traders are afraid to tell their wives just how much money they have lost, on the justifiable grounds that their wives will dump them if they find out. So the husbands go on paying out for the holidays and the clothes and the jewellery that they cannot now afford.
Unfortunately, some of the rules that apply to the very rich also apply to the rest of us. It is a very bad time for anybody to get divorced, and all the more so for couples who do not have assets in excess of $10 million, or €10 million.
The naked truth that money problems place marriages under severe strain is not applicable only in the plusher areas of Manhattan. As jobs are cut, as businesses go into receivership, as debts mount, there is a price which is paid behind the bedroom door. It is not only American millionaires who get frightened. The woman who is earning half her family income is just as likely to call time on her marriage, if she has the energy left to pick up the telephone. In the real world, too, it is women who initiate the majority of the divorce proceedings.
For most couples their biggest asset is the family home, which is now worth a lot less than it was 12 months ago. Last year you could sell an ordinary home and get two more modest homes, perhaps one an apartment. Now you cannot.
You could, perhaps, try to raise money on the family home so that one of you can move out and rent an apartment. Or you could hold on, and not get divorced until things get better. Altogether the options for a separating couple are pretty grim.
This is Ireland's first recession since our divorce legislation went through, so we haven't had the time to see how our national divorce statistics respond. Never has property been so closely linked to the institution of marriage. And now property has packed its bags and left.