Over the last several years, I have come to view my work with divorcing individuals, couples, their families and advisors as a calling. At the professional level, it’s a calling to help the parties understand the short- and long-term financial ramifications of their divorce. On a personal level, it goes deeper.

Statistics state the obvious: millions of couples are involved in divorce proceedings each year. If they have children, that number doubles or triples; if they have parents, are part of a community, have other family or friends, the multiplicative effect of the pain and dislocation approaches systemic proportions.

In my experience, first as a divorcing wife and mother, later as a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst™ and later still as a Financial Specialist in the Collaborative Divorce dispute resolution arena, I have met very few divorcing individuals with a firm grasp on their financial picture. Many seem to have even less of an idea about what the actual process of divorce entails. Even if an individual is the traditional sole breadwinner – and even if s/he is a financially savvy professional –s/he is unlikely fully aware of real options and real pitfalls. With lack of divorce financial modeling, organizing and education, these pitfalls can increase in number and severity, forever closing off once-favorable options.

Needless to say, it’s often worse for the spouse who may be less involved in earning or managing the family’s finances. With a tipped playing field, unaddressed financial issues often become critical. By definition, their future is now cloudy at best.

Divorce financial specialists can assist the parties and their attorneys to articulate and then begin to answer a gamut of questions such as:

• Should someone keep the house? If so, which partner and for how long?
• What will happen to the pension(s)?
• What level of child support or maintenance does my current situation allow?
• What if my income nosedives? Or dramatically increases?
• What will my future employment or post-marriage health insurance look like?
• What will happen to our college funding plans?
• Am I going to survive? Are our children going to be taken care of?
• If so, how, specifically? What planning and $ will that require – specifically?

Although every couple’s situation and divorce are unique, my experience is that the earlier a seasoned financial specialist gets involved to help address these issues, the better. In several situations (even prior to this difficult economic situation), an individual has come to me for advice who hasn’t even wanted a divorce, but was fighting over money with his or her spouse. In those cases, we worked to flesh out the financial “what-ifs” to gain a clearer financial picture – reasons he or she may decide to wait, not consider divorce at all, or take further steps in that direction.

How often does a couple really get early, transparent and what both parties feel is complete financial information during a divorce? From what we’ve seen, this very seldom occurs unless they are divorcing using the collaborative model. Even then, there is no guarantee of a panacea. So often I see endless fighting over the lack of easily verifiable financial documents, like credit card statements or tax returns. Sometimes years and years into proceedings, one spouse will hire me to help, but they still don’t have the even the other partner’s W-2 which we use to partly analyze the real cash flow for the family. Is that fighting over basic financial document really necessary? No. Does it happen all the time? Yes. Is there something I can formally do about it? No, but if they come to me soon enough and under amenable circumstances, I can help.

But how often have we all heard of an initially (somewhat) amicable couple that ends up fighting to the financial death? How often have you had a friend whose difficult situation turned nearly fatal, emotionally and financially, if not physically, during protracted proceedings? How have you observed the children usually fare in bitter, long or uneven divorces? Even when spouses have high-road intentions regarding how they’d like to handle their divorce, we hear over and over that their confusion, sorrow, uncertainty and fear (very often over finances) have increased with time. At the same time, precious resources, time, energy, money, career opportunities, health, and even their children’s happiness wane.

I hear these stories at work every single day, and I never cease to be sad for those affected. Every day it helps reaffirm my commitment to try to be of service, as far as my capabilities, my profession and insights allow.

I am neither an attorney, nor CPA, nor counselor, and for a successful divorce, a family needs strong resources in all these professions and more, as well as loving friends, family, and peer support groups. What I can offer is help and financial tools for divorcing people at all stages of this process – people in the early stages of considering divorce, to those in the thick of it, to those picking up the pieces, post-judgment. With these tools, a good team, insight and some luck, there should be reasons to persevere and hope.

Long before I knew it existed or was possible, I had dreamed about a different and better way to end a marriage without murdering the family and throwing all the money into the grave. On many occasions, divorced people have told me, “If only I’d known about your services during my divorce…” to which I occasionally reply: “I wish I’d known about my own services during my own divorce.”

Whether I’m helping a couple in mediation construct a projected post-divorce budget, working with one spouse in a traditionally litigated divorce providing analysis of various settlement offers, or brainstorming with a team of matrimonial attorneys and mental heath professionals on interesting ways of introducing the collaborative divorce alternative dispute resolution model to our communities at large, I remain committed and optimistic. Also, I remain convinced that finances are a most necessary piece of the puzzle to be addressed up front, comprehensively, creatively and in a manner which everyone involved can understand. This way, we may eventually embrace our new financial realities and our new futures.