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.

My Worst Client

by | Dec 20, 2017 | Money

My Worst Client

It’s December 19th. I’d planned to go Christmas shopping; it was getting close to the wire, but it started to slush, and after a short walk, I was left soaked and cold, so I decided to leave it until tomorrow, when it’s supposed to be sunny.

I can shop mid-week because I’m self-employed, one of the perks.

When I sat back down at my desk after skipping the slushy shopping, I thought: I can do anything I want right now. I’d already booked the time off in my head.

What had I been putting off because of more pressing deadlines?

My own bookkeeping.

I am one of my own worst clients. I throw receipts in the drawer next to my desk or leave them buried in my inbox, where most of them live these days. If I’m honest, I didn’t want to. But it needed doing.

When I started my business, it was a slow start, and I made barely any money that first year. As a sole proprietor, I hadn’t paid any tax through the year, no employer withholding it for me, so when I filed, I reported my pitiful non-earnings, and that was it. No tax owing, no refund. Slightly anticlimactic.

By my second year, I’d turned a profit. I still hadn’t been making tax instalments, since I hadn’t owed enough the year before to require them. I scraped some savings into an RRSP to lower my taxable income, and had just enough left over to cover my tax bill. Phew.

A couple of years in now, the business has become a real, full-time job. Not nine to five, but at least forty hours a week. I’d been keeping half an eye on my billings, enough to know that the “savings” sitting in my account weren’t really savings. They were this year’s tax bill. But I kept looking at that balance and getting a little happy feeling anyway.

That’s the danger. Once you start imagining everything you could spend a balance like that on, you know exactly where that leads. Spending.

So today, close to year-end, I finally sat down to see how much of it was actually mine to spend, and how much was tax.

It was tax. All of it. It turns out I’m a pretty good accountant. I’d saved the exact right amount, to the dollar.

Sigh.

All the little happy feelings drained out of me at once, replaced by one loud thought: what’s the point of working harder if I end up exactly nowhere?

That spiralled into everything I’d sacrificed that year, all the hours, for what felt like nothing.

I let myself wallow for about ten minutes. Then I turned it around.

I’d spent the year doing exactly what I wanted. My business had grown enough to support my family. I’d had the freedom to do things when I wanted to do them. That’s not nothing. That’s proof I can keep building a life on my own terms, one that’ll need to keep growing as my kids head into their teens, then university.

Today’s little exercise in self-pity taught me something else too: the thoughts you let take up space in your head shape your life just as much as your actual finances do.

So yes, pay attention to your money. Clarity matters. But pay just as much attention to what’s running through your head while you look at the numbers. And don’t leave your bookkeeping until December.

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.