Everyone can be intuitive and foresee impending divorce, here is how to spot a spouse’s intentions and be warned, - you need wealth protection strategies. This is the first of a series of articles detailing how to spot a forthcoming divorce, how to do pre divorce planning and how to handle the divorce itself. As an International Asset Protection and Divorce Strategist working in both Europe and the U.S. I have secretly advised some of the highest profile business executives helping them save millions in the divorce process.
My clients are intelligent; not just because they use me, that goes without saying, but because they are at the top of the business food-chain. They often run multi-million dollar businesses, or family empires; they are creators of wealth, generals in charge of business legions. In the stress of personal unhappiness my clients wonder whether they are “paranoid” thinking their marriage is heading down the tube. Usually I am advising them about issues of asset protection and various wealth protection strategies and they are beginning to wonder is it all necessary; maybe they were just being “paranoid”? I usually ask some questions to find out why they feel things are not going well. Generally I find a client’s intuitive judgement is generally correct; it is a truism for good reason; there is rarely smoke without fire!.

Here are five tell-tale signs that things are not as they should be.

1) Attention changes. Either the spouse pays you more attention due to guilt or else seems to find fault with you, because they try to justify the affair in their mind.

2) Sex changes; this can be less interest in sex or indeed occasionally more interest.

3) Money changes. Try and keep a check on where the money goes; if they are more cautious with spending, it is often because there are additional expenses you don’t know about. Sometimes they start spending far more than previously on certain outgoings. This may mean they have received legal advice and be increasing their “financial needs”. This is your spouse doing their little bit of pre divorce planning.

4) Personal changes; watch out for habit changes in gym attendance, new clothes in the cupboard - but not used for you! New this or that, indeed any significant change of routine can signify a change of of object of desire.

5) Phone changes. Maybe they whisper on the phone and abruptly change voice tone or hang up when you come into the room. Check their mobile account, especially calls made to the same number after leaving for work or just before coming back from work.

As you will have noticed all of these are behavioural changes of one form or another, because when a person knows their personal relationship is wrong their behaviour changes. Emotional detachment signifies a lot. Avoiding communication or indeed unusual communication can signify that the relationship is not on course. When they avoid either connection to you or from their obligations as a spouse and start prioritising their needs and desires and behaving as if it is purely their life and they want to live it their own way rather than with you, then break-up will follow. Sometimes a spouse will accuse you of having an affair as a way of distracting attention from themselves

When you discover some of these changes do not confront your spouse as this will only mean they adjust their behaviour and make it more difficult for you to keep track of what they are doing. To the same degree that your spouse’s behaviour has changed because they know they are turning their back on their relationship with you, so you must make sure that your behaviour does not change to alert them to your suspicions. Instead, keep things as “normal” as possible and do some “pre divorce planning” and exercises in “wealth and asset protection” for the day that comes. Just as they are “playing a game” with you, so you must learn to play the same game in reverse while you protect your assets and wealth and work out a divorce strategy.

Next time, I’ll tell you five simple things you should do immediatley you become suspicious to protect your wealth and assets before the divorce war to follow.

Doctor Ditchem
International Divorce Strategist
Protecting wealth against Divorce!

Well, the critics have been speculating about their marrriage for some time and now the speculation seems to have been on the ball; Madonna and Guy Ritchie have announced their intention to divorce, so now the fun really begins as top divorce lawyers for each will manoevre and argue over the couples combined fortune - estimated at £300 million!

The case will be an interesting twist on the norm of a woman seeking a large sum of money from her wealthy husband with Guy instead probably seeking a large slice of the couples fortune. After all - I am sure the argument will go - he had to put his own career on the back-burner to support Madge’s demanding career and give emotional support to their family.

Guy is one of a growing number of men in the position of benefiting from divorce because of being married to a very successful woman. The law doesn’t discriminate bewteen men and women any longer, just the wealthy and the not!

Incredibly it seems tht Madonna didn’t get Guy to enter into a prenup and so all is open to argument. Sorry Madge, big mistake! In legal circles it is being speculated that if properly handled the divorce should result in Guy receiving the largest payout in British court history, dwarfing the miserable £24 million paid to my old friend and yours, Heather Mills McCartney.

There really is no reason why this should have happened. If Madonna had taken the advice I am sure she was given then a prenup would have been in place and the divorce spoils would be minimised. Madonna has been implicated by Axel Rodriguez’s wife as being responsible for their marriage break-down, (something Madonna has denied); but at least the New York Yankee star had a prenup! Maybe instead of him listening to her, she should have been listening to him!

If you think that Madonna’s wealth is such she won’t miss the occasional £50 or £100 million, just look at what they are reported to own, just real property, not cars or anything else, just real property, all of which is now up for argument;

Madonna is believed to own the couple’s London home, a £7m family townhouse in Marylebone, and a 10-bedroom, £6m property next door as well as two Manhattan apartments overlooking New York’s Central Park worth £2m each.

Guy is thought to own their estate, Ashcombe House, in Wiltshire which has large grounds and is reportedly worth £10m.

It is thought that the couple own the following properties jointly;
Two mews cottages in London worth £2m each (used to house their London staff).
The £2.5m Punchbowl Pub on Farm St in Mayfair, apparently Madonna and Ritchie own it with their friends.
A £3.6m building in London’s West End -the headquarters of the Kabbalah sect;
A five-storey, £1.6m house in Regents Park.
A two-storey mansion in Beverly Hills, California worth £8m.

Divorce planning doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen, especially if you are “A material girl!”

Doctor Ditchem
International Divorce Strategist
“Protecting wealth against Divorce!”

For this I am grateful to the newssheet, “The Daily Reckoning” which makes for provoking reading in troubled financial times. Anyway, a number of clients have asked me how to get gold in practical terms and I reproduce a portion of a recent article on the subject from the newsheet. Here is the Link for the full article; http://dailyreckoning.com/rpt/goldinvesting.html

Direct ownership. There is nothing like gold bullion, the ultimate expression of pure value. Historically, many civilizations have recognized the permanence of gold’s value. For example, Egyptian civilizations buried vast amounts of gold with deceased pharaohs in the belief that they would be able to use it in the afterlife. Great wars were fought, among other reasons, to pillage stores of gold. Why the allure? The answer: Gold is the only real money, and its value cannot be changed or controlled by government fiat-the underlying reason for governments to go off the gold standard, unfortunately.Gold’s value will rise based on the pure forces of supply and demand, no matter what Mr. Greenspan decrees regarding interest rates or greenbacks in circulation. The big disadvantage to owning gold is that it tends to trade with a wide spread between bid and ask prices. So don’t expect to turn a fast profit. You’ll buy at retail and sell at wholesale, so you’ll need a big price jump just to break even. However, you should not view gold as a speculative asset, but a defensive asset for holding value. Since your dollars are going to fall in value, gold is the best place to preserve value. The best forms for gold ownership are through minted coins: one-ounce South African Krugerrands, Canadian Maple Leafs, or American Eagles.

Gold exchange-traded funds. The recent explosion in exchange traded funds (ETFs) presents an even more interesting way to invest in gold. An ETF is a type of mutual fund that trades on a stock exchange like an ordinary stock. The ETF’s exact portfolio is fixed in advance and does not change. Thus, the two gold ETFs that trade in the United States both hold gold bullion as their one and only asset. You can locate these two ETFs under the symbol “GLD” (for the streetTRACKS Gold Trust) and “IAU” (for the iShares COMEX Gold Trust). Either ETF offers a practical way to hold gold in an investment portfolio.

Gold mutual funds. For people who are hesitant to invest in physical gold, but still desire some exposure to the precious metal, gold mutual funds provide a helpful alternative. These funds hold portfolios of gold stocks-that is, the stocks of companies like Newmont Mining that mine for gold. Newmont is an example of a senior gold stock. A senior is a large, well-capitalized company that has been around several years and has a profitable track record. They tend to own established mines that produce known quantities of gold each year. For many investors, selection of such a company is a more moderate or conservative play (versus picking up cheap shares in fairly young companies).

Junior gold stocks. This level of stock is more speculative. Junior stocks are less likely to own productive mines, and may be exploration plays-with higher potential profits but also with greater risk of loss. Capitalization is likely to be smaller than capitalization of the senior gold stocks. This range of investments is for investors whose risk tolerance is broader, and who accept the possibility of gold-based losses in exchange for the potential for triple-digit gains.

Gold options and futures. For the more sophisticated and experienced investor, options allow you to speculate in gold prices. But in the options market, you can speculate on price movements in either direction. If you buy a call, you are hoping prices will rise. A call fixes the purchase price so the higher that price goes, the greater the margin between your fixed option price and current market price. When you buy a put, you expect the price to fall. Buying options is risky, and more people lose than win. In fact, about three-fourths of all options bought expire worthless. The options market is complex and requires experience and understanding. To generalize, options possess two key traits-one bad and one good. The good trait is that they enable an investor to control a large investment with a small, and limited, amount of money. The bad trait is that options expire within a fixed period of time. Thus, for the buyer time is the enemy because as the expiration date gets closer, an option’s “time value” disappears. Anyone investing in options needs to understand all of the risks before they spend money. The futures market is far too complex for the vast majority of investors. Even experienced options investors recognize the high risk nature of the futures market. Considering the range of ways to get into the gold market, futures trading is the most complex and, while big fortunes could be made, they can also be lost in an instant.

Doctor Ditchem
International Divorce Planner and Strategist
“Protecting wealth against Divorce!”
www.doctorditchem.com

New York Yankees Baseball star Alex Rodriguez, or ‘A Rod’ to his friends, had a prenuptial agreement with his wife, but when the parties went for divorce his wife challenged the terms of the prenuptial agreement. Recently theyapparently reached a settlement. Premarital agreements ( or ‘prenups’) are entered into prior to marriage and may deal with the parties’ present and future property rights. Even in the Uk where the law does not specifically recognise prenups there is still an advantage in having them in my view.

Maybe you are not aware of the “nuances” of prenup law, but any reviewing court must find the premarital agreement is in line with public policy or it’s terms will not be enforced by the court. For this reason it is important that any prenup include a ’severability clause’ or as it is sometimes called a ‘red ink’ clause, meaning that if a court finds one or more terms of the Agreement are NOT in line with public policy they can draw a red line around the offending clause or clauses and the rest will still stand as enforceable because they can be ’severed’ by the court from the offending terms and still stand in their own right.

Usually the party against whom you wish to enforce the terms of the Agreement must have had at least seven days between the date they were first presented with the Agreement and advised to seek independent legal advice and the time of their signature, otherwise any court is likely to find the Agreement is totally unenforceable.

I usually work with clients in the background advising about the terms of the Agreement, and - more inmportantly frankly - how to ’sell’ the idea and it’s terms to the other party; as I say, it is these ’soft issues’ that are often the hardest! These are issues a lawyer cannot help with!

Even in the case of this NY Yankee star where the prenup was challenged it’s existence set a foundation for the argument. If there had been no prenup then the arguments would undoubtedly have been more wide ranging and lsted a whole lot longer!

A good prenup is classic pre-divorce planning; it sets the ground rules before the players ever go onto play!

Doctor Ditchem
International Divorce Planner and Strategist
“Protecting wealth against Divorce!”
www.doctorditchem.com