Divorce can be a stressful process for everyone involved, including the children of the divorcing spouses. That may explain why a study, recently published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), discovered a correlation between childhood obesity and parental marital status.

The researchers studied over 3,100 third-graders and found that children whose parents were divorced were 54 percent more likely to be overweight. This means that parents going through a divorce may want to keep a special eye on their children’s weight, and ensure that they take steps to keep their children healthy.

What the Study Found

One of the main focuses of the divorce process is the division of the marital assets between the spouses. This requires the court, through the spouses and their attorneys, to take a thorough accounting of all of the marriage’s property. This can tempt some spouses to hide away assets for themselves rather than revealing them for division. Because the concealment of marital assets can be a problem, people going through a divorce should be aware of the different strategies others can use to hide assets, as well as how to spot them.

The strategies for concealing assets fall into two major groups: expense manipulation, making it look like more money is coming out than actually is, and income manipulation, making it look like less money is coming in than actually is. The prior post in this series covered some common expense manipulation strategies. This post will focus on the other type of concealment: income manipulation.

Income Manipulation Strategies

Many divorces occur amicably with the two parties reaching agreeable compromises on property division. However, some divorces are more acrimonious. One common way that confrontation can manifest is through spouses attempting to conceal marital assets to keep from having to divide them in the divorce. This happens despite the fact that many jurisdictions contain rules requiring the disclosure of assets.

People have developed a variety of strategies that they can use to hide their funds, ranging from simplistic and easy to detect to highly subtle or sophisticated. Broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: expense manipulation and income manipulation. Expense manipulation involves techniques that make it appear as though the person is spending more money than what is actually be spent. They can then secret the difference away without having to divide it in the divorce. Income manipulation, which will be covered in part two, involves the opposite: people deferring income until after the divorce to keep it out of the marital estate.

Expense Manipulation Strategies 

A large part of divorce involves the practical issues related to separating two lives that have been managed jointly. This presents unique problems in the digital age when an increased number of those lives take place online.

A recent study by the Pew Research Internet Project found that over one in four couples have a joint email account and 67 percent of people in a committed relationship have shared at least one of their passwords with a significant other. People going through divorce should make sure to stay conscious of these electronic ties that they share with their soon-to-be ex-spouse. Otherwise, they could unwittingly allow their former partner to look into their private affairs.

Dealing with Shared Accounts

While there is a cultural idea that marriage tends to lead to weight gain and divorce to weight loss, based on whether someone is trying to attract a member of the opposite sex, the reality actually turns out to be somewhat more complicated. A study from the Sociology Department at the Ohio State University looked at BMI reports culled from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

That survey involved a group of researchers asking a set of lifestyle questions of a group of people from ages 14 to 22. The researchers then repeated the same survey with the same group every year from 1979 to 1994, at which point the surveys switched to every other year. This type of longitudinal survey provides valuable data to researchers about the effects of various life events on people.

What the Study Found