I read the book as well and agree with you, Katie. The emotional resonance for me was not about "true" financial precarity or lack thereof. It was about the "rug pull," the looking back and wondering if your life as you know it has been a sham, the contributions you made being devalued, feeling "stupid" for not involving yourself in areas of your life you trusted a partner to handle in your best interest, etc etc. It's clear from the text this is a woman of privilege with many safety nets at her disposal in a worst case scenario. It doesn't change how much it would hurt to feel so destabilized and then have the father of your children engage quite aggressively in a divorce.
All these aspects transcend class and many, many more women are left in financial peril due to divorce. If the book inspires a fraction of the women who read it to educate themselves on their family's finances, that feels like a win.
The rug pull and the complete invalidation of 20 years of proximity to her assists and labor that allowed his career to flourish is what got me. Pfffft
Perhaps that's why this story resonates so widely. Regardless of wealth, trust is the foundation of every partnership and financial literacy strengthens that trust across generations.
If I more of less paid for both the houses in full, my husband told me I couldn't work while he accumulated millions that he got to keep just for him even though it was enabled by my contributions as wife and mother, and then he tried to make me buy out half of the houses that again I paid for, that would drive me fully insane just on principle, regardless of whether or not I could afford it. I don't understand why the $12M appreciated value of the home was even presented as a gotcha on her when it was joint property at time of divorce. Had he enforced the prenup, she essentially would've had to pay an extra 50% for two very expensive homes she already covered the first time or sell and give half of what was originally her trust to her ex.
My overall read is that he had lifelong insecurities about his financial situation and given her higher status going into the relationship, he did what he could to assert financial control over her throughout the marriage. The annotated credit card bills, saying she needed to stay home for the kids, almost never doing anything for her birthday feel like ways he took her down a peg precisely because she had a lot of financial power.
Even with triple heiress financial security, it's still terrifying to see your husband completely change overnight and go about this in what felt like the coldest way possible, particularly how completely detached he became from his children. Being left with full care over the kids, paying for an equally competitive divorce lawyer when he got a shark, and possibly having to buyout half the stake of two homes is still completely upending her life, especially if she spent their whole marriage with him taking care of everything financially. The lesson that you should be eyes wide open and a full financial participant in your marriage still holds.
Exactly! This is all they give us about his financial situation: ‘Davis’s financial disclosure, as of 1999, listed a little more than two hundred thousand dollars in base salary, plus slightly less than that in “marketable securities/cash,” and noted that he was “entitled to profits” in a seven-figure investment fund’ and ‘Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.’ Such a set up that the only number we get for him, and not even a hard number, is his 1999 base salary, while comparing it to her numbers decades later. If you claim you have the missing info and you’ve seen the divorce documents, tell us how much money he squirreled away! She covered the houses, her family covered most of the kids’ education, she contributed to the taxes and paid for things out of her own personal account. Hedge funds basically print money, and two of the major line items for most families, housing and schooling were taken care of and then some. He was rolling in it!
I have not read the book, but will definitely be picking it up now. I find it interesting that given her vast wealth, others have chosen to focus only on that aspect. Not the full story or potential cautionary tale that goes beyond wealth classes. I was married at 21 and divorced at 25. While my wealth was nowhere close to hers, I had no prenup (or trusts), my ex was still able to walk away with a decent amount of my money. We had agreed to put money in my 401k, but he chose not to contribute to his retirement so he took a chunk of mine. Additionally, he chose a lower paying job over one tied to his degree, so my income was double his. While it wasn’t significant money in retrospect, what I had to give him at the time was devastating.
Loved this analysis of both the book and article. Just because a woman is not left destitute by a man after divorce does not mean she has to be grateful for the situation in which he leaves her. Society expects women to be satisfied with anything above nothing (both financially and emotionally).
I can’t help but feel like people who are “discovering” that Belle was never at risk of being destitute are 1) missing the point and 2) are assuming things in the text that aren’t really there. You do a really excellent job of highlighting both here. Belle writes of betrayal and loss, which aren’t necessarily relative and can be true whether she had a remaining financial cushion or not. It seems like readers are assuming that financial safety can protect you from any sort of disappointment but that’s (sort of obviously, imo?) untrue. I actually thought Belle did a really graceful job drawing on emotions that would feel pretty universally relatable to those going through divorce *despite* being in a pretty unique situation of financial comfort.
I have been anxiously awaiting this piece since I saw your IG stories - it is SO good!
Belle's story still hit something deep in me - that idea that we just don't know our partner. It's unnerving and terrifying. It's not just about the other person - it's "what is wrong WITH ME, that I couldn't see this coming?"
I divorced under very different circumstances - I initiated, it had been a slow drift apart, and we could barely afford to split up. I perceived us to be cordial friends who were no longer in love (if we'd ever been). I thought he was a great parent - we stayed together as long as we did because I didn't want to split custody of our teenager.
It quickly changed. "The custody arrangement says I *can* have her, not that I have to have her" was not a sentence I was prepared to hear. And when I hear Belle talk about betrayal - that's what I hear. I don't care that my ex hates me, but it's really hard to process that a person I shared my life with for twenty years is the same person who abandoned my child.
I read it — well, listened to it — liked it, and was mystified by anyone who claimed its commercial success was dependent upon readers believing she was on the brink of financial ruin. For those who have never been divorced, I am sincerely happy for you, but the discussion around money is absolutely existential, especially for women. It’s not just about your ability to provide your children with the lifestyle that they knew, it’s about your worth on every level. My ex and I ended up arguing over an amount that was less than 1 percent of the total settlement and it was horrible, although our divorce overall was pretty collegial.
Yes. I have had some incredibly uncomfortable conversations about this book with friends who haven't been divorced. Belle's story hits at a sense of dread that still lives inside me, and I am not interested in a math debate.
(although, ftr, I think the math *ALSO* agrees with Belle)
I really enjoyed the book (while occasionally rolling my eyes at the insane and unimaginable wealth in their rarified world) and found lots of human and relatable themes in it. I was annoyed by the Winter piece for all the reasons you state here, Katie. Thank you for putting it into words much better than I could and doing meaningful reporting and work to rebut the attempted takedown and minimization of Burden’s story. This is precisely the kind of thing I follow you for!
Ugh was waiting for this!! YES, even though the specifics of Burden's story are more voyeuristic in our consumption...the overall sentiment of a woman's unpaid labor in hetero relationships being deemed as "not valuable" is what stirs in most of us who find ourselves giving in so many emotional, invisible and intangible ways. This is the stuff of nightmares (truly to me) in early marriage where I'd wake up and have my partner suddenly unrecognizable to me, screaming lines like "don't you care????" in my sleep. Then to witness one of my closest friends (both her AND him) go through a divorce in which her sacrifice of being default everything and giving up her work life to be the stabilizing force in her family for 12+ years was demeaned to "you got to do whatever you wanted on my dime" and "the life I built", blah blah blah. It's the dehumanizing and demeaning (most often misogynistic) claims that are and will continue to BOIL my insides. So, no, I'm not worth millions with a family trust....but I can resonate with the unthinkable desperation you'd feel waking up one day feeling like your contributions and sacrifices were being labeled as nothingness. Devastating!
I’m an estate planning attorney and I have felt like I’m taking crazy pills during this whole situation. Thank you for writing it all out. Your understanding parallels mine. I keep trying to make people understand that, to the best of our knowledge, Burden is probably the successor beneficiary to some or all of these trusts but we cannot know the actual details: when does she become the beneficiary? What are the terms? Hell, how many beneficiaries are there currently, and what are THEY allowed to do? (The stuff about the stepmom’s trust being depleted makes me wonder if it’s a marital bypass of some kind and she has no access, or limited access, to principle; and as she’s aged she’s needed to divert the interest income away from the grandchildren and towards her own care - I see this in my practice) Also, the existence of a future interest in a vast sum of money, a sum of money whose arrival is potentially based on the date of a loved one’s death, is kind of not helpful when you need money to fix a major problem right now, and not in the vague future.
Katie, this is such an epic deep dive. The pull quote you zeroed in on is the key:
“What remains, what still brings a lump to my throat, a chill to my bones, is not about money. [...] It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”
She felt erased.
This line is devastating, too: “I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too.”
I have no doubt she felt that deep in her bones. What woman hasn't, at some point, felt foolish or uninformed when it comes to money? The system is, in many ways, designed that way! It's exactly why Money with Katie is so incredible, so necessary, and so popular.
For me the most unhinged part of the book was his total lack of interest in his children. I feel like Burden focused on the real estate in part because she was trying to preserve her children’s privacy around a truly devastating emotional injury, which I think she did pretty well. I found the book very well written and engaging - and any real estate envy was pretty thoroughly quelled by the downside of all the horrible rich people in her life! The 99% are a lot nicer than the 1%….
Happy 5 year anniversary of Money with Katie!!! With everyone commenting focused on the actual topic of your article (which was great btw) I wanted to make sure someone also celebrated this cool milestone with you.
From one forensic fact-checking obsessive to another, this was truly excellent KGT.
I've got one of those close colleagues, like a friend but we don't hang out outside of work. He was one of the first people I met after joining my company in 2021, and we were on the same development team for years. He had a beautiful wife, great kids, and similar interests to my own.
One of the first things he shared with me, soon after meeting, was how he and his wife and just paid cash for a full set of owned Tesla solar on their house, plus two batteries. The system ran about $80,000. Shortly thereafter, so maybe mid-2022, he shared that he had just made the final mortgage payment on their home, purchased in 2012. His wife was a teacher, they bought at an incredible time (tail end of the real estate crash in Arizona), and lived frugally, throwing every extra dollar at their mortgage. He was like an IRL Mr. Money Mustache, driving his hatchback and going to skateboarding competitions on the weekends. Present company excluded, he was my #1 source of financial inspiration.
A few years later, his wife receded from their marriage and their kids—slowly, and then suddenly. The details are pretty sordid, so I won't share them, but it left my buddy pretty devastated. After doing everything he reasonably good to salvage their marriage, they divorced last year. As part of the proceedings, he took out a $300,000 mortgage to buy out her half of the appreciated value of their home (where he and his kids still live) and which he is now, once again, aggressively paying off.
When he talks about it, it isn't the money that frustrates him; that's "just life." What gets him is that this thing they had built together—an outright-owned home, funded retirement, the feeling that they could finally, in their forties, take the vacations they had foregone for years, growing old together—had been completely pulled out from under him. His descriptions of the relationship were very much of the "Strangers" variety: looking at the person you have spent 20 years living with, and not recognizing them at all.
Not a gripping multi-million-dollar tale and not a 1:1 comp, I know, but a real example of how this painful, disorienting, financially-recalibrating stuff can and does happen to regular people, and occasionally, to men as well.
I read the book as well and agree with you, Katie. The emotional resonance for me was not about "true" financial precarity or lack thereof. It was about the "rug pull," the looking back and wondering if your life as you know it has been a sham, the contributions you made being devalued, feeling "stupid" for not involving yourself in areas of your life you trusted a partner to handle in your best interest, etc etc. It's clear from the text this is a woman of privilege with many safety nets at her disposal in a worst case scenario. It doesn't change how much it would hurt to feel so destabilized and then have the father of your children engage quite aggressively in a divorce.
All these aspects transcend class and many, many more women are left in financial peril due to divorce. If the book inspires a fraction of the women who read it to educate themselves on their family's finances, that feels like a win.
The rug pull and the complete invalidation of 20 years of proximity to her assists and labor that allowed his career to flourish is what got me. Pfffft
Perhaps that's why this story resonates so widely. Regardless of wealth, trust is the foundation of every partnership and financial literacy strengthens that trust across generations.
If I more of less paid for both the houses in full, my husband told me I couldn't work while he accumulated millions that he got to keep just for him even though it was enabled by my contributions as wife and mother, and then he tried to make me buy out half of the houses that again I paid for, that would drive me fully insane just on principle, regardless of whether or not I could afford it. I don't understand why the $12M appreciated value of the home was even presented as a gotcha on her when it was joint property at time of divorce. Had he enforced the prenup, she essentially would've had to pay an extra 50% for two very expensive homes she already covered the first time or sell and give half of what was originally her trust to her ex.
My overall read is that he had lifelong insecurities about his financial situation and given her higher status going into the relationship, he did what he could to assert financial control over her throughout the marriage. The annotated credit card bills, saying she needed to stay home for the kids, almost never doing anything for her birthday feel like ways he took her down a peg precisely because she had a lot of financial power.
Even with triple heiress financial security, it's still terrifying to see your husband completely change overnight and go about this in what felt like the coldest way possible, particularly how completely detached he became from his children. Being left with full care over the kids, paying for an equally competitive divorce lawyer when he got a shark, and possibly having to buyout half the stake of two homes is still completely upending her life, especially if she spent their whole marriage with him taking care of everything financially. The lesson that you should be eyes wide open and a full financial participant in your marriage still holds.
Also, what do you mean you’re gonna be vindictive to me when YOU cheated?
So much this!!! So, Belle was okay financially? SO WAS HE!!!
Exactly! This is all they give us about his financial situation: ‘Davis’s financial disclosure, as of 1999, listed a little more than two hundred thousand dollars in base salary, plus slightly less than that in “marketable securities/cash,” and noted that he was “entitled to profits” in a seven-figure investment fund’ and ‘Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.’ Such a set up that the only number we get for him, and not even a hard number, is his 1999 base salary, while comparing it to her numbers decades later. If you claim you have the missing info and you’ve seen the divorce documents, tell us how much money he squirreled away! She covered the houses, her family covered most of the kids’ education, she contributed to the taxes and paid for things out of her own personal account. Hedge funds basically print money, and two of the major line items for most families, housing and schooling were taken care of and then some. He was rolling in it!
Yep. Why are we focused on her only, he was the one buying nice things for himself and not allowing her to buy clothes for her children.
“Then I read the book and paid to access the full property records.” TOOK ME OUT
I have not read the book, but will definitely be picking it up now. I find it interesting that given her vast wealth, others have chosen to focus only on that aspect. Not the full story or potential cautionary tale that goes beyond wealth classes. I was married at 21 and divorced at 25. While my wealth was nowhere close to hers, I had no prenup (or trusts), my ex was still able to walk away with a decent amount of my money. We had agreed to put money in my 401k, but he chose not to contribute to his retirement so he took a chunk of mine. Additionally, he chose a lower paying job over one tied to his degree, so my income was double his. While it wasn’t significant money in retrospect, what I had to give him at the time was devastating.
Loved this analysis of both the book and article. Just because a woman is not left destitute by a man after divorce does not mean she has to be grateful for the situation in which he leaves her. Society expects women to be satisfied with anything above nothing (both financially and emotionally).
PREACH
I can’t help but feel like people who are “discovering” that Belle was never at risk of being destitute are 1) missing the point and 2) are assuming things in the text that aren’t really there. You do a really excellent job of highlighting both here. Belle writes of betrayal and loss, which aren’t necessarily relative and can be true whether she had a remaining financial cushion or not. It seems like readers are assuming that financial safety can protect you from any sort of disappointment but that’s (sort of obviously, imo?) untrue. I actually thought Belle did a really graceful job drawing on emotions that would feel pretty universally relatable to those going through divorce *despite* being in a pretty unique situation of financial comfort.
I have been anxiously awaiting this piece since I saw your IG stories - it is SO good!
Belle's story still hit something deep in me - that idea that we just don't know our partner. It's unnerving and terrifying. It's not just about the other person - it's "what is wrong WITH ME, that I couldn't see this coming?"
I divorced under very different circumstances - I initiated, it had been a slow drift apart, and we could barely afford to split up. I perceived us to be cordial friends who were no longer in love (if we'd ever been). I thought he was a great parent - we stayed together as long as we did because I didn't want to split custody of our teenager.
It quickly changed. "The custody arrangement says I *can* have her, not that I have to have her" was not a sentence I was prepared to hear. And when I hear Belle talk about betrayal - that's what I hear. I don't care that my ex hates me, but it's really hard to process that a person I shared my life with for twenty years is the same person who abandoned my child.
I read it — well, listened to it — liked it, and was mystified by anyone who claimed its commercial success was dependent upon readers believing she was on the brink of financial ruin. For those who have never been divorced, I am sincerely happy for you, but the discussion around money is absolutely existential, especially for women. It’s not just about your ability to provide your children with the lifestyle that they knew, it’s about your worth on every level. My ex and I ended up arguing over an amount that was less than 1 percent of the total settlement and it was horrible, although our divorce overall was pretty collegial.
Yes, I don’t have a problem with the math, either, but I accept that some people have no empathy for people who don’t have financial issues.
Yes. I have had some incredibly uncomfortable conversations about this book with friends who haven't been divorced. Belle's story hits at a sense of dread that still lives inside me, and I am not interested in a math debate.
(although, ftr, I think the math *ALSO* agrees with Belle)
I really enjoyed the book (while occasionally rolling my eyes at the insane and unimaginable wealth in their rarified world) and found lots of human and relatable themes in it. I was annoyed by the Winter piece for all the reasons you state here, Katie. Thank you for putting it into words much better than I could and doing meaningful reporting and work to rebut the attempted takedown and minimization of Burden’s story. This is precisely the kind of thing I follow you for!
Ugh was waiting for this!! YES, even though the specifics of Burden's story are more voyeuristic in our consumption...the overall sentiment of a woman's unpaid labor in hetero relationships being deemed as "not valuable" is what stirs in most of us who find ourselves giving in so many emotional, invisible and intangible ways. This is the stuff of nightmares (truly to me) in early marriage where I'd wake up and have my partner suddenly unrecognizable to me, screaming lines like "don't you care????" in my sleep. Then to witness one of my closest friends (both her AND him) go through a divorce in which her sacrifice of being default everything and giving up her work life to be the stabilizing force in her family for 12+ years was demeaned to "you got to do whatever you wanted on my dime" and "the life I built", blah blah blah. It's the dehumanizing and demeaning (most often misogynistic) claims that are and will continue to BOIL my insides. So, no, I'm not worth millions with a family trust....but I can resonate with the unthinkable desperation you'd feel waking up one day feeling like your contributions and sacrifices were being labeled as nothingness. Devastating!
I’m an estate planning attorney and I have felt like I’m taking crazy pills during this whole situation. Thank you for writing it all out. Your understanding parallels mine. I keep trying to make people understand that, to the best of our knowledge, Burden is probably the successor beneficiary to some or all of these trusts but we cannot know the actual details: when does she become the beneficiary? What are the terms? Hell, how many beneficiaries are there currently, and what are THEY allowed to do? (The stuff about the stepmom’s trust being depleted makes me wonder if it’s a marital bypass of some kind and she has no access, or limited access, to principle; and as she’s aged she’s needed to divert the interest income away from the grandchildren and towards her own care - I see this in my practice) Also, the existence of a future interest in a vast sum of money, a sum of money whose arrival is potentially based on the date of a loved one’s death, is kind of not helpful when you need money to fix a major problem right now, and not in the vague future.
Katie, this is such an epic deep dive. The pull quote you zeroed in on is the key:
“What remains, what still brings a lump to my throat, a chill to my bones, is not about money. [...] It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”
She felt erased.
This line is devastating, too: “I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too.”
I have no doubt she felt that deep in her bones. What woman hasn't, at some point, felt foolish or uninformed when it comes to money? The system is, in many ways, designed that way! It's exactly why Money with Katie is so incredible, so necessary, and so popular.
For me the most unhinged part of the book was his total lack of interest in his children. I feel like Burden focused on the real estate in part because she was trying to preserve her children’s privacy around a truly devastating emotional injury, which I think she did pretty well. I found the book very well written and engaging - and any real estate envy was pretty thoroughly quelled by the downside of all the horrible rich people in her life! The 99% are a lot nicer than the 1%….
Happy 5 year anniversary of Money with Katie!!! With everyone commenting focused on the actual topic of your article (which was great btw) I wanted to make sure someone also celebrated this cool milestone with you.
Yes!!!! Happy 5y anniversary to you and Thomas!!!!
This breakdown scratched every itch that I had after reading this book. Thank you!
From one forensic fact-checking obsessive to another, this was truly excellent KGT.
I've got one of those close colleagues, like a friend but we don't hang out outside of work. He was one of the first people I met after joining my company in 2021, and we were on the same development team for years. He had a beautiful wife, great kids, and similar interests to my own.
One of the first things he shared with me, soon after meeting, was how he and his wife and just paid cash for a full set of owned Tesla solar on their house, plus two batteries. The system ran about $80,000. Shortly thereafter, so maybe mid-2022, he shared that he had just made the final mortgage payment on their home, purchased in 2012. His wife was a teacher, they bought at an incredible time (tail end of the real estate crash in Arizona), and lived frugally, throwing every extra dollar at their mortgage. He was like an IRL Mr. Money Mustache, driving his hatchback and going to skateboarding competitions on the weekends. Present company excluded, he was my #1 source of financial inspiration.
A few years later, his wife receded from their marriage and their kids—slowly, and then suddenly. The details are pretty sordid, so I won't share them, but it left my buddy pretty devastated. After doing everything he reasonably good to salvage their marriage, they divorced last year. As part of the proceedings, he took out a $300,000 mortgage to buy out her half of the appreciated value of their home (where he and his kids still live) and which he is now, once again, aggressively paying off.
When he talks about it, it isn't the money that frustrates him; that's "just life." What gets him is that this thing they had built together—an outright-owned home, funded retirement, the feeling that they could finally, in their forties, take the vacations they had foregone for years, growing old together—had been completely pulled out from under him. His descriptions of the relationship were very much of the "Strangers" variety: looking at the person you have spent 20 years living with, and not recognizing them at all.
Not a gripping multi-million-dollar tale and not a 1:1 comp, I know, but a real example of how this painful, disorienting, financially-recalibrating stuff can and does happen to regular people, and occasionally, to men as well.
Hell of a job dude.