Sustainable Decisions

by | Nov 21, 2021 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Sustainable Decisions

Recently, I spoke with a friend going through major life transitions. Like many of us, she and her family are stressed.

My friend is in her late 40s with two children under 11. Her husband, also in his late 40s, recently quit his job. He realized it wasn’t the right fit, and he knew his employers would soon start looking for someone who was. He wanted to take control of his life.

While he quit his job to maintain positive mental health, his search for a new job is ongoing, and he is having a hard time not getting discouraged. Their youngest child just started at a new school and needs more support. Their oldest daughter is gifted and attends an expensive private school.

My friend spent the last year training for a new profession, only to discover the expected job market isn’t there.

With all this happening, they have used up their emergency funds. Now they have to decide whether to take on more debt or start withdrawing from their retirement fund.

My friend started our conversation by stating her husband is sleeping a lot.

Oversleeping is a classic sign of depression.

It all sounds stressful

After getting rejected day after day by potential employers for jobs he’s convinced himself would be exciting, he’s now applying for jobs in other provinces. Adding a cross-country move into the mix will add even more stress to their lives. And what if the job didn’t work out?

Meanwhile, the family has been focused on getting through their days, with little thought to planning or aligning goals with values, because that is hard to do under the extreme pressure they’re under.

My friend asked what I thought.

I acknowledged that yes, they did indeed seem to have an unfair share of stress in their lives right now.

I asked her what she thought about making such life-changing decisions when they are suffering from stress.

She got quiet and said, “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

I sat with my friend, and we pondered her rather bleak comment.

Was it only by hitting the proverbial wall that she and her husband would find the fortitude to push through to a way forward? What if crashing into that wall meant they couldn’t move forward at all?

I asked my friend if there was a way to get some breathing room into their lives so they could slow down their decision-making and find a more sustainable path forward.

She just looked at me and said,

“Well, we may be able to dip into retirement savings. That might buy us some time.”

I think she expected me to argue with her. Dip into retirement savings! What kind of financial planner would support that strategy?

Instead, I said, ” Let’s look at your big-picture financial situation. Maybe there is a way, after all.

Getting out of Limbo

by | Apr 2, 2020 | Divorce and Separation

Getting out of limbo

 

It is C+16 since my world changed, and I find myself in limbo.

Pardon me if you don’t understand my lingo. Coincidentally, I am reading “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson, a story about a BIG world change: the destruction of Earth because an agent breaks up the moon into little pieces. The science is over my head, but everyone has time to prepare for the end of the world because there is a lag between the moon breakup and the Earth’s destruction. The characters decide it’s time to establish a new calendar, and AD and CE are gone, replaced by A (for Agent), plus the number of days since the Agent hit the moon.

Today is March 29, 2020, 16 days after my kids were ordered not to go to school and we were all instructed not to leave our homes unless absolutely necessary. So it’s C+16 (C for COVID) since the Global Pandemic changed my world and the world of most of us. At C+16, it feels like the significant impact has happened, and I am living my new normal.

That…was…fast. As I stood in line at my local grocery store yesterday, two metres apart as the stickers on the floor guided me, I had an out-of-body experience. Suddenly I was a character from one of the endless dystopian books I have read and continue to read.

When I got up to the cashier, I smiled at her. She looked utterly frazzled. I asked how she was doing. “Not as good as thirty minutes ago when I started my shift.” She was an older woman who told me she had just returned to work after being off for four months due to a shoulder injury. Her grown children were mad at her for coming back, but as she explained, she had no choice. I packed my own bags so she wouldn’t have to and tried to channel calm to her, but I knew my chest was tight, so I was probably channelling stress instead. I thanked her and left.

I’ve set up a routine to deal with my new normal. It’s not one I would “normally” choose, but it gets me through the day so that I can do it again the next one. My youngest wakes up, feeds the cat, empties the dishwasher, begs for the Switch, gets told to read instead. My teenager drifts in, gets breakfast, negotiates Switch time with his brother. At 11:15 sharp, someone announces they’re hungry. We eat, we argue about what to do next, we get outside somewhere between one and four. Then it’s happy hour, dinner, more Switch, storytime, bed at 9- Groundhog Day style. Yes, I still make my teenager sit through storytime. We’re making our way through Narnia again. It’s one of the highlights of my day, and I’ve told him plainly: if he wants Switch time, he has to do storytime and outside time first. He is almost convinced.

That’s been my day for the last 16 days, minus the days my kids were with their dad. Hallelujah.

Some of you might think, ” Must be nice.” Others might think, “I don’t think I could do that for 16 days straight.” That’s because it’s my schedule. I built it after knowing all my constraints and what I was and wasn’t willing to live with.

Building it reminded me of my separation. I’ve lived through the end of a world before.

When I was newly separated, I had a schedule that got me through the interim period, that stretch between deciding to separate and actually having two new lives in two homes. I was on mom auto-pilot. My kids were seven and four. I took care of them, and when they were with their dad, I cried, took long baths, and phoned my friend Barb for therapy, because I thought I couldn’t afford the real thing. I cursed the world, and I cursed my spouse for throwing me into an interim period I had no control over.

I drifted for a year, blown around like a leaf, at the whims of family law, my emotions, my spouse, and my kids. Then I began my new normal as a divorced mom of a seven- and four-year-old. I still had day-long cry fests after drop-offs. I still had conflicts with my ex. I dragged myself out of bed to survive the day and to make sure my kids did too, but I was miserable.

About six months post-divorce, I had a breakdown, or maybe it was an epiphany. I decided I wasn’t going to keep going about my days the way I had been.

It took longer the first time. But I built a new normal. I learned how to deal with my constraints, the biggest one being my own emotional state. I realized my thoughts about the unaffordability of therapy were costing me more than therapy actually would, so I hired a coach, someone else’s help, not mine, and we started co-creating something new.

I was building resilience and learning to adapt to hard things and come out the other side still standing.

The separation days were horrid. I was being blown around by a force I couldn’t control. The C+ days are horrid too, and I have no control over them.

And I’m going to be okay.

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 a relatively new acronym for couples who are romantically involved but choose not to move in together. Along with yuppies and DINKs, we have LATs.

I sometimes wonder why this wasn’t a thing when I was young and just assumed moving in with a boyfriend was 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.

And have you noticed? Divorced co-parents are already living a 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 collaborate, and we show up for the same goals and events from two separate addresses.

Actual LAT couples, the romantic kind, tend to be people who’ve already been divorced once and know exactly what they’re avoiding. Living apart cuts out most of the friction that comes from sharing space, the toilet seat, the shoes colonizing the closet, whoever never loads the dishwasher, but it usually comes at a real cost. It’s expensive to be a single adult, and combining two incomes under one roof is often the only way to actually get ahead financially. In a city like Vancouver, that math isn’t optional for most people. So most couples eventually move in anyway, not because they want to, but because staying apart is a luxury.

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 ever having to solve that financial math, because we were never 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.