Tough Talk About the Family Home

The family home is very often a hot topic in the divorce, especially if you have children. There is often a desire to keep some stability for the kids, and keeping them in the family home seems to do that. You may have neighbors you've grown attached to, or a neighborhood school that your children attend. Maintaining these may be important.

Many people also have emotional ties to the house, causing them to want to stay there. An expensive rental market and high interest rates on home loans might also make you want to stay in the home you currently have.

These are all legitimate reasons for wanting to stay in your home. I get it.

But the sad truth is that most women cannot afford to keep the family home. It's hard to hear, but it needs to be said.

When we're dividing up the assets in the divorce, the first step is usually to figure out what everything is worth, Once we've assigned values to everything, we can start deciding who gets what. The hope is that we're taking equal values of things.

But then the reality becomes clear. If you're going to stay in the family home, you probably have to buy your husband out of his share of equity. The longer you've been in the home, the greater that equity. This becomes a huge burden.

Many women end up giving up rights to other assets like retirement accounts and investments accounts. While this may seem fair because it allows you to keep all of the value in the house, it usually puts women in financial jeopardy.

You end up with a house that is probably too big for you to manage on your own. It has costs that go along with it beyond the monthly mortgage and the property taxes. Routine maintenance is expensive, and big one-time repairs can be crushing to your budget. Then there are all the little costs that you might not have thought about as you lived in the house.

It is important to look carefully at the finances surrounding keeping the family home. If you take on the home and later find that it's too expensive for you to maintain, you may end up being forced to sell for less than the value you received in the divorce. It would be better to know the realities of the finances before you settle the divorce.

Emotional ties to the home often cloud your judgment during the divorce. That emotional attachment can be costly. You need to take a good hard look at the financial realities of the house before you make a decision to keep it or give it up.