We live in an era of false equivalence. One person’s uninformed opinion is supposed to be as respected and valid as another person’s researched and studied opinion. In a just argument, you will represent all sides of an issue fairly, accept your burden of proof, and reason correctly. This means looking at both sides of a situation, such as invalidating ...
Something you own is valuable when a person is standing in front of you, peeling off the Benjamins. That is the most accurate appraisal you will ever get. Even appraisers get fooled, as with Antiques Roadshow's $50,000 appraisal1 of a 19th century "grotesque face mug" that turned out to be a kid's high school art project from the 1970s. Accurate ...
Rose Ditano of Penhook, Virginia (over there in Franklin County) won $1 million in the Virginia Lottery recently1. She got it all in a lump sum, electronically deposited into her account. Spouses hoping for lump sum spousal support probably feel — if only for an instant — as happy and lucky as Rose. So what is lump sum spousal support? ...
For the first quarter of 2017, American households carried $764 billion in credit card debt, says the Federal Reserve Bank of New York1. If your estranged wife is doing more than her part to add to that debt load, what can you do about it? More important, how does her behavior put you at risk? Estranged is a Strange Word ...
A lot of people and things have budgets. Households have budgets; nations have budgets; even the earth has an energy budget. From budgets come options we label as affordable or unaffordable. If money were limitless, affordability would never be a concern. Most Virginians, though, have to learn to live within their means; they do not have bottomless pockets. They have ...
For our purposes, a “prenuptial agreement” is identical to a “premarital agreement,” which is the legal expression found in the Code of Virginia. In fact, the Code (never one to use a single word when 27 would do) has an entire chapter devoted to it (Chapter Eight, with its nine elegant parts1). You may feel, since you are unlikely to ...
Divorce-proofing any part of your life is likely not something that was on the table prior to your joint nuptials, but saving your business in the event of a divorce is something to truly hang onto. With 40-50% of marriages in the United States ending in divorce, you may think twice about safeguarding your business and business assets from an ...
For anyone in our nation’s military services, acronyms are a fact of life. From Weapon Of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank — aka WOMBAT — to Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS), weird clusters of letters invariably mean something important. The USFSPA, or Uniformed Services Former Spouse Protection Act, is an important acronym that could be a path to a comfortable retirement in later ...
The Latin word bono is, to our ears, naturally funny. “Bone-oh,” as in Sonny Bono or Matteo Bono. You cannot count Paul David Hewson, aka Bono, because he pronounces it “Bahno.” There is also pro bono, Latin shorthand for pro bono publico, “for the public good.” The law is supposed to mete out justice, but Justice, blind as she is, ...