According to a story which appeared in the May 99 issue of the Washington Post, $508,700 a year might be a good estimate of a wife’s worth. That figure was according to a study by Edelman Financial Services Inc, based in Fairfax, VA.
The study used as its basis 17 occupations that wives and mothers typically perform and each job’s median salary. According to Ric Edelman, chairman of Edelman Financial Services, the figure doesn’t include retirement benefits which would increase the bottom line value of a wife to about a million dollars a year. With inflation, those 1999 figures would be considerably higher if recalculated today.
Logically, a wife’s value increases when the net worth of the couple increases. It would be unrealistic for a wife divorcing a billionnaire to expect her value to the marriage to be on the same monetary level as someone divorcing a man with a middle income job even if all “jobs” are the same within the marriage.
In 1997, when Gary Wendt, the chairman of GE Capital Services, decided to divorce Lorna, his wife of 32 years and the mother of his four children, he offered her $8 million plus alimony. Lorna rejected that offer and went for half of everything they had accumulated during their years together, half of what she estimated to be $100 million.
When the dust settled, Lorna Wendt didn’t get the 50% she asked for but she got more than what her husband had initially offered. The Connecticut Superior Court judge overseeing the case divided the physical marital assets in half with Lorna getting their Connecticut house after he paid off the mortgage, their home in Key Largo, Florida, $21,000 a month alimony, and half of the cash and stocks, somewhere around $20 million.
Splitting their current assets was fairly easy but when it came to her husband’s stock options, bonuses, and unvested pension benefits he would receive when he retired ten years after the divorce, things got complicated. Despite the fact that those benefits were based upon the work done during their marriage, it wasn’t clear cut that the assets were part of the marriage and therefore could be distributed as part of the divorce settlement.
The Wendt divorce was the first time that Connecticut courts had to deal with this particular issue and the final calculation gave Lorna less than half the value of those future benefits.
Drawing on her experience, Lorna Wendt is trying to educate women and men about the importance of equality in marriage and divorce.