Perhaps You Just Need a “Standby” Divorce Agreement.

Call it Moving on instead of Moving out.

You and your spouse are each in your sixties. She was a teacher who stepped away after 20 years and now runs a knitting shop. You have three sandwich shops, all within 20 miles of each other. Kids are raised and, thankfully, gone. Unfortunately, you are not liking each other and that’s been going on for a while.

The house has lots of equity; especially since the real estate run up of 2020. If you sold it and split the proceeds, you each would get $300,000. You each look around and see that $300,000 is not going to buy a house you would want to live in even if the marital home is feeling a tad “crowded” these days. Each of you have social security benefits to claim but you’re not certain when would be best. Wife has a $3,500 a month pension in pay status and it will pay half to you, should she pre-decease you. She has $50,000 in an IRA and your IRA is $350,000.

The knitting shop brings in about $25,000 a year. Your sandwich operations report $125,000 before we start looking through the rubble for perquisites to add-back. You each saw a lawyer and each one said the devil would be in trying to value the business interests. To this writer’s mind no one ever fought over or grew wealthy with a knit shop. When you went to see your lawyer, you told him about the fate of Subway. A decade ago, they had 27,000 stores. Now they are under 19,000. You are better than Subway, but the trend seems negative for the industry.

Your spouse came back from her lawyer dancing on air. In early July, Jersey Mike announced it was going public and expecting the stock to produce a market value of $12 billion (with a “B”). That’s about $3.6 million per store. Those stores had average sales in 2025 of $220,000 each. You get the calculator out and go: “Who in the world pays 16x revenue for a sandwich stop? This is not SpaceX. Not Nvidia. You go look it up; they are talking about 65x earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Fast forward. Wall Street got a little pumped about Jersey Mike. It went public at $23 a share reflecting a market capitalization of $5 billion. That’s still 27x earnings (EBITDA) per share for a sandwich business.

So, the Subway left hand tells you that your future is dim. But Wall Street seems to telegraph that your sandwich shops might bring in $1,500,000 or more even though you have no real estate. Just appliances and cold cuts. And you spouse’s crazy lawyer might just argue that.

Private equity has bloated lots of business values in its quest to aggregate and take industries public. Funeral homes, plumbers, HVAC contractors, and telemedicine services have all been through this and some, have been paid handsomely because they were among the “chosen” who were consolidated and then taken to market with promises of meteoric sales growth and profits. But then they move on to fresh kill like sandwich shops or minor league sports franchises.

In this case, our couple may be wise to mediate a “live together” agreement to see what happens to the housing market and whether the taste for cold cuts grows unabated into a big sale. This is a very turbulent market. Stocks are rising but no one can explain why. Interest rates are unstable because we have a huge deficit and tons of money being put into a new industry we don’t understand. Yes, it would be nice to split up and move on, but the market is choppy and housing is very expensive. An agreement should batten down the hatches; make asset changes require mutual consent and state that everyone should stand by for things to clear. If, in the meantime, you find true love, take that fun off premises.

There are unique aspects to this kind of agreement. Who gets what rooms and how are kitchen access and responsibilities divided? How do the bills get paid? But these “small deals” may help establish a pattern of responsible negotiation that can help when it comes time to address larger and more lasting financial issues. Call this a kind of matrimonial “staycation” if you will. In turbulent financial times, it makes for an affordable holiday.