When marriages degrade to that point there is usually no way of saving them. I've been there done that & honestly I feel like I escaped with my life & have no regrets about that. I lived in the same house separated the last 13 years I was living with him basically trapped there by financial issues until my mom died & I sold her house & used the money basically to escape though it wasnt the initial plan.

About your wife's inheritance money. Ok, I left 10 years ago & finally had money to put my farm into an LLC to protect it from his financial irresponsibility. The interesting thing to find out was that I bought my farm (totally paid for) with my inheritance. His name was never signed to the property title but because Ky Is a dower state, he had to sign a quit claim on MY farm property because the dower statutes gave him ownership also of my inheritance money even though the inheritance came from a state (calif) that is not a dower state.

While initially pissing with the initial divorce demands, he talked with a lawyer about baknruptcy. I had tsken some of my inheritance money WITH THE AGREEMENT of being paid back when the refinance went through on that Ca house. I got my money back but the lawyer had told him that according to community property laws in Ca, because I put that money into the common ownership property of the house that it had actually become part of the community property & in reality I wasnt entitled to get ALL the money back that in agreement had only loaned him.

My daughter ended up in a similar situation in Colorado though not married, she had put her inheritance into buying a house with her BF. They split up & EVERYTHING was divided...inheritance gone.

You seriously need to consult with a lawyer regarding that 80k she put ito the common property house. Leagally it may very well have become common property because of your house being common property. That lawyer told him that IF I had placed my money into our joint account it woukd have legally become common property too. Luckily I kept it in the trust account ONLY in my name.

Oh the nightmare book I could write about my marriage that I stuck together for 33 years of my life (wasted). Most I hid away in my computer engineering career but when aerospace crashed & my career crashed & I didnt have my escape any longer, life at home fell totally apart. I didnt even realuze until a few yearsago that ALL my suicide attempts werent just because of the loss of my career but were the only way I could see OUT OF BEING TRAPPED in the bad marriage. I ended up on disability unable to handle the high stress of an engineering career any longer but still had no way out because our home was upside down financially & all my medical bills from trying to end my life. Wgen I was finally able to escape, all retirement money was gone. I gave him the house when he let it go into foreclosure but my name is still on the loan. My quit claim on that house just orotects me against any law suit against the property that might occur but with my nsme still on the loan nothibg protects me against them coming back to me if he ends up letting it go into foreclosure again. Evenduvorce doesnt protect me, only his refinance in his own name which he would never be able to qualify for.

All these little details are things you need to keep in mind with divorce in your future.