Mistresses and Broken Marriages Cost Arnold, Tiger and Kobe Millions: Wealth-Wise Tips for Spouses Thinking About Straying from the Nest

Infidelity is an age-old way for your clients to lose their wives and, in the wrong circumstances, their assets. The key, experts say, is to know their weaknesses — and have an asset protection plan in place before they give in to temptation.

Tiger Woods settled $100 million of his $600 million fortune on his ex-wife Elin and agreed to pay her a reported $20,000 a month in support, provided she refuses to talk about his private life.

The sports books are giving 3/2 odds that Kobe Bryant ends up giving Vanessa at least $100 million of his $300 million. And the Schwarzenegger-Shriver family are still at the negotiating table six months after Maria filed for divorce.

What all these men have in common is wealth and adultery. Before one of your clients becomes the next Schwarzenegger, Woods or Bryant, make sure they’ve done everything they can to keep from destroying their marriages and their net worth.

1. Asset protection comes first. A properly drafted trust well while your client is still single removes the money from any consideration of what becomes marital property and what doesn’t when the marriage breaks down.

Even in a community property state like California — home of the Schwarzeneggers and the Bryants — assets assigned to a trust well in advance of the wedding are generally shielded from the divorce court split because they’re never commingled in the first place.

Old money has known for generations that this is how you keep family property in the family, no matter who the kids marry. After all, Maria Shriver’s share of the Kennedy fortune came down to her alone through trusts, and she’ll probably keep it after she and Arnold finalize their divorce.

As Nashville estate planner Bryan Howard tells me, asset protection trusts are running neck-and-neck with prenuptial agreements in his practice as parents move to lock up the kids’ money before there’s even a love interest in the picture.

Besides, wealthy celebrities are magnets for lawsuits and should have asset protection trusts anyway to protect their wealth from creditors. Depending on the state, these vehicles can offer added armor against an aggrieved ex-spouse as well.

2. Take care with the prenuptial agreement. Every state now allows “no fault” divorces, so the question of which spouse was unfaithful no longer plays the huge role in court that it once did.

Back then, a wife or wronged husband who could prove adultery had a huge advantage in forcing a split of the marital assets. Now, it only matters if the cheating spouse wants support or, according to divorce guru Matt O’Connell, there’s a prenup in play.

“Often times, prenuptial agreements have a clause stating if infidelity is involved, the settlement is affected” he explains.

“But if you have no prenuptial agreement or there is no specific clause, adultery will not be an issue.”

Eliminate the clause, and your clients can get their future spouses to sign away all rights to the money up front — or, in a more generous scenario, limit their claim on the marital property to a fixed dollar amount.

Thanks to Tiger Woods’ lawyers, his original prenup would have given Elin maybe $20 million, a measly 3% of his vast fortune.

Unfortunately, his lawyers failed to secure two things that matters even more to the low-profile golf god than his $60 million Florida estate: his privacy and his kids.

Getting Elin to sign a post-nuptial non-confidentiality agreement and agree to joint custody raised the final bill to $100 million. That’s still a pittance compared to the $300 million she could have gotten in a 50-50 split.

And it’s better than Arnold and Kobe, neither of whom seems to have any agreement at all in place and are back on the hook for half their assets.

3. Don’t do it at all. Remind your clients with roving eyes of the cost of straying. It’s a simple trick of behavioral economics, but if Arnold or Kobe or Tiger had thought ten seconds about the 9-digit price tag on their infidelities, they probably wouldn’t be in the position they’re in now.

Adultery sets up patterns of behavior that get people in deeper trouble. With Arnold, for example, Maria hired a private detective to dig into his double life.

Were there more illegitimate children lurking in his past? Was he diverting marital assets to pay for gifts to his mistresses? Either would count against him in the settlement, not to mention do even more damage to his carefully nourished “family values” image.

Tiger Woods reportedly paid his girlfriends over $10 million to keep quiet. That gave Ellin a lot more negotiating power.

Ultimately, if your client gets caught, the experts say, he needs to confess everything then and there. Time for big presents to buy time — Ellin Woods and Vanessa Bryant both got major jewelry when they first caught their husbands cheating — and big planning for a final split down the road.

Sure, any couple might get back together. But with the sports book giving relatively long odds of 2 to 1 against Kobe paying Vanessa less than $50 million, there’s enough money at stake for a good advisor to earn his or her fees here and, naturally, keep the assets from moving from one side of the aisle to the other.

Scott Martin, senior editor, The Trust Advisor. Steve Maimes and Jerry Cooper contributed to the research.

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  • Chuck

    What odds can a bettor get that Elin will have a higher net worth than Tiger in 20 years?

  • http://www.facebook.com/MauiJoe2010 Joe Gordon

    Spielberg paid Amy Irving about $97 million so it seems Kobe, Arnold and Tiger should have just used Charlie Sheen’s advice: get a high paid professional because they leave afterwards! It’s an exit fee, not prostitution.