How To Spend Your Money After You Divorce

To some, it’s not obvious, but in each of these situations, the way that you budget or spend your settlement will be crucial. It may be the difference between being able to retire at 67 or figuring out what little part time gig you can handle to make up for the short fall. If you get too comfortable and somehow over spend on the upfront settlement, what will you have as income in the latter years? If you kept the home, and don’t really monitor your everyday spending, how will you handle home repairs or the car breaking down?

Basically, from this point on, how you chose to spend your money has more severe long-term consequences, so how do you prioritize? How do you stay aware of where your money goes? You can easily fall back in to the automatic spending and swiping that you clean up at the end, or set a deliberate plan of how you spend your money with blocks in place that make you think before you actually spend the cash.

For most of us, the daily things that we swipe our debit cards for can seem arbitrary. But there really is a routine to them. You can estimate how often you fill up your car or how much you spend at the grocery store between pay periods. The arbitrary parts come from the impulse buys that you might make at the register, or letting the kids come with you on that grocery shopping spree.

If you set aside those amounts in cash and actually had to hand those bills over to the cashier, do you think you might pay a little more attention? And if your grocery amount each week pulls a little cash from your gift/miscellaneous category, then you’d know that you need to reallocate the budget, or just say no to the extra snacks.

With a little time and attention, you can reel in the spending, and make sure that your money goes where you want it to. To get off to a great start, join us at Smarter Divorce Solutions for our first budget coaching class at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 9. Call us to RSVP. The Empowerment Zone will help you set your new budget and give you tools to make it truly work.