Friday, October 22, 2010

Womanizing - things to avoid to preserve your wealth

This post is about women and money. It is written from the perspective of a man and is not relevant to women readers.

I do not want to approach this topic of womanizing as a moralist because I am not qualified to do so. I cannot guarantee to behave like a gentleman should a stunning temptress throws herself freely onto my lap. Rather, I would like to approach this topic from the financial angle.

Womanizing is extremely costly to a married man. Depending on the laws of the country, the woman who sues for divorce can grab half the man's assets plus a chunk of his future income as alimony. The richer the man, the more expensive it is. This is the price you pay to your wife for womanizing.

Even if the wife does not discover your philandering, you still have to pay for the most expensive pets a man can ever keep - mistresses. Mistresses cost much more than a car in Singapore. It is easy to give in to them. It is sad fact of life that men spend more on their mistresses than on their wives. They are more willing to buy expensive jeweleries to please their mistresses than their wives. This is unfair to the wife who made sacrifices to the family for bringing up the children and taking care of the old folks. This is irrational to the pocketbook because if the jewelry had been spent on the wife, it could at least be pawned when the family falls into hardship.

The expensive pets can quickly turn into even more expensive pests when the man tries to disown them. Men, especially men of status, are subjected to blackmail from their mistresses when they fall out. This can be a bottomless pit for your pocket.

The cost of womanizing drops exponentially for bachelors. For men who suffers from sex addiction, it is much cheaper to indulge themselves as swinging bachelors than as cheating husbands. Tigerwoods who reportedly has a sex addiction problem has to pay USD750 million to settle his divorce. For that price, he can hire a high-class prostitute every night to indulge his wildest sexual fantasies till the day his machinery wears off.

When a bachelor womanizes, he might even be respected among his circle of men friends for his conquests. When a married man womanizes, he will be condemned universally. It is a pity so many prominent public figures who could have gone on to do more social good have been destroyed by such scandals.

While the cost of womanizing for bachelors is lower, it is nevertheless an expensive lifestyle to maintain and should be discouraged. The optimal financial scenario for your romance life is to marry the first woman you kiss. Money spent on girlfriends who do not become your wife offers zero returns. If you change girlfriends several times, you have to write off a substantial sum of money spent on useless relationships. It can be worse than useless as former lovers can become sworn enemies if the fall-out is not handled properly. Having too many girlfriends before marriage can be an emotional baggage for the marriage. I would not advise my sister to marry a man with a history of womanizing. Few fathers would want such a man for their daughters unless they are betting on a lucrative divorce settlements.

The most money-saving outcome is to have your first girlfriend become your wife. However, it is better not to marry at all than to marry the wrong one because of the huge cost of getting it wrong.

When my son grows up and seeks advice on such matters, this is what I would tell him;

Take your relationships seriously. Enter into one only if the woman is of marriage material. After marriage, keep your eyes to your wife exclusively. Roving eyes for a married man are simply not affordable, even for the rich.

As a father, I hope to set a living example for my son to follow. One should not womanize out of love for the wife and money. Should one womanize, one runs the risk of losing both wife and money. What happiness is there left?

7 comments:

  1. I would like to point out that not all wives are good. The scenario that you have painted is too idealistic.

    There are wives who do not take care of parents or parents-in-law. They just treat the husband as an ATM machine.

    However, I do agree that the best is not to marry. I don't know how old you are but the world has changed. Girls of these days are not girls like the last generation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would like to point out that not all wives are good. The scenario that you have painted is too idealistic.

    Thanks for dropping by. Although it is true that there are bad wives around, it is not uncommon for men to womanize even when they have good wives. This is true in our generation, parents' generation, grandparents' generation and so on. Knowing our own DNA as a man, I think this will continue to be true even for our children's generation, grandchildren's generation and so on.

    So, if a man is lucky enough to get a good wife, he should treasure her and don't womanize. Please note that I am not condemning womanizing as a moralist but approaching this issue objectively from the financial angle.

    There are wives who do not take care of parents or parents-in-law. They just treat the husband as an ATM machine.

    Bad luck if this happens. This is not uncommon too.

    It is tragic when Germany marries Greece. When this happens, it may make sense for Germany to take its losses and divorce Greece.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is one hell of an entertaining read! Kudos to someone who can put this aspect of life so adequately and from a male investor POV.

    I too struggle with such views especially when there is no love interest. Even with a gf, there is no guarantee you find happiness with the amount of money you spend. Hopefully a good gf will be a good wife!

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi AnonymousThursday, October 18, 2012 12:37:00 PM GMT+08:00,

    Thank you for your complement. Glad you enjoyed reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. some of the things need more attention--hopefully will find in the next post! fashion

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi guys. I need some recommendation. Do you know this firm - aws consulting partner - Pro4People LTD. I'm planning to implement their solution of cloud computing. I heard some good opinion about them and their solutions. But what do you think? Do you use this in your companies?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Odisha Board Textbooks work to promote the advancement of education in general. Here, we bring you the Odisha Board Primary Textbooks for classes 1-5. We have SCERT Odisha 4th Class Syllabus collected and aggregated the textbooks, so that students can easily access and study them. The language used in the bse odisha textbooks are simple and lucid.

    ReplyDelete

Picking the right Valentine. A much more difficult task than picking the right stocks

9 years ago, I wrote about choosing your Valentine from a value investing standpoint. What I wrote then still stands today, Beauty is over...