Living Apart Together and Personal Finances

by | Sep 2, 2019 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

We’re Basically a LAT Couple

Living Apart Together, LAT for short, is the latest acronym for couples who are romantically involved but choose not to move in together. After yuppies and DINKs, now we have LATs.

I sometimes wonder why this wasn’t a thing when I was young and just assumed you moved in with a boyfriend as the next obvious step. My wasband, that’s the past tense of husband, and I might still be married if we’d never combined a household in the first place.

Here’s what nobody points out: divorced co-parents are already living some version of a LAT relationship, minus the romance. My wasband and I have weekly meetings about the kids, their homework, their schedules. We have more genuinely constructive conversations now than we ever managed while married. We coordinate, we compromise, and we show up for the same goals and events from two separate addresses.

Which got me thinking about actual LAT couples, the ones who want the relationship without the shared roof. This seems to show up most among people who’ve already been divorced once. Once you’ve lived through that particular type of hell, you understand exactly why you might not volunteer for round two. Being divorced doesn’t mean you’re sentenced to being single forever, but it also doesn’t mean cohabitation is the only legitimate way to be in a relationship.

Living apart cuts out an enormous amount of the friction that comes from actually sharing space. The toilet seat. The shoes colonizing the closet. Whoever never loads the dishwasher. Keeping two addresses means skipping most of that entirely.

So why doesn’t everyone just do this?

Money, mostly. It’s expensive to be a single adult, and the math gets tempting fast once you’re spending real time with someone who’s also paying rent or a mortgage somewhere else. Combine two incomes, and suddenly there’s room to actually save, or go out more, or just breathe a little. In a city like Vancouver, that math isn’t really optional for most people; it usually takes two incomes under one roof just to stay financially stable at all.

Which is exactly why the co-parenting version is worth noticing. My ex and I get the real benefits of LAT: low-friction collaboration, real partnership on the things that matter, without having to solve the financial math of merging two households, because we’re not trying to be a couple. We’re just two people who figured out how to run a shared project well from a distance.

Turns out you don’t need romance to make LAT work. You just need a good reason to stay coordinated, and enough distance to skip the toilet seat argument entirely.

Getting Through the Wall of Pain and Suffering

Getting Through the Wall of Pain and Suffering

by | Sep 25, 2018 | Divorce and Separation

Getting Through the Wall of Pain and Suffering

I often come across clients who are on a path that brings deep emotional pain, and they can’t see how to find a healing way forward.

I want to help my clients find a better, less emotionally overwhelming path. Still, I’ve noticed that emotional overwhelm acts like a soundproof barrier. Despite my “telling” my clients what I think works, they can’t hear me. And when that happens, I often notice myself resorting to the megaphone-style email.

Here’s a version of that email, cleaned up from the handful of times I’ve actually sent something like it:

Dear Reluctant Collaborator:

This process we are in together is not collaborative; you are right.

We are working in a litigation-style model where you submit a proposal with all the reasons you are right, then threaten dramatic action when you don’t get the answer you want. This is the traditional way of handling a separation and divorce.

That said, here’s what you’re hoping the traditional method gets you:

  1. Your spouse finally comes to their senses and agrees to all your demands.
  2. You come out on top once everything is divided.
  3. You win in court.

Now here’s what it actually looks like:

  1. You haven’t convinced your spouse so far. In the meantime, they’re getting more and more evidence that you’re trying to push something through. The conflict between you is increasing, and they’re getting more resistant as they gather proof that your opinion is exactly that: yours. Things keep getting delayed.
  2. You can’t liquidate everything. That one doesn’t work. Your spouse is a shareholder in your business and is also on the title to your home.
  3. Court will take a lot longer and cost you thousands of dollars more. No one wins in the court system. Children lose the most.

I’ve sent variations of this email to more than one client, and so far it hasn’t turned any of them into willing collaborative clients. Huh. Puzzling. My email is so very rational and logical.

Lightbulb moment.

There is no way to rationalize away pain and suffering. I know that’s frustrating for those of us trained as accountants, lawyers, engineers, doctors, and teachers.

So what to do instead? Well, this is the part I missed in my megaphone email. Collaboration takes listening. That’s the first step, and what I now practice with my clients. It’s the only way through the wall of pain and suffering. First, we must truly understand it. Only then can we find a path forward.

September

September

by | Sep 3, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

September

September

September. Labour Day. A day of transition, and that’s underselling it.

If you’re a parent to school-aged kids, September can be a lot. If you’re separated or divorced and sharing parenting with a co-parent, September can be too much.

It can be too many decisions, and too many decisions to implement, especially when you have to navigate them with someone you no longer live with. It really can be too much. But does it have to be? It depends on how you approach it.

Let me tell you a story about two parents with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, heading back to school.

Both parents had recently signed their separation agreement. Both believed the agreement was the clear document they needed to make decisions. They’d spent a lot of money and done a ton of work to finalize it. They were pinning their hopes on it.

I’m sorry to say they were a bit deluded. They had a separation agreement. That was all they had. They didn’t share an understanding of how to interpret it, and they didn’t have a process for building one.

What did they have? A lot of anger, grief, and blame directed at each other. And a joint decision to make.

Which parent would buy the back-to-school shoes?

Seriously. Was buying shoes the big decision? Yes.

Parent A, call them type A, had always done the back-to-school shopping. Parent B, type B, had worked outside the home and, in the past, had paid for it. Under the new agreement, they were meant to share both parenting and its costs, but they had very different ideas of what that looked like.

Parent A went from full-time parent to part-time parent, trying to find work to cover a part-time single-parent household. The bills got covered. There was nothing left for extras.

Parent B had gone from full-time employee to full-time employee with a new part-time parenting job that felt full-time. Money felt tight too, running two households on one income while Parent A was still job hunting, and while paying child support on top of it.

Cue the back-to-school shopping.

Parent A had bought the summer shoes. It was Parent B’s turn. Parent A was tired of being taken for granted, tired of no one giving credit for years of unpaid work at home. That was going to change. Parent B could buy the shoes.

Parent B had just sent child support. Child support is supposed to cover the basics. Shoes are basics. Parent A needed to understand how hard it was to fund two households. Parent A could buy the shoes.

The first day of school approached. The kids were still in their Crocs. “Has Parent B taken you shoe shopping?” Parent A asked. “Nope,” the kids said.

To keep them out of the middle, though the kids likely noticed the eye-roll that followed “nope,” Parent A called Parent B. “It’s your turn to buy the shoes, but I know you’re busy, so I’ll buy them if you pay me back.”

Parent B disagreed.

Well, Parent A thought, the kids can go to school without new shoes. Maybe then Parent B will finally understand the work I did all those years and stop taking me for granted.

So the kids didn’t get new shoes. The teachers sent notes home. The kids said they needed running shoes. Parent A and Parent B dug in.

“I just gave you child support,” Parent B said. “You can buy the shoes.”

“I’ll buy them if you pay me to,” Parent A said. “I bought them last time. It’s your turn, based on our fifty-fifty split. I charge fifty dollars an hour for parenting services, and I’ll gladly do this on your behalf if you cover the rate.”

This argument happened at the five-year-old’s first soccer game, in front of both kids.

Eventually the shoes got bought. The kids also got put squarely in the middle and watched their parents have an embarrassing fight at a five-year-old’s soccer game.

Parent A and Parent B hadn’t figured out how to have these conversations differently. They were still using the old method: someone wins, someone loses. So the next joint decision went the same way. And the one after that.

Every simple decision took days, weeks, months. This is exhausting, both of them thought separately. Life is hard enough running a single-parent household without a difficult co-parent on top of it. Do simple decisions really have to take this long?

Back-to-school. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Birthdays. Spring break. Summer. It was already stressful enough without the decision-making battles layered on top.

Both parents knew it couldn’t keep going this way. They tried different things. Counselling. Coaching. Separately at first, then together, once they’d learned how to be in a room with each other again.

Parent A and Parent B have been separated for five and a half years now, divorced for four. Their kids are twelve and nine. They are not the parents they used to be. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment they became true co-parents. I know it wasn’t the day they signed the agreement.

September. Labour Day. A day that reminds them how much easier decisions are now. Which is a relief, since the decisions never stop, and if anything, there are more of them with each passing September.

Divorce is a Stoplight

Divorce is a Stoplight

by | Feb 6, 2018 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Divorce Is a Stoplight

A few months ago, I was at a presentation about money. It wasn’t about tax rules or investing. It was about how hard it is to talk about money.

I know that; I thought to myself, an A-plus for me.

That night, we were all asked what money meant to each of us. Answers varied, but I knew mine right away.

For me, money is strongly linked to my sense of self-worth. That undercurrent drives a lot of our society, whether we admit it or not.

When I was negotiating my divorce, I felt like I had no voice and no value, because I wasn’t earning any income as a stay-at-home mom. Every meeting with divorce coaches and lawyers was torturous, because I didn’t feel heard. I was lost. I didn’t know why I did the things I did, or what value I brought to the family. I believed everyone was listening to my co-parent. He held the power. After all, he earned the income; therefore, he had more value since he made more money. I believed this for most of my life. Honestly, some part of it still lurks under the surface in me, the same way I think it lurks under the surface of our society.

I felt like I couldn’t live according to my own values. I’d walked away from a well-paying job as a financial analyst to be a stay-at-home parent, and during our legal meetings, the only thing I kept hearing was some version of: when is Renée going to get her high-paying job back?

When, indeed.

Instead of figuring out what I actually needed to move forward, I proposed a plan to do exactly that: get back to that job. It was written into our separation agreement, my plan for getting my career back, laid out clearly on page five. I wanted that agreement. I thought once I had it, I’d be able to move on. The divorce coaches and lawyers, all collaborative, tried to help me figure out what I actually wanted, but I didn’t know myself. Being the type-A person I am, and wanting to save money, I kept driving the process forward while burying the emotions that kept trying to surface. I did the budgets. I figured out how to divide the money. I thought that part was the easy part.

My life since then hasn’t followed the clear path I thought it would. It was never just a matter of making logical choices to reach an end goal.

Underneath it all, I was fighting a battle against my own assumptions about what was expected of me, and it wasn’t until I got a handle on that that decisions started to feel easier.

Since then, working with people navigating their own divorces, I’ve noticed we’re mostly on the same path. I’ve yet to meet someone who can easily choose between financial options when they’re in the middle of separating. I’ve yet to meet someone who can clearly articulate what they’re actually feeling about their financial situation as it happens.

Financial professionals are often the first people newly separated couples contact. Society has driven home the message that divorce is about dividing the money, so it makes sense that people go looking for someone who knows the rules for splitting it. But that’s not actually where to start.

Divorce is a stoplight. Life is telling you that you’re not living according to what actually drives you, and you’ve reached a point where you can’t keep going down the road you were on. You can sit at that intersection a long time before you figure out how to make it turn green.

The truth is, no single professional gets you through that intersection alone. You need a team: a financial professional to help you understand where you stand and what your options actually look like, a mental health professional or coach to help you figure out what you actually want, separate from what everyone around you expects, and a lawyer to handle the legal side and document whatever you decide.

I didn’t have that team working together the way I needed. My separation agreement ended up outlining a life I didn’t actually want, because nobody had helped me figure out what I wanted before we wrote it down.

If there’s one thing worth taking from my own experience, it’s that: don’t let your separation agreement quietly become a document that maps out someone else’s expectations of you.

Communication – Rules for Life

Communication – Rules for Life

by | Nov 3, 2017 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.

Bringing Back Time

by | Oct 9, 2017 | Divorce and Separation

Bringing Time Back

I start new posts all the time. Most of them are about time, fittingly, since I usually run out of it before I finish writing them. Lately even the starting has slowed down.

I noticed this a few months ago and didn’t want to admit it. I’m admitting it now, on the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend, visiting my sister, kids fed, dishes done, nothing left demanding my attention for once.

I sat with that stillness and asked myself what I actually wanted to do.

Last week my life felt out of control. Everything felt like too much. I was close to doing something dramatic just to feel like I’d taken my life back, my old way of dealing with pain. Drama changes things for a while. It doesn’t fix the actual problem. But it feels like it will.

The actual problem was that I’d taken on too much.

So instead of anything dramatic, I took time to figure out what I actually needed. I stopped trying to finish everything on my list and started figuring out what could wait. I did only what was essential. I ate properly. I finally went grocery shopping so my kids could eat too. I went to bed when they did. I told clients clearly what needed doing and by when, and started turning down new work and social invitations I didn’t have room for. I made it back to yoga for the first time in weeks.

As I built that space back into my life, things got better.

It reminded me of the hardest stretch of my separation and divorce, when my instinct was to plow through and just get it over with. That approach didn’t lead anywhere good. I got through the divorce, but I paid for the way I got through it in other ways too.

Now, working with people navigating their own separations, I’ve noticed something: the ones who take their time, who let their emotions settle before sitting down with a spouse, who take care of themselves instead of taking their frustration out on their kids, come out the other side in better shape than the ones trying to force it all through at once.

I’m reminded, again, that time and care is how I want to live, and that I should probably practice what I preach.

This Thanksgiving, I was grateful for the extra day the long weekend gives us. It was that one bonus day that gave me the space to remember what I’d stopped doing for myself.

Happy Thanksgiving.