As soon as you begin to contemplate divorce, the pictures start to form. How will my life look after this? Will I be broke and starving? Will this leave me poor and destitute? Then that nauseating, panic-attack-inducing realization of losing half of your net worth kicks in and you find yourself wondering if it’s even worth it to consider leaving.

There are ways to ensure that your financial future is not destined for disaster. First and foremost, be SURE you involve a financial advisor who specializes in divorce on your team so that you will be fully informed of all the creative settlement possibilities that may be open to you. When you have a fact-based, financially intelligent outcome in front of you versus an educated guess, it takes a lot of the fear out of making these heavy decisions. 

I previously helped a couple that was married 24 years with a creative financial settlement. They were completely amicable and had visited an attorney together. What you may not know is that they are ethically bound to represent only one party. So the attorney made it clear that he could only do their document preparation. Since they agreed on most things this was fine, but they asked how they would determine their property division. He responded, “This is a community property state so we’ll just divide each asset and each debt exactly 50/50.” The couple just didn’t feel like that was the smart thing to do. They were referred to me to explore options. 

After gathering all of their financial documents and completing my analysis, I put together two reports for the clients. The first reflected an exact 50/50 split as the attorney had suggested. The second was my creative settlement solution that also resulted in a net 50/50 split but took into consideration tax planning and consequences as well as the needs of each party as they planned for the next phase of their lives.

This couple had less than $800k in total net worth and my creative settlement solution resulted in an additional $20,000 EACH to their bottom line just because some financial intelligence was used to determine their settlement. That’s real money! Needless to say, the couple was thrilled to pay my bill knowing that I had saved them $40,000!

Don’t go into this blind. There are so many ways to ensure that BOTH of you get to keep more of your own money. Get the right experts on your team. We’d love to help you have a Divorce Done Different! Call us today.