Temperament: Money, Mind & Emotions · Personal Finance TV

How to handle your finances in divorce?

March 6, 2025·26 min·10 clips

Divorce is the starting point here. The episode treats it as a financial event as much as an emotional one. It opens with a broader picture of divorce in India, where a recent money control analysis based on data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, PLFS, reveals a telling trend. More Indians are getting divorced now than they were seven years ago. And the shift is happening across both rural and urban India. In rural areas, the proportion of divorced or separated women is rising. Meanwhile, in urban India, the ratio of divorced men has climbed from 0.3% in 2017-18 to 0.5% in 2023-24. For women in cities, 0.7% are now divorced, up from 0.6% just a few years ago. The ratio of divorced men has climbed from 0.3% in 2017-18 to 0.5% in 2023-24. But stepping away from a marriage also means stepping into financial uncertainty. Finances become entangled in ways that are far more complex than we often realize. Who gets what? How do you split assets, liabilities, and even future responsibilities? And perhaps the most pressing question, how do you rebuild your financial life after separation? Everything that was once ours suddenly has to be redefined into yours and mine. Hi, my name is Ashish Chabla, and in this episode of Temperament Season 2, we'll decode th the exception of the Hindu Marriage Act, which at the time of enforcement in 1955, actually had a provision that in the event the man was also incapable of providing for himself, he could actually turn to the woman, you know, and her income and assets and so on would be considered. Of course, you've seen very few cases like that. It's mostly the women who do agitate that claim. Now, when you agitate a claim like this, you have to ensure that A, you are incapable of providing for yourself. And you have to obviously back that up with evidence to show that, you know, you enjoyed a particular standard of living when you were married, which was provided to you by your husband. Now, before 2019, what would happen is automatically, just before a divorce, the man would become a pauper and the woman would be solely sort of dependent on her husband's income. And you'd find a lot of people who would be not really disclosing their assets, their wealth, and so on. And women kind of exaggerating it and not disclosing what they actually own, what their savings are. So in 2019, there was a very interesting judgment that came up, which is the Rajnesh versus Neha judgment. And it's kind of made a uniform law when it comes to filing for any claim of maintenance. All right. Both the husband and the wife at the time of filing such an application, they have to disclose their assets which is known as the affidavit of disclosure of assets and liabilities, which includes information from your educational qualifications to what liabilities you have, what are your income tax returns, one year prior to marriage, at the time of marriage, one year before separation, and then after filing, you know, that application. So it's very detailed. Essentially, of course, you know, people are creative, and there are ways to skirt around that as well. But then what happens is the court has the right to draw adverse inference, if you don't disclose all the details correctly, or the court doesn't disclose all the details correctly. So it's a very detailed application. They feel that you're hiding something. Got it. And also, is the law still tilted in favor of one gender? I don't think so. I do feel,

As heard by us

A practical look at the money side of divorce in India.

This episode treats divorce as a money problem as much as a personal one, and that is where it gets its weight. It moves from the rising incidence of divorce in India to the harder questions that follow: what happens to assets, liabilities, and future responsibilities when a…

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When divorce turns into a money map, you need the rules first.

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