Dividing a community estate in Texas
When a couple decides to divorce they inevitably have to come to terms with the fact that they are each going to have to give up some of the property they collected throughout their marriage. In the movies the division is easy. How many times have we heard people state that, during a divorce, the man/woman is “entitled to half of everything”? It makes people think that the wife or husband who married into money is going to get a windfall or hit the lotto. The reality is that, in Texas, the rule when it comes to division of property is the “just and right” division. In other words, the court decides what the proper division of the community estate is and they DON’T have to stick to any predetermined statute. To be sure, there are some states that rely on a 50/50 split of property but Texas isn’t one of them. In Texas a Judge will base his division of the estate on several factors and you usually have to ask for it for him to consider an unequal division. Adultery, cruelty, abandonment, prison, earning capacity, children, etc. are just some of the factors the court will consider when deciding how much of an estate he should award to the prospective parties in a divorce. A good example of a divorce in which the wife got much less than 50% of the assets in a marriage is an article I found recently. Granted, this article (posted below) is from 2005 and it involves an estate that is worth millions but the lady only got 24% of the estate and that is a LOT less than the 50% she could have gotten.
Friday, March 25, 2005 BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — A judge has awarded the former wife of a multimillionaire businessman a divorce settlement worth more than $40 million even though she admitted having affairs with her rock-climbing guide and a man she met on a flight to China. In addition to a $24 million payment, Susan Sosin (search) will keep the couple’s $3.6 million Manhattan apartment, $2 million Utah ski house and $800,000 home in Wallkill, N.Y. (search). But she has to vacate the couple’s two mansions in Connecticut and three desert properties in Arizona. In the divorce granted Wednesday, she also gets to keep $6 million in her brokerage accounts, eight cars and $2.9 million in jewelry, including a ruby piece her husband had bought for her but hadn’t given to her prior to their divorce. Richard Albrecht (search), attorney for Sosin’s husband, Howard, estimated the total value of the award at $43 million, or 27 percent of the estate. She wanted half, he said. “My opinion is her conduct in this matter affected the award,” Albrecht said. Susan Sosin’s lawyer, Frederic J. Siegel, estimated the total value of the award was about $45 million and said his client asked for about 45 percent of the estate “By anybody’s standards, it’s a large amount of money,” Siegel said. “Both parties will be able to move on with their lives.”
Siegel said both sides were at fault for the divorce and defended his client as a good mother.
Howard Sosin, 54, who founded AIG Financial Products (search) in 1987, filed for divorce after discovering his wife’s relationships in February 2003. During an upgrade of their computer system, he found hundreds of e-mails between his wife and her lover, according to testimony. Susan Sosin, 51, admitted in testimony that she had become intimate with a guide while rock climbing in 1996, though she said it was a spontaneous and isolated occurrence. During a flight to China in 2000, she met a married man, and that led to a lengthy affair, according to testimony. “The parties’ marriage has been undeniably marred by the defendant’s infidelity,” Superior Court Judge Howard Owens stated in his verdict. “Although her sexual relationship was not the sole cause of the breakdown, it did effectively terminate the marriage.”
Howard Sosin’s wealth was estimated at $168 million. Among the assets he gets to keep are $89 million in bank accounts, 10 of the couple’s 18 cars, $960,000 worth of private club memberships and $22 million in fine art. The couple met in 1978 when Howard Sosin was an assistant professor at Columbia University. At the time, she was married to another man and working in retail. Howard Sosin served as the president and chief operating officer of AIG Financial Products until 1993 when he left the company. Following litigation, he received $182 million from AIG.
