In the previous articles of financial planning for women, we learnt about the starting steps of getting onto your own feet. Next, we understood the inherent multitude of risks women face and in light of that what must women do to mitigate the underlying risks. Moving on we will now understand how financial planning can help women in different stages of their lives. In part eight, we discussed the life stage of ‘Separated but still not divorced’. Here we move onto another life stage.

Life Stage: Getting Divorced/Preparing for Divorce

Relationships don’t fail people, people fail the relationship. Divorce is certainly an end to a significant chapter to your life, however, a better way to look at things is to consider divorce as the beginning of something new and perhaps better. By all means, divorce is an extremely painful process and for your own good it is best to get it done and over with as fast as possible. I know this is far easier said than done– but then here is another way of looking at things.

Divorce is about attitude. Now that you have mustered the courage to draw the line then with the same attitude and strength you have to decide to move on as fast as possible. Time may not be the remedy; infact it may send many into an orbit of depression and low self esteem which of course is best, if prevented. Acting fast should be the preferred way forward. Divorce brings out the worst in people– be it the anger, greed, resentment, blame, envy, desire to inflict suffering or (ironically) the joy of hurting someone you once loved. Divorce is not generally a happy time for anyone; and the life that we live today, to overcome this situation I believe ‘Money’ is a far better remedy than ‘Time’. It is money or shall we say the lack of it or the potential loss of it that catalysis the grief and agony of a divorce.

So basically when you have decided to call it the day, there are two immediate things that need consideration viz., extent of using the legal system and talking money matters.

Decision to Use the Legal System

Let us classify divorce in two parts viz., legal divorce and real divorce. The legal divorce is not concerned about what happens to you in your life after the orders of the court, where your real divorce is what you will do with life after divorce and how you plan to carry on with your life thereon.

Ideally keep away from the legal system at the start. The legal system will give you a piece of paper i.e. the judgment. Note that sorting out a divorce matter in court can be a long drawn and a very expensive affair. If one spouse engages a lawyer, the other spouse is forced to do the same. The best thing to do is to talk the division of assets via a marital settlement agreement (MSA).

By using this route in agreement with your spouse, you will be able to pretty much divide assets as you like without much reference to the laws. If you are in a situation where you don’t want to talk to your spouse – see if you can get help from friends. There is a little point hiring lawyers as there will be four people having issues in communication instead of the two. Hire them if you are going to be sure that there will be joint effort on their part to resolve your situation in a win-win fashion. This is quite rare. Hence, the best way for both is to talk and seek legal counselling and advice to finalise the MSA. At this point, you have an uncontested case; due to which you may use an independent single lawyer (neutral to both) to file your petition and obtain the court orders. This will save a great deal of agony, stress and cost.