Alimony till death
This Is Uncomfortable
Marketplace
4.6 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Sonia Delgado divorced her husband after 30 years of a bad marriage, she thought she’d finally seized financial freedom. She’d no longer have to go along with her ex’s money decisions, which had landed them in chronic debt and insecurity. But when she learned she would have to pay him alimony for the rest of her life, it was as though the divorce had tethered her, once and for all, to everything she wanted to leave behind.
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“This Is Uncomfortable” is Reema Khrais, Donna Tam, Megan Detrie, Peter Balonon-Rosen, Camila Kerwin, Phoebe Unterman, Marque Greene and Serena Chow.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sonia Delgado had been fantasizing for a long time, plotting a way to start over. |
| 0:08.7 | Sheener husband had been unhappily married for almost 30 years. |
| 0:13.0 | There were a lot of problems, but one of the biggest things was money. |
| 0:18.8 | They never agreed about money. |
| 0:21.3 | I thought about money almost all my life with him. |
| 0:24.9 | Everything was a fight. |
| 0:26.6 | Sonia says he had always been in charge of their finances, kind of by default. |
| 0:31.0 | But the problem was that he wasn't very good at it. |
| 0:34.2 | He had terrible credit. |
| 0:35.4 | She felt like he was always spending way more than they could afford, month after month |
| 0:39.5 | after month. |
| 0:40.7 | To the point that they slipped into chronic debt. |
| 0:43.4 | Their power was cut out at least once, and for a while they had to rely on food stamps |
| 0:47.2 | to take care of their three kids. |
| 0:49.6 | She says she even hired an accountant to come up with a basic budgeting plan with her |
| 0:52.8 | husband, but it ended the way it always did. |
| 0:56.3 | There was no discrimination, there was no logical interaction. |
| 1:01.3 | Just yelling and it was a mess. |
| 1:06.3 | And after three decades, Sonia was done. |
| 1:09.9 | It was 2010, and on the first week of summer vacation from her job as a high school teacher, |
| 1:14.8 | she drove herself to the bank. |
| 1:16.8 | She walked inside and asked the teller to close the joint account she had with her husband |
... |
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