This is just one guy's advice and I'm in no way a professional. My sitch was similar. We were married 15 years and she was a SAHM for 12 of those. We had no appreciable assets or liabilities. Still, my goal was to help her on the road to being independent. I'm a college graduate, a former military officer and I work in a reasonably high paying job. She never finished college and has only ever worked in retail. So, whenever I started thinking the financial cost to me was too great, I remembered that in 5 years I'm going to be much better off and she will either have lots of cats or will need to remarry.
First, if there are lawyers that you don't want her retaining, hire them first. This advice was from a guy specifically about a handful of lawyers in his city who had gained a reputation for accusing the husband of being sexually inappropriate with their children or at least threatening that charge to gain a more advantageous settlement for their client. Thus, the advice was to spend the money on a professional consultation about your divorce and then you have entered into a client relationship with them and ethically they can't then represent your wife. He did say that this strategy was becoming more well known and as a result, some lawyers were charging more that just an hourly rate for this kind of consultation. Only you can decide if this is necessary.
Secondly, while I was trying to do everything I could to help my wife and because I still love her and never wanted a divorce, I didn't want to get screwed over either. So, I shot for something like a 55/45 split of the income based on a shared parenting 50/50 and from the very first time I spoke about money, I already had figures in mind that were more than fair and I repeated myself everytime "$2500/mo in MX for 5 years and about $500/mo in CS".
The formula I used for figuring MX was like this. ME Gross pay - MX - Taxes - (CS * (1 + effective tax rate) = NET HER Gross pay + MX - Taxes + CS = NET
So, for me it was like this: ME Gross - $7800 MX - $2500 Taxes - $1166 = (.22 * (7800-2500)) CS - $486 = (1.22 * $398) = $3736
It ended up being a 47/53 split of NET proceeds and 44/56 split gross, but, my biggest concern was getting something reasonable that didn't extend past 5 years. I also knew that I was going to be buying a house and starting a new job that paid a little better. So, now, it's more like a 40/60 split and she can certainly go find a full-time job making better money.
