Makes sense to me. If say, the dad stays home to take care of the house and look after the children, while the wife works. Should the husband then be left with no claim to money/house if the wife decides she wants a divorce?
Maintaining a house and raising children are not low effort jobs. If you calculate how much daycare + a basic cleaning service would be year round, I doubt the cost would be minimal. Not to mention the fact that the person staying home will undoubtedly have a tough time entering the workforce after an extending period of time away from their careers.
Even if both work, how would you go about figuring out the split if the incomes were inequal? Do you literally just take the incomes and proportionally divide up the assets accordingly? What if the person earning more doesn't actually contribute their share to the mortgage, and wastes money on frivolous expenditures? How do you actually decide what is fair?
Being a homemaker is absolutely a high effort job, and cleaning/daycare are hardly cheap. You also are right to point out the opportunity cost of not being in the workplace.
These are interesting things to think about as I just don't think the matter is as black and white as some people might want to think.
Why work and make a living, while you could skin this man alive and have him pay for you.
This sort of behavior incentivizes divorce. Not that hard to play victim when you can get some one to pay for you all life, while you chill around beaches and make merry.
In a marriage, this is what you agree to, yes.
> If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?
On the one hand, in the case of a spouse who brings significant assets to the marriage, or provides a significant monetary contribution to the marriage, their contribution is recognised.
But also, a spouse who has sacrificed a high-value career to care for children is given credit for that in a settlement, so that they do not lose out on their opportunity-cost. There are fairly standard practices for courts to determine the relative merits/costs when judging a settlement.
All that said, does it happen all that often that a court decides that the assets should be divided far from 50:50?
One variable is extremely easy to quantify, and the other much less so.
If one partner earns more and pays a disproportionate amount of the downpayment and mortgage on a house that both partners live in, is the house really only 1/2 theirs legally? Ethically?
And in such an arrangement, particularly where one partner decides to stay in the home, can the partner who is not there force the sale to improve their cashflow? If so, how should the proceeds be divvied up assuming that a disproportionate amount of money was paid into the house by one partner?