0214: Top 10 Must-Follow Divorce Tips - Part 2

02/03/20 • 17 min

Divorce and Your Money - #1 Divorce Podcast

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In this episode, we're continuing the series on my top 10 divorce tips, and I want to just jump in to the next ones. Tip number four, so if you didn't hear the previous episode, I gave tips one through three. Number four is keep the big picture in mind. If you know or ever heard of Yogi Berra, he has a funny quote that I like that says, "If you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up someplace else." And the point is with keeping the big picture in mind is what do you want? One of the questions that I will ask everyone if they don't have a clear answer for is what do you want out of life? What do you want out of the divorce process? Clearly things are going to be changing during the divorce process, and given that, you need to have some goals, some things that you're aiming for.

Start envisioning what your future looks like, and what I encourage is I encourage writing down your priorities. This is an exercise I go through every week, and I do it for me personally, but this is something you should be thinking about and thinking hard about, and it is, I usually ask two questions for if you're going through divorce. One is what are the three most important things that matter for you in the future? And secondly is what are your three most important goals for your divorce? The point is this, is if you think about your future and think about what your life may look like or what you really want to get out of life, you might not have concrete answers. Sometimes it might be a well, I want to be able to support my kid until they reach this age or get off to college, or maybe I want to start a new career, or it may be I want to pay off some debt and start fresh. There's any number of potential goals you may have. It may be I want to move. I've talked to a lot of people who say, well, I've been thinking about where I've lived isn't the place I necessarily want to be. I've been thinking about moving to some other place.

Whatever that is, it's worth writing down your goals and ultimately then sharing them with the people who are here to help you. Because one of the things that we can do, your attorney can do, you can do, is really guide yourself and guide the divorce process so that people are working towards the goals that matter most for you. And oftentimes in the divorce process, you have options, and one of the most valuable things that I think that I do and that an attorney can help you with is, hey, you have this pool of assets, but there may be five different ways to split them up that gets you to the same place, but maybe way number four is the one that actually gets you to the goals that you're aiming for. But if you don't know what those goals are and you're not able to share them, it's hard for all of us collectively to get you on the right path.

The next tip, which is tip number five, is one of my most important and one of my favorite tips when it comes to the financial side of things, and that is understand your expenses. I have a line, so I've written I guess three books at this point. One of my first books is more general financial advisor related, but I have a line in there which is one of my favorite lines. It says expenses are guaranteed, making money and investment and income is not. And so what I mean by that is that you have a fixed base of expenses. Some people call it a monthly net, monthly nut, some say it's just your expenses, but it's your housing, your car, your food, your activities, your clothes, just the normal way that you live your life. And most people don't sit down to understand, well how much do I need to cover my expenses each month?

Now, I do know some of you who know offhand, and that you know that every month you spend $8,000 or you spend $24,000 or whatever the case is, and you kind of have a pretty good idea, but most people have no idea how much they spend every month, and it's usually a shock to once you sit down and figure out what your expenses are. And so one of the things I really encourage you to do is to understand your expenses and your expense picture as you go through the divorce process and figure out what areas you might be able to cut as you go down later. Now if you complete a financial affidavit, in many states the financial affidavit or statement and net worth statement has and requires some very, very detailed expense information. And while it's admittedly a pain and perhaps kind of overwhelming to fill out that information, on the plus side, that information is very helpful when it comes to planning your future, because you'll have a baseline of like, hey, here are all the things that I've been spending on. Do these expenses make sense? Can I continue this lifestyle afterwards, or most likely, for most people that I talk to and work with is, is that you'll ha...

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0213: Top 10 Must-Follow Divorce Tips - Part 1

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In this episode and the next couple of episodes, I want to get into the top 10 must follow divorce tips. I want to cover a bunch of different areas quickly so that you can... If you only have to focus on 10 things, these are the 10 items to focus on. And I'm going to cover them and get into them, and in this episode I want to cover three areas of the top 10 in particular. The first is face reality head on, the second is know you can do this and the third is to get organized. The first tip is to face reality head on. When it comes to divorce and it comes to planning for a divorce or being in the middle of divorce, one of the things that you have to think about is understanding and accepting that this is happening.

Yes, it's happening to you. Yes, this is your life and this is real. And many times during this process, it can be easy to want to feel denial. Feel like you're not going through this or not want to deal with the hard and harsh reality of a relationship and maybe you want to bury your head in the sand, not accept what's happening. Maybe you're overwhelmed or anxious or depressed or filled with emotion. And unfortunately, when it comes to making decisions during divorce, particularly financial decisions, but much of many of the decisions during divorce, is you need to face the reality head on and accept that it's happening and put your emotions to the side. And even though you feel like you may have or you may have a lot of emotions floating around, when it comes to making the best financial decisions, whether you keep a house or retirement account or when to divorce or how to best protect yourself, emotions can't really play into it.

If you want to end up in the best decision possible, you have to treat it like you would a business deal. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't work through your emotions, but those are for a therapist, those are for your friends, those are for your emotional support team, but when it comes to your financial team and making financial decisions, accept it's happening and now, okay, the divorce process is happening or about to happen, what can I do to best protect myself, my kids and my future?

The second tip when it comes to the top 10 tips is understand that you got this. You have to keep in mind that the decisions that you make today are going to potentially affect you for the rest of your life. And so understand that also, you're going to get through this. Divorce in most cases last six months, a year, two years for most people, and then you're going to have the rest of your life ahead of you. And even though this may be the first time and hopefully the only time you have to go through this process, you probably have most, if not all the skills you need to get through it and make it through in one piece. And the phrase that I like to say when it comes to divorce is you have to treat yourself like you are the CEO of your divorce process. You are the chief executive officer. You are the conductor. You're the person they're in charge and making the key decisions as you navigate your life and you navigate all of the different complications in the divorce process.

Now, some of you listening, I know because I talked to you are the CEOs or are executives in companies, in which case although the situation is personal, deeply personal, you're used to making hard decisions on a daily basis, just this time it applies to your life. Others, you might have been a stay at home parent or may not have been involved in the finances or just may feel overwhelmed with the divorce process, but the funny thing about it is 100% of the people I've ever spoken to, worked with, talked to through the divorce process, have the skills to navigate through this process even if they don't feel like they have the skills to navigate the divorce process and make those key decisions and be the CEO of the divorce process.

I'll give you just a very simple example is if you are a stay at home parent, you've probably been used to running the family. You are the CEO of the family, making sure the kids got to the right place, making sure all of the appointments were handled and their lives ran smoothly. And so you may have been the CEO for the kids and the family and so it's taking this very, the skill set that you have, you may not realize you have and applying it to this really difficult and challenging area of your life, but you already have those skills. And so it's just realizing that you have those skills, those capabilities, and it doesn't mean you have to go it alone. It doesn't mean you can't get help. A good CEO has help for various divisions, so it might be legal help, might be financial help, might be emotional...

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0215: Top 10 Must-Follow Divorce Tips - Part 3

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In this episode, we're continuing the series on the top 10 divorce tips, and I want to go through tips number seven through 10. In the previous two episodes, I went through one through six, and now we're going to go through the last four.

Tip number seven is keep your spouse from spying on you. What do I mean by this? Well, one of the things that's really important, whether you're planning for divorce or going through divorce is, or even after divorce, is making sure that your private information remains private. And that means you don't necessarily want your spouse to have access to your emails or your computer or all the sensitive communications that are going on during the divorce process and afterwards.

And you want to start setting up your own independent online accounts so that you can keep that information private. And I don't just mean online accounts, I also mean physical accounts as well.

So specifically is, I'll start with some electronic things. So you're going to want a different phone number. It's not good when you see X, Y, Z Divorce Firm popping up on your phone and your phone bill. So if you can set up or even better yet, get a new phone just for divorce communications, that's a good idea.

And the nice thing is, is that a smartphone these days is pretty cheap on Amazon or if you go into the store. And so you can get a phone for $25, $30.00 a month, and that allows you a new phone number, new way to communicate and a very private line for all of the various private things that go on during the divorce process.

I encourage you to consider getting a new computer. It's worth it to get a new tablet or new computer. Also, not a very large investment these days, so you can surf, do all of the relative online things with privacy and not be tracked by your spouse.

Definitely get a new email address. If you use AOL, go to Gmail. If you use Gmail, go to Yahoo. If you use Yahoo, go to a different service. One of the things that happens all the time is your spouse may have access to your emails. And something that happens all the time with the phone is that your phone's linked to an email account, so when you take a picture of a document or something, all of a sudden that picture shows up on all of your devices that your spouse is going to login to their pictures, and they'll be saying, "Oh, new picture added." You'll have a picture of a retainer agreement or picture of a financial document or a picture of something else. And if you don't have all of these things separated, you're going to unintentionally be providing your spouse access to everything.

So non-online things is get your own bank account. If you are at a bank, like Bank of America, get an account at a different bank. Go to Chase, go to Citi Bank, go to whatever your local bank is, a bank that you don't traditionally use. Because all too often, and I this every week, is where a bank teller starts sharing information about accounts they shouldn't be sharing information on, because you're still banking with your soon to be ex-spouse.

Get a new physical address. It's very easy to set up a P.O. Box for mailing things or one of those mailboxes at a UPS store, very cheap, very easy to do. And you don't have to keep all of these things permanently, but during the divorce process, very well worth doing.

And also monitor your credit report, just to make sure that there's no new accounts being added or new cards being taken out, just making sure that you understand that you have all of the right information. So that's tip number seven.

Tip number eight is avoid court, if you can. I talked about this recently in an interview that I'll be sharing with you in a few episodes. But one of the things that you should try and avoid is don't think that judges have your best interests in mind. Don't think that you're going to have lots of time in court. Don't think that it's the ideal place to get things resolved.

If you're in a position where you can avoid going to court, going to trial, spending tons and tons of money, fighting it out till the bitter end, and also ending up with an even worse result, I would suggest you do that.

Sometimes court's inevitable, and I talk about in my new book, some things about court that you should keep up with. But if any way that you can stay out of court and come to resolutions on issues, you will save time, money, emotional energy, and a lot of other from avoiding the court process.

Tip number nine is stay involved in your divorce process. This is an important tip, because a lot of times you'll have this opinion, you would have spent hours searching for the best lawyer getting recommendations. You hire someone, maybe you hire the most expensive firm in town, or you hire the ...