Divorce And Your Money - #1 Divorce Podcast

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   When negotiating a divorce settlement, you need to understand what trade-offs you're making, and make sure that you're keeping the big picture in mind. When it comes to your assets, and the debts that you have in your financial life and your marriage, they are what they are. When you're thinking about your divorce settlement and your future, your goal, really, is to figure out what the best combination of assets is for you, so that you can move on with your life in the best way possible.   You need to be realistic and reasonable, and make sure you're negotiating for things that make sense for you. One of the biggest areas I see people having trouble is not being accepting of what the status quo, what today, what their actual financial picture is, and not confronting head-on what you actually have. I unde

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   A subject that's been coming up a lot recently in coaching calls is stock options, and many of you have them and you may not realize it, or you do know they exist, but you're trying to figure out what you should do with stock options. And stock options are actually a pretty complicated subject. They're one of the most complicated financial instruments even when the divorce process isn't involved. And when you add divorce on top of it, trying to decide what you do with the stock option, whether you keep them, split them, how do you negotiate for them? They're tough.   I remember when I was much younger, I still have on my bookshelf an old book about stock options and it is one of the hardest to read books that I've ever purchased because they are a very complicated subject. But because it's the podcast, I

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode I want to discuss refinancing the house in the divorce process and some considerations that you need to be thinking about as part of this process. Now, whether you're the person who's going to be keeping my house or if you're the person giving it up, there's going to be some information in here that is going to be helpful for you. Another thing I just want to mention right off the bat is if you go to the store and you get the quick start guide, I have 9 or 10 episodes dedicated just to considerations regarding your house in divorce and there's a lot of great information in there. It's a whole section in the quickstart guide and if you haven't checked that out, definitely go and get it because only some of the episodes are here available wherever you listen to podcasts. But the vast majori

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here. Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below. Most of the information on this podcast is focused on leveling the playing field in divorce and making sure that if you aren't the person who was in control of the finances, that you make sure that you're able to get the information you need so you can create and structure a reasonable settlement for the rest of your life and ultimately, to put it bluntly, so you don't get screwed, as they say, in the divorce process. As part of that, and part of the coaching calls that I do every week, one of the recurring themes is that many times you don't have access to essentially information that you'll need so that you can make an informed decision about your financial picture and what the best things are for you to do.   One of the things I want to discuss in this episode is a few ways to get the appropriate financia

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode I want to discuss mediation. It's a topic that I haven't talked about in a little while, and mediation is very important for many of you. You end up hearing your attorney talking about mediation, or you end up going for it, or you're preparing for mediation, or you've just heard about it and you want to know what it is, what it's like, and whether it's right for you.   One thing I will toss out there is, mediation for many of you can be a very useful way to resolve many of the issues in your divorce. I want to go through a little bit about how it works, and why it exists, and provide some information in terms of whether mediation is something that you should consider during your divorce process.   Now, the reason people pick mediation, or even consider this mediation process is, it's one

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here. Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below. In this episode, we're going to discuss how to divorce a narcissist and when, or I should say at least survive the divorce process, and really come in in one piece, and come through this situation in the best position possible given a particularly difficult spouse to handle during the divorce process.   The reason I bring this topic up, I haven't talked about it in a while, and through the coaching calls I've had over the past few weeks, many of you are identifying that your spouses have some form of pretty severe or extreme narcissism, and are wondering, and have been asking, "Well, how do I deal with that, and what kind of strategies can I employ? What are some things that I should be thinking about?"   I'll say of course individual circumstances always matter, and if you want to talk about your case, we c

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   How do you pick a divorce attorney if you don't know anyone? A lot of people just guess, they'll search online, type in “divorce attorney near me”, and that's the attorney you pick. Well I don't think that's necessarily the best option. I wanna give you some guiding principles in terms of how you can pick a good divorce attorney without having to know anyone in advance. A divorce attorney is one of the most important, if not the most important, decision you make during the divorce process. Finding a good attorney can be tough, I mean how do you know that that firm that you're going to call is really good? Are there any ways that you can narrow down your search to at least improve your chances of getting a good attorney? The way I think about some of the information in here is I know an attorney, so I'm h

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode, I want to discuss do it yourself divorce and specifically whether or not it can work. Do it yourself divorce, just to make sure we're all on the same page, means not having an attorney represent you or your spouse during the divorce process. Basically, the two of you decide to work out all of the issues together yourself and you don't involve lawyers in the process and it actually has a term also called Pro Se divorce. If you ever see the term Pro Se divorce, it's a form or it's the same thing as do it yourself divorce and a lot of people choose this process and actually, I was speaking to several attorneys recently and they said it's becoming a more and more common practice and for good reason. In many cases, depending upon your situation, you might not need an attorney.   So in this ep

One of Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   The most important decisions you can make, during the divorce process is, choosing a good attorney, and having a good attorney work for you and on behalf of you. One of the main questions I get with a lot of people is, is my attorney doing a good job? I have the fortune of working with attorneys, family law attorneys, seven days a week. I can tell you which attorneys are good and which are less good. Actually, even from time to time on the coaching calls, I will make a recommendation for an attorney if you happen to live in a city where I know an attorney, who is a good one. But that happens only on the coaching calls.   If you don't have a good attorney yet and you're looking for one, I'm going to record an episode on how to choose ... another episode on how to choose an attorney. I already have

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here. Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below. In this episode, we're talking about a major tax change to alimony coming in December. And I wanna go through what's happening, what you need to know, and how you need to plan for it. And why this could apply to your divorce if you are thinking about getting divorced this year. So at the end of 2017, the Tax Cuts and Job Act passed. This was right at the very end of last year. And there were a lot of different tax changes that occurred to many people. This was one of the biggest tax bills that passed. But, there was a small provision in there that affects alimony. And this small provision can affect many of you in a big way. And so what happens is that certain tax benefits in divorce are being eliminated effective December 31st, 2018. And this is the biggest change in alimony in about 75 years or so. And man

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode, we're trying to answer the question, what happens after you sign a divorce settlement, because the conception is that the divorce is over, but that's not true. There's still, unfortunately, a lot of work that needs to be done even after you have signed the divorce settlement. Because of that, I want to give you a sense of some of the things you need to be thinking about as soon as that settlement is signed because you can't just give up and call it a day. There's a lot that needs to happen after you sign the settlement and before and after the judge finally signs off on it. If you didn't listen to the previous episode, I strongly suggest you do.                                   The two main tasks I group into these categories, the first being ensuring that you get, you receive, and also

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode, I want to discuss what happens after you sign a divorce settlement. The past month has been one of the busiest I've had in a while and the end of the year is looking to continue down that path. You know, as I've mentioned on a previous episode, the tax laws regarding alimony in divorce change in six months, and so that's creating a lot of pressure for people to get their divorces wrapped up before the end of the year, because there's often tax benefits to both sides, for wrapping up this year instead of delaying a year when the law changes in a big way.                                     If you don't know what I'm talking about, be sure to listen to episode 170 for some of the details and I'll be discussing it more in future episodes. But one of the things that's happened over the pas

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In the previous episode I gave you a high level overview of a balance sheet and if you haven't listened to that episode, be sure to go back and hear it because the balance sheet is one of the most important documents that exists in divorce, so I want to make sure that you get it and you understand the key details of the balance sheet. It's so important as I said in the previous episode that it's something that I update every month and have for many years and probably will continue to until, for the rest of my life. It's that important of a financial document to keep track of.   In this episode I want to discuss a little bit about specifically how you prepare a balance sheet and how you go about it. If you were going to prepare a balance sheet from scratch, how would you do that process? What do you need

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the United States and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here. Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below. We're almost 200 episodes into the Divorce and Your Money show. There's a lot that I've covered, but there's still a handful of topics that I haven't gotten a lot of depth on. Sometimes you might notice that there's a little bit of a gap between recordings, and that's actually just simply because I'm working with you. So sometimes, particularly on busy weeks or sometimes busy months, I don't always get to record a ton of helpful episodes. But in this one, we're covering one of the most important topics that I can't believe I waited so long to cover. This is something that ... This topic is something that we do with 100% of the clients that I work with on the ongoing coaching packages. Now, in a coaching call we can't do this topic, but anyone I work with longer term throughout their divorce proc

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the United States and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   Depending upon your situation, you may be in a position where you don't have much credit. And what is credit? Credit is, at least in this country, it's a concept that ... it determines whether or not, or how trustworthy you are in terms of receiving a loan, and a loan could mean many things. A loan could be something like an actual credit card, a loan could be a mortgage, a loan could also be a promise saying that you're going to pay your rent. That's a form of a loan.   Credit in the United States is a very important concept, because it affects a lot of things in your day-to-day life, and oftentimes you may not realize it. Let's just start with a simple example of why credit's important. If you're trying to get a new home after divorce ... I know some people who are trying to get a new mor

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode I'm going to discuss an important topic that I don't hear discussed very often. We're covering what jobs can you get when you have limited experience in the workforce. The reason I bring this topic up is because I have had a lot of discussion about this subject on coaching calls for the last few months and I think that it would be very helpful to talk about some of these things in the podcast.   This topic, excuse, me is much more important than many people think and for two particular reasons. Reason number one, if you are facing divorce and you might not have worked during the marriage, maybe you were taking care of the kids or doing other things, one of the big questions is what jobs can I find after divorce that might pay me a decent income so I can get on with my life. I want to gi

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the United States and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In this episode, I'd like to discuss mediation. It's something like 95% of divorces, roughly, depending upon the statistic that you read, are settled out of court. Mediation is one of several ways you can settle divorce out of court.   Now, you can do what's called a do-it-yourself divorce, which means you and your spouse just work everything out yourself, you prepare the papers, submit them to the court, and you get divorced. You could have collaborative divorce, which is an option for you as well, which is a specific divorce process. You can look it up. There's episodes on it in the archives of this show as well. You can do what's just called a negotiated settlement, which is also common, which is where you and likely your attorneys will go back and forth and figure out and reach an agreeme

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   I'm going to start off this episode with quote from Yogi Berra, or at least it's attributed to Yogi Berra, and he said, "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." The reason I read that quote is because one of the first questions as soon as a divorce process either hits you in some cases, or if you're planning for it, or maybe if you're in the midst of it already, one of the first questions or one of the main questions you should always keep in mind is, what do you want? What do you really want during the divorce process and after it's over?   If we have a coaching call together, it's actually one of the questions I usually ask people on calls, and it's really just to try and figure out, well, do you know what you want out of life? The divor

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   In the previous episode, we were setting a stage for understanding your fixed monthly expenses. If you didn't hear the previous episode, go back and listen to that one first before you continue on with this one. What we were discussing is you need to know your fixed monthly expenses as accurately as you can in order to really plan for not only to negotiate a settlement that's truly workable for you, but also so that you understand what your post-divorce life will look like from a financial perspective. Because, you're going to have to know what that is, and you don't want to be surprised by the results.   Really. One of the things you should be thinking about is if the result that you see today, given your current life style, doesn't look like it's going to be feasible going forward. You can start plann

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   I was meeting with a client in person recently and we had a long discussion about whether or not they should keep the house or sell it as part of the divorce process. One of the things that, although in theory they could afford the house and keep it for a few years as the kids grow up and they want to keep some kind of consistency, that might not have been the right line of thinking for this person and ultimately the more we talked about it, the more we discussed how the house could become a burden. It's something that could actually cause, keeping the house, could cause more harm than good. But we're not going to talk about the house specifically today, that'll come up a lot in this episode. I want to speak more broadly about how you should you think about your expenses, and your post-divorce expenses,