I don't understand why anyone needs to "sell" anything in divorce. I suppose that if the pins were acquired during the marriage, then they are considered as "marital assets", and thus the wife owns 1/2 of them. In such a case, the husband should be able to bid against the wife in paying the marital estate to get to keep the pins.

If cash is needed to pay off the lawyer (or for any other emergent expense), then this is what tapping a retirement account is good for - if the pins were really worth it to the owner. And if the owner hasn't done much in modding or overhauling the pin, and it's a later model, then he could sell now and then buy again when his finances get better. It's a lot different if a lot of work - which doesn't have near the value in the market - has been put into them. Is bankruptcy an option?

Maybe my experience with having the half of my herd that was on the ground floor of my Katrina-flooded home being washed away - and then going through a tenuous bankruptcy (where I had to buy back my herd with exempt assets, albeit at a price of about $50 per pin ) - has made me a bit hard in sympathizing with others' misfortune that could be addressed by simply laying out cash.

Now, as for the issue of the Divorce Industrial Complex, I most certainly sympathize. I think any man going into a marriage should go into it with the expectation that the wife will want to divorce, and plan accordingly - and that marriage should only be done to have kids, as there is no good reason to get married otherwise. I feel the same way about divorce as I do about hurricane floods: one time in a lifetime is enough.