Leah Hadley [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Intentional Divorce Insights. I'm Leah Hadley, certified divorce Financial analyst, accredited financial counselor, and the founder of Intentional Divorce Solutions. I'll be your guide through the complexities of divorce finance and emotional wellness. Join me as we uncover practical tips and empowering insights to help you navigate your divorce with clarity and intention.
Leah Hadley [00:00:25]:
Hi there. Welcome back to Intentional Divorce Insights. I am so glad that you are here with me today. I want to start with something that I hear all the time from the women that I work with. They come to me right after their divorce is finalized or sometimes maybe while they're still in the process. And one of the first things they'll say to me is, I know I need to make a budget. I just don't know where to start. And then I almost always they follow that up with an Honestly, the word budget just makes me feel anxious and I get it.
Leah Hadley [00:01:02]:
For a lot of us, the word budget actually carries a lot of weight. It can feel like restriction. It can feel like having to give things up. It can feel like a spreadsheet that reminds you of everything you can't have. And when you are already navigating one of the hardest transitions of your life, the last thing you want is one more thing that makes you feel like you're falling short. So today I want to offer you a completely different frame because here's what I have learned from years of working with women going through a divorce. And that is a budget is not a cage. I'm going to say that again.
Leah Hadley [00:01:44]:
A budget is not a cage. A budget is a blueprint. It's not about what you're giving up. I really want you to think about it in terms of what are you building and when you approach it that way, when you build it from the inside out, starting with your values, starting with the vision for your life, and it stops feeling like something happening to you and it really starts like you're actively creating something. And that's really what we're doing here today. I'm going to walk you through why most post divorce budgets fail and how to build one that actually is going to work.
Leah Hadley [00:02:32]:
And we're going to do that using the Intentional Money Method from my book. And I'm going to share a couple of client examples that I hope will make this feel very real and most importantly, very doable. Okay, so let's get into it now. Before I tell you how to build a budget that works, I want to talk a little bit about why the budgets most women build right after divorce don't often work. Because if you've tried and struggled, I want to be very clear. I want you to know it's not because you're bad with money. It's because the approach that most people use to set it up kind of fails from the start, quite frankly. Okay, the first mistake is what I'm going to call the ghost budget.
Leah Hadley [00:03:18]:
That's when you sit down to build your new financial life and you unconsciously are kind of working through that old marital budget as your template. So you look at what you are spending as a household, cut it in half, and call it your budget. Now the problem is that your old life may have been built around two incomes, two sets of expenses that were shared, and a completely different set of circumstances. So your new life is not half of that old life. It's a whole new life, right? With its own income, its own costs, and its own possibilities. And you build from the ghost of your old budget. You're also inheriting all the values and all the, all the priorities that went into it, which you may find may not reflect who you are now or what you actually want for yourself, right? You might be allocating money to things that maybe matter to you in your marriage and shortchanging things that matter deeply in this next chapter of your life. Now, the second mistake that I see is fear based budgeting.
Leah Hadley [00:04:30]:
That is when the anxiety of your new financial situation is, is driving you to cut everything you possibly can as quickly as you can from a place of pure survival mode. Now, I understand the impulse completely when you are looking at your new financial reality and it feels scary. And the instinct, it's to clamp down, right? But here's what I've seen over and over again, that budgets build entirely from fear. They just don't stick. They're not sustainable. You end up kind of white knuckling it for a few weeks and then the pendulum often swings very hard in the opposite direction. A budget has to have some breathing room, okay? It has to reflect a life you actually want to live, not just a life that you're trying to survive. There's a difference between being intentional with your money and punishing yourself with your money.
Leah Hadley [00:05:29]:
And I want to help you stay firmly on the intentional side.
Leah Hadley [00:05:32]:
Okay?
Leah Hadley [00:05:33]:
The third mistake, and honestly the most important one, is skipping the values conversation. Most budgeting advice starts with numbers. It says, here are all your expenses, here's your income, here's what's left over. Now figure out where to cut, right? But numbers without values, are just numbers, okay? They don't tell you what matters, they don't tell you what to prioritize. They don't tell you what kind of life you're really trying to build for yourself. When you skip the values conversation, you end up with a budget that might be technically correct and still feel completely wrong, okay? Because it's not aligned with who you are or with who you're becoming. Now the good news is that there is a better way. And that is exactly what the Intentional Money Method is built to do.
Leah Hadley [00:06:26]:
So in my book, The Modern Woman's Guide to Building Wealth, Purpose and Peace, I share a framework that I call the Intentional Money Method. And it is a six pillar approach to building your financial life. I want to walk you through how each of those pillars really applies specifically to building your post divorce budget. Now, the six pillars are clarity, values, mindset, strategy, action and support. So we're going to go through each one of those, okay? Now the first pillar is clarity. And that means exactly what it sounds like. But before you can build a budget, you really got to know where you actually stand. That means getting a complete picture of your income, all of it.
Leah Hadley [00:07:18]:
So if you are getting child support, if you're getting spousal support, you want to include that, right? If you have part time work, you want to include that. If you have investment income, maybe you have rental properties, all of that you want to include. But you do want to know what is your total monthly income? Okay? Make clear on your expenses, and I mean the real ones, not what you think you spend, but what do you actually spend to get that information? If you're not sure, you can pull up your bank statements, you can look at credit card statements, you know, if you're really not sure, you can look at the last month, you can look at the last three months. Might be helpful to go back and look at the last year. Categorize the things that you're saying. I want to be very clear and this is really important. This step that I'm talking about is about building awareness. It is not about judgment, okay? It is about building awareness.
Leah Hadley [00:08:11]:
It is not about judgment. This is information, okay? You can't make good decisions without good information. But why am I harping on this issue? Because so many of us avoid this step because we're very harsh in judging ourselves in the way that we spend money. Okay? And finally, get clear on your assets and any remaining obligations. What do you have? What do you owe? Right. We want the full picture. Clarity is really the foundation of all the other work. And without it, it's just guesswork.
Leah Hadley [00:08:46]:
Okay, pillar number two. We talked a little bit already, but values is the one thing that really changes everything. Before you allocate even $1, I want you to ask yourself, what matters most to me in this next chapter of my life? Not what mattered in your marriage, not what you think should matter. Right? What actually matters to you right now in this season for yourself and for your family. Now, it could be stability. Maybe it's adventure, Maybe it's your kids activities. Might be rebuilding your health or investing in your career. Might be really having a home that truly feels like yours for the first time.
Leah Hadley [00:09:31]:
Whatever it is, write it down. These values are going to become the filter through which every single budget decision gets made. So when you're not sure whether to spend money on something, you're going to come back to this list. Does it align? Then it's probably worth it, right? Does it not align? And maybe we avoid it. This is how to stop budgeting by default and start really bringing intentionality to your spending plan. Now, the third pillar is mindset. And I want to spend a moment here because it's often the one that gets skipped in financial conversations. And this is important because the stories we tell ourselves about money, whether we're good with with money or we're bad with money, whether we'll ever have enough, whether we deserve financial security.
Leah Hadley [00:10:20]:
These stories are running in the background of every financial decision you make. And for women who are going through a major life change, like a divorce, those stories can take a significant hit. So maybe you weren't the primary financial manager in your marriage. Maybe you're feeling behind. Maybe you're carrying a lot of fear about the future. And all of that is completely understandable and completely normal. And I want you to know none of it is permanent. Okay? The mindset shift I want to offer you today is this.
Leah Hadley [00:11:01]:
You are not starting over. You're starting with experience. Everything you have learned, everything you've survived, everything you know about yourself, what you need, that's not nothing. That's the foundation. So I want you to approach this budget from a place of possibility, not punishment.
Leah Hadley [00:11:22]:
Okay?
Leah Hadley [00:11:22]:
You're building something. You're not surviving something. The fourth pillar is strategy. Okay? Now we get into some of the practical mechanics. So the fourth pillar, this is where we really build the actual budget structure. Okay? We can think about this in terms of the four buckets framework. I find it a lot easier for a lot of people to work with rather than kind of that line by line spreadsheet. So at least to start.
Leah Hadley [00:11:50]:
And the four buckets are gonna be essentials, financial health, quality of life and your future goals. Bucket number one, your essentials, these are your non negotiables. Housing, utilities, groceries, health insurance, medication, transportation, child care. These are going to be the things that keep your family functioning, right? These are going to be important to really prioritize. But we can also make intentional decisions about how we commit to these kinds of expenses in our life. Right? Bucket number two is financial health. Now this is where you take care of that financial foundation.
Leah Hadley [00:12:33]:
We want you to have that strong foundation. So if you have high interest rate debt, that's going to be paying off your debt. If it's maybe you don't have an emergency fund, it's going to be building up your emergency fund. Contributing to your retirement is really important. I know that when money is tight, this tends to be the bucket that women skip first. And I'm going to just kind of gently push back on that. Even so small, consistent contributions to your financial health compound over time. So I don't want you to skip this bucket.
Leah Hadley [00:13:06]:
Even if money's feeling tight. This is important. Okay? Bucket number three is quality of life. This is the bucket most budgeting advice, quite frankly, just leaves out entirely. It's the things that make your life feel like your life, right? Whether it's dining out, it's a yoga class, it's date nights with yourself, going out with friends. These aren't luxuries, right? They are part of making a sustainable system for yourself. Okay? So if you strip this bucket out entirely, it's just very unlikely that you're going to be able to maintain your spending plan. Budget number four is your future goals.
Leah Hadley [00:13:48]:
And this is the budget that gives you direction, right? What are you working toward? Maybe a down payment on a home or paying for your child's higher education. Maybe you're working on starting a new business or building a retirement fund that feels secure. Okay? Naming your future goals and allocating something toward them, even if it's small, is going to change the energy of how you're relating to this plan. You're no longer just managing scarcity, right? You're really funding a vision of the life that you're creating for yourself. These four buckets won't divide evenly for everybody. I want to be very clear, and that's okay. And that's normal. Your percentages are going to depend on your financial situation, right? Your income, your obligations.
Leah Hadley [00:14:37]:
What does your life look like? This point of this is not to be a formula. The point is to be intentional and thoughtful about what we are representing in this plan. Plan. Okay? Now, the fifth pillar is action. And this is simple, okay? A budget only works if you use it. Now, I recommend building a monthly review into your calendar. You can set aside even 10 or 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour, the start of each month to look at how the previous month went. Where did you stay on track, where did you maybe drift, what needs to be adjusted.
Leah Hadley [00:15:13]:
And this you're going to find, might take a little bit longer at first if you're just kind of getting used to doing it. But the more consistently and regularly you do it, you're going to find it really becomes a quick and easy process. And to be clear, this is not about self criticism, right? This is not about shame. Information. Information allows us to make good decisions. It allows us to iterate, right? This, this budget that we're talking about, it's a living document. It's going to evolve as your life continues to evolve. The goal is not perfection.
Leah Hadley [00:15:47]:
There is no perfection here, okay? The goal is building awareness and it's building intention, okay? And just give yourself grace if you're new to this, okay? You are building new habits and a new financial life at the same time, okay? So just give yourself some grace. Now, the last pillar is support. The six pillar support. And I want to be honest with you, you do not have to do this alone. Whether that support looks like a financial advisor, a certified divorce financial analyst, or a cdfa, a therapist, a trusted friend who's good with money, or a community of women navigating the same transition, having people in your corner makes a measurable difference. The data on this is absolutely clear. People who have support systems achieve their financial goals at such higher rates than those who try to do it in isolation. So as you build your budget, I want you to also look at what kind of team, what kind of support you need.
Leah Hadley [00:16:54]:
And we'll talk about where you can find support in just a minute. I want to talk a little bit about two examples. These are women, composites of women that I've worked with. So the details have been changed to protect their privacy, but the situations are very real. Okay, Diane, we'll talk about first. She came to me about six months after her divorce was final. She had two kids. They were 10 and 13 at the time.
Leah Hadley [00:17:21]:
And she had kept the family home. She was working full time as an office manager. Um, she had a steady income, but she was feeling pretty stretched and she felt guilty every single time she spent a dollar on anything that wasn't related to her kids or to the house.
Leah Hadley [00:17:38]:
Okay?
Leah Hadley [00:17:39]:
So when we sat down together, her first instinct was to pull up her old household budget and figure out what to cut. And I stopped her right there. I said, Diane, now before we look at even a single number, I want to ask you something. What matters most to you right now? And she paused for a long time, and then she said, really want my kids to feel like our life is normal. I don't want them to feel like we're living in survival mode. Okay? That sentence changed everything about how we built our budget, right? Instead of starting with cuts, we started with that value normalcy for her kids. So her son's lacrosse fees stayed in the budget, Right? Her daughter's dance classes stayed in the budget. Even the family annual beach trip stayed in the budget, even though it was like a smaller amount than what was allocated previously.
Leah Hadley [00:18:33]:
And then we looked at what could move, right? She realized that she had been paying for some subscriptions that they didn't really use regularly, so she cut those. She recognized that she'd been ordering takeout at a level that didn't reflect what really mattered to her. So she shifted some of those dollars toward her emergency fund, which she had never fully built in her marriage. So when we finished, she said something that I'm not gonna forget. Okay, this is what she told me. She said, I thought making a budget was going to feel like giving up, but it actually feels like I'm taking care of my family on purpose. And this was such a huge shift for her. And it's the exact same shift that I really want for you.
Leah Hadley [00:19:19]:
Carol is another story I want to share. She was about 55 when she came to me. Her kids were grown, they were already out of the house, and she had just finalized her marriage after. Excuse me, after. She had just finalized her divorce after a long term marriage. She was getting spousal support, but it had an end date and she was nervous because that clock was ticking. So she hadn't been in the workforce full time in over 20 years. So that was very scary for her.
Leah Hadley [00:19:48]:
And honestly, her retirement savings were modest because those contributions had mostly gone to shared retirement accounts that had then, you know, been divided in the settlement. So she felt like even though she was 55 years old, she was starting at zero, at an age when she felt like she should be getting pretty close to retirement. We started with clarity and laid out everything right. We laid out her spousal support, her part time income. We looked at her expenses. We looked at her assets and the end of her support when. When she knew it would be terminated. And we looked at all of it clearly and without judgment for the information.
Leah Hadley [00:20:29]:
And then we moved to her values. And she said something that was really important. Carol told me that she valued independence more than anything else. She never wanted to be financially dependent on another person again. That became kind of her North Star for everything that she was building. So we looked at her four buckets, right? And we put a very heavy emphasis on her financial health and on her future goals. Right. We looked at how she could really maximize her retirement contributions for the first time in her adult life.
Leah Hadley [00:21:04]:
She started really aggressively building an emergency fund. We found her a career coach to help her identify how she could take her skills and translate them into full time work so she could really start making moves in increasing her income. Okay, but I want to be clear, quality of life was not abandoned. Okay? Carol loved to travel, and so we kept a small travel fund in our budget. You know, it was right size for the season that she was in. With the understanding that this wouldn't be permanent, right? With the understanding that it could grow as her income grew. Two years later, Carol is now working full time in a role that she really likes. Her retirement account has grown significantly and we spoke not that long ago.
Leah Hadley [00:21:55]:
And one of the things that I'm going to cry talking about this, one of the things that she shared with me is that she feels financially confident for the first time in her life. Not perfect, but she feels confident. And that's what intentional budgeting can do. So before I wrap up today, I want to give you three concrete things that you can do this week to start building your intentional post divorce budget. First, get clear on your numbers. You know, if you need to pull out the last three months of bank or credit card statements, get a real picture of where your money has been going, not where you think it's been going. Where has it actually been going? And again, I want to be clear, I want you to do this for information. This isn't about judging yourself.
Leah Hadley [00:22:44]:
This isn't about self criticism. This is about information. The second thing I want to encourage you to do is write down three values for this chapter of your life right now. Just three. What matters most to you right now. And I want to encourage you to keep that list visible somewhere while you're putting together your budget. Right? Let it really guide you. Let it be your filter in making your decisions.
Leah Hadley [00:23:13]:
And the third is to really think about those four buckets, right? Take a Look, first pass at filling in kind of what belongs in each one, right? What's essential, what goes in the financial health, what goes in the quality of life. And what are those future goals? Okay, does not have to be perfect. That's it. It's just about creating a starting point, those three steps. And if you want the deeper framework, the one that really takes you all the way through, building a financial life that is aligned and intentional and sustainable. That's exactly what I wrote about in the book Intentional Money the Modern Woman's Guide to Building Wealth, Purpose and Peace. So I will be sure to include a link to that book in the show notes. It walks you through all six pillars of the Intentional Money method in depth.
Leah Hadley [00:24:07]:
It includes exercises, examples, and practical tools at every step. It's available on Amazon. And again, I will be sure to include a link in the show notes. I wrote this book because, honestly, I know what it feels like to sit across from a woman who is brilliant and capable and still completely overwhelmed by her financial situation. And I know that when she gets the right framework and the right support, she doesn't just survive this transition. She built something that is better than what she had before. And that's what I want for you. So I really want to thank you for being here with me today.
Leah Hadley [00:24:50]:
If you found this episode valuable, please consider leaving us a review, sharing it with somebody you care about who might be going through this transition themselves. Thank you so much for being here and we will see you next week.
Leah Hadley [00:25:05]:
Thank you for joining me on Intentional Divorce Insights. It's a privilege to share this time with you. I hope each episode offers valuable guidance to navigate your journey. If you find our content helpful, please leave a review to help others discover the benefits of intentional decision making in divorce. Until next time, take care and continue to embrace your path with intention.
