Personal experiences have a habit of making what you might otherwise dismiss as obvious a lot more relevant.
As this week began, I was contemplating some comments in last weekend’s newspaper from women who struggled to articulate their connection with Women’s Day.
Not longer after, I found myself involved in another woman’s crisis.
I learnt from her sister that her screams and her neighbour’s intervention had stopped her husband from strangling her.
The couple had had an argument over his behaviour; ill-feelings had been allowed to fester; he developed some irrational beliefs, attempted economic blackmail by leaving her and her children without food for the weekend, and finally resorted to indefensible violence.
She fled with her young children to her family, but, after only one night away, she ventured back home armed only with an interdict.
Trying to fathom why – against my and others advice – she would put her own and her children’s lives at risk gave new meaning to the often-commented-on link between the high rate of woman abuse in South Africa and women’s lack of economic empowerment.
In practical terms, this woman had to return home for clothes for herself and her children; she could not transport all the things she required for herself and her kids, such as clothes and blankets; and she needed to be at home to use her regular and already-paid-for means of transport to work. Long term, she wanted to keep the home for which she had helped to pay and believed that she did not deserve to lose.
Despite having her own source of income, she needs a lot more to be sufficiently empowered to leave her abusive home life.
She will need the confidence and the desire to manage and improve her finances and to determine her destiny without being under the physical, emotional and financial control of her husband.
It is for this reason that shelters for abused women in the United States are teaching financial skills. These are skills that we who have them can impart.
In a recent blog, Johan Fourie, a senior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, commented on a working paper written by colleagues who found that social ties between domestic workers and their employers can reduce the inequality between them.
Anyone who has and can impart financial skills to domestic and other less-empowered workers will improve their chances of escaping abusive relationships.
When getting a divorce
Speaking to the needs of women who want to get out of relationships where it is important that the divorce order deals in detail with the couple’s finances, Angelique Visser, the chairperson of the Fiduciary Institute of Southern Africa, this week issued some guidelines to financially dependent women going through a divorce.
Visser advises that you:
* Ensure that the divorce agreement provides for maintenance for both you and your children to continue after your former spouse’s death. If this provision is absent, your children may have an automatic claim against the deceased estate, but you may find it very difficult to prove your maintenance claim to the executor, Visser says.
It is also important to make sure that the settlement agreement makes it clear what expenses will be paid by whom, because this could result in additional costs if you have to approach the court again to, for example, get a former spouse to pay for a child’s university tuition.
* Finalise the registration or transfer of assets between you and your former spouse at the time of your divorce. Postponing this will complicate matters when either of you dies, Visser says.
Worse, if you do not take transfer of fixed properties into your name, if your former spouse’s estate is sequestrated, you will have a claim only against his insolvent estate.
* Take your share of your former spouse’s retirement fund interest. Consider all the implications of taking this amount in cash rather than transferring it to a retirement fund in your name. Lump sums above R25 000 will be taxed on a sliding scale.
Also, remember that lump sum withdrawals of retirement fund benefits before retirement will reduce the tax-free lump sum to which you are entitled when you retire.
Women generally live longer than men, so it is likely that your retirement savings will have to fund an income for a longer retirement than any man you know.
* Update your will within three months of your divorce order being granted. If, after these three months, your former spouse is still named as a beneficiary in your will, he will inherit from your estate regardless of your circumstances. You could even have remarried and have children born from the second marriage. This happens, Visser says.
* Ascertain whether the court has granted you sole or joint guardianship of your children. If you have joint guardianship, your former spouse will automatically become the sole guardian of your children if you die while they are minors, Visser says. If you do not believe that your former spouse is fit to act in that capacity, you need to get the court to appoint you as the sole guardian. Then you can nominate an alternative guardian in your will, but make sure that the guardian you appoint is someone suited to the job.
* Ensure you have enough cash in your estate to cover debts, taxes, funeral expenses and administration fees, or your executor could be forced to sell assets to cover any shortfall. One way to guard against this is to take out a life assurance policy that will provide liquidity to cover all these expenses.
* If you have minor children, ensure that your will provides for a testamentary trust to be established on your death so that their inheritance will not be paid into the Guardian’s Fund. It is difficult for a guardian to claim ad hoc expenses from the Guardian’s Fund.
The trustees of a testamentary trust can invest the funds in favour of your children and pay the children’s guardian an amount every month to cover their living expenses, including education and medical costs.
Addressing the issue of badly worded divorce orders, which Personal Finance highlighted recently, Russell Anderson, the consulting senior policy adviser at the Association for Savings & Investment SA (Asisa), says if you are a woman facing divorce, it is critically important that you ensure that the wording of your final divorce order does not fail you when it comes to sharing retirement fund benefits.
“Asisa member companies are increasingly dealing with divorce orders that cannot be given effect to. Often, the wording is simply too vague and does not comply with the laws governing retirement fund benefits and the provisions in the Divorce Act that deal with them,” Anderson says.