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Paulina Porizkovais speaking out about her financial regretsfollowing the deathof her estranged husband Ric Ocasek.
During a recentconversation with UBSas a part of a paid partnership she is doing with the bank, Porizkova discussed how her marriage to the late Cars frontman “eclipsed [her] financial thinking” and warned other women not to make “the same mistake.”
“Now if I had a daughter, any of my goddaughters or granddaughters or any of the young women I know…if there’s one good thing I could do for them is to let them hear my story of how romance eclipsed any financial thinking and what a bad idea that is,” she said.
The 55-year-old’s estranged husband died suddenly in September 2019 at 75 andleft her out of his will.
Now, Porizkova is calling herself a “perfect example of a cautionary tale” as she explains the financial complications that occurred following Ocasek’s death.
Before their marriage, Porizkova recalled that Ocasek felt signing a prenup was a “bad omen.” So they didn’t sign one, merged their finances during their28-year-marriageand after they announced their split in 2018, the supermodel explained that she still had access to money. But that all changed following his death in 2019, when she suddenly had none. “I couldn’t go to dinner,” she said.
“I got two mortgaged houses and the pension, but no way to pay for anything,” she said about what happened following his death. “So obviously things had to be sold, but until they got sold, I had nothing to live on. I literally went through a year of asking my friends to buy us groceries. It was not a good position to be in.”
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During the conversation, she explained that in the beginning of her relationship, she thought bringing up the topic of money felt “unromantic.”
“It put our relationship into a sort of a calculated romance rather than just love and passion,” she shared. Instead, she trusted her finances to a money manager and her husband because, “I was stupid,” she said with a laugh. “It was incredibly naïve of me.”
“I had this sort of idea that he knew everything about the world and his word was the word of God and I should just sort of listen to what he said because obviously he had the wisdom of living that I hadn’t had,” she shared. “And he reminded of that every of often, that he knows better because he’s older.”
Now, she’s sharing the “painful process” she went through to help others. “What happened to me, it seemed like it was so easily preventable. And it was based on not misfortune, it was based on my own stupidity. It wasn’t that I had an evil husband. It wasn’t that things conspired against me, this is literally, I have nobody to blame for this except for myself.”
Porizkova previouslyaddressed being left out of Ocasek’s willin November 2019, explaining that although the news was just being made public, she had known for months.
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“I’ve known about the will since the day after Ric passed,” shewrote at the time, noting that despite the news, she had stillspoken lovinglyof Ocasek on numerous occasions.
Though the pair, who share two adult sons together, had been separated for nearly three years when Ocasek died in September 2019, they were not legally divorced andwere still living together.
Last February, the model appeared onCBS Sunday Morningwhere she said being left out of Ocasek’s will made “the grieving processreally, really tricky.”
source: people.com
