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Ten years ago, when I was first starting to work with divorcing people, I had an idea that I thought would make divorce just a little bit less devastating - at least on a couple's bank account. The idea was part of my "divorce preparedness plan" and it was to have what I called, "marital insurance."
Being a therapist, I couldn't exactly implement this idea but it has always bothered me that divorcing couples often have to come up with outrageous sums of money that they rarely have as a liquid asset in order to dissolve their marriage and end this legal contract.
I've seen people have to cash in on retirement accounts, kid's college funds, savings accounts, and liquidate any assets that they can simply to pay for attorneys' fees.
According to Forbes.com, the average amount a couple pays for a divorce is $15K to $30. That's quite a lot of cash for people to have to come up with at a time when they are about to have to live on less money.
We face few other potential hazards that do not offer insurance: we have liability insurance, disability insurance, malpractice insurance, fire, flood and earthquake insurance; we have accident, illnesses and even life insurance; we have insurance for our pets and our possessions, and even wedding insurance but we have had no safety net to fall into if the marriage doesn't work out.
Given the incredibly high likelihood of divorce compared with any of these other incidents, it's shocking that the insurance industry did not start capitalizing on this twenty or thirty years ago. I think it's a sign that divorce has become more socially acceptable in this past decade.
At last, an insurance company from North Carolina called, Safeguard Guaranty Corporation is offering divorce insurance. The protection policy for divorce, called WedLock, provides a Divorce Cost Calculator and a Divorce Probability Calculator (that only has a 13 percent margin of error!) on their website to help you know whether you need to invest in a policy or not.
What I think we'll see developed next is the IDA (individual Divorce Account) or a CDA (Couple's Divorce Account) and, frankly, I think it's a good idea, given that divorce is now a very real fact of life. Of course, people can always put $20 aside in their own bank account earmarked for divorce as well.
To learn more about WedLock and see how it works, go to:
http://www.wedlockdivorceinsurance.com/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
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