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 [00:00:26]:
I want to start today with a moment that is probably fairly common. It's a Tuesday night, 9, maybe 10 o'clock. The kids are down, maybe they're at their dad's. The house is quiet and something came in the mail or showed up in an email, a statement, a notice about your retirement plan, a number you're looking at, but you can't tell whether it's good or bad. And you pick up your phone to ask somebody. When you scroll, there's nobody to text. Not nobody in your life. You have people, you have a best friend, you have a sister or a mother who calls you every Sunday.
Leah Hadley [00:01:01]:
You have people who love you. There's just nobody you can send that particular question to at 9 o'clock on a Tuesday. I hear about this moment constantly, and almost always the women telling me about it are apologizing for it, like it's some evidence of something wrong with her, like she's failed at being Building a real life. It is not that. It's structural. And today I want to explain why it happens to almost everybody. And then I want to tell you what to do about it, because there is something to do about it. And it's more specific than find your people.
Leah Hadley [00:01:35]:
I'm Leah Hadley, and this is Intentional Divorce Insights. So here's why it happens. Think about who was around you during your divorce. You may have had an attorney, a mediator, Maybe a coach or a therapist, maybe a financial professional. Maybe it was me or somebody like me, right? Every single one of those relationships is built to end by design. And that's not criticism. They're there to get you through a process. And when the process is over, typically that relationship ends.
Leah Hadley [00:02:12]:
And here's the part that catches women off guard. For a lot of these folks, they may all end at roughly the same time. The decree comes through, the file closes, and maybe within about a month or so, your entire support structure that you've created for yourself quietly dissolves. And if you're not proactive, nobody replaces it because nobody tells you to. Somebody told you to get a lawyer. Somebody probably told you to find a therapist. I've never once heard of anyone telling a woman to build a support system for the money side of her life afterward. It's not in any of the checklists, including mine.
Leah Hadley [00:02:53]:
So she does the natural thing. She asks the people who are standing closest to her, her friends, her sister, her mom, the woman she walks with on Saturday mornings. And it goes badly in a way that she usually can't name. Now that's part 1 of what I'm going to be talking about today. And then in part 2, we're going to talk about what to do instead. I want to be really careful with this section because I'm not about to tell you that your family or friends are bad or that they don't want good things for you. Most of them want very good things for you. It's about where they're standing.
Leah Hadley [00:03:28]:
There's 3 reasons, and I think you're going to recognize all 3. The first one is that they knew your marriage. Ask a friend who sat through the whole thing what she thinks about your settlement and watch what happens. You'll get an answer about your ex. You'll hear about what he was like with money. You'll hear that she never trusted him. You'll hear what she would have done, which usually involves fighting harder for something. And let me be clear, she's being loyal.
Leah Hadley [00:03:58]:
That's genuinely what's happening. Her loyalty to you as a person in a story she watched from the front row And she's answering the emotional question, which is, whose side am I on? But in this case, you're not looking for an answer to an emotional question, right? In this case, we're looking for an answer to a financial one, and your money does not care how your marriage ended. It's just math and it's time. And the people who watched the marriage can't look at your numbers without seeing your spouse or your soon-to-be ex-spouse in them. The second reason is that they're answering from their own kitchen table. Most of the people around you are running a 2-income household. So when your friend tells you what she's keeping in savings, or that she'd never carry a mortgage into retirement, or that she should be more aggressive or less aggressive, she's telling you the truth about her own life. And in some cases, that life may have a second paycheck in it and a second person to absorb a challenging month.
Leah Hadley [00:05:03]:
And a whole different tolerance for risk because of it as well. The advice is sincere. It's also calibrated to a situation that it's no longer yours. And the gap between those 2 things is invisible to both of you while you're talking. And the 3rd reason is the one nobody says out loud, which is that you have to see these people again. You're going to be at Thanksgiving with them. You're going to be at the school thing or the birthday party. You're in the group text, right? So you edit.
Leah Hadley [00:05:34]:
You round the number down because you don't want to sound like you're bragging, or you round it up because you don't want anybody worrying about you, or worse, talking about you. You leave out the part that you're embarrassed about. You describe the situation in a way that makes you look like you're handling it, and then you get an answer. But here's the thing. The answer is to the edited version of the question. It's advice about a version of your finances that It doesn't actually exist. And you take it because you asked for it and because it came from somebody who loves you. But here's the most important thing for you to know.
Leah Hadley [00:06:11]:
An edited question gets an edited answer. That's worse than not asking because now you're making decisions on bad information that you actually introduced yourself. Now add one more, and this one only applies to some of you. If your family helped you financially during the divorce, if they covered a retainer or floated you for a few months, they hold a stake now. That changes what you're able to say out loud, and it changes what comes back. It's not anybody behaving badly. It's just that money in a relationship makes some words difficult, right? So that's the problem. Every person who is emotionally close enough To be easy to ask is for that exact reason, typically compromised as a source.
Leah Hadley [00:07:01]:
And every person far enough away to be objective is somebody you'd have to go find. Which brings me to the actual point of today. And here's the reframe that I want to give you. You're not looking for a person. You're looking to fill 4 specific roles and they are 4 different jobs. And almost nobody does more than one of them well. When somebody is trying to get all 4 from one person, which usually is going to be a new partner, maybe a friend, maybe an advisor, but it just doesn't work. And then they conclude that they're bad at asking for help, but that's not really the case, right? They were just asking one person to do the, the, or the role of 4.
Leah Hadley [00:07:47]:
So role one is a professional one who, it's a person who actually owes you something, right? I want to spend a minute here because this is the most useful, practical thing I'm going to say today. And most women have never had it explained. There is a very real difference between somebody who is allowed to recommend things to you and someone who is obligated to put your interests ahead of their own. The second one is what's called a fiduciary. A fiduciary is a legal standard. It is not a marketing word, and not everybody who gives financial advice is held to it. So ask directly when you're interviewing a financial professional, are you acting as a fiduciary in all of our work together? And then ask the second question, which is, how are you compensated? A fee, a commission, a percentage of what you invest, some combination. I want to be clear, there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question, but there is definitely a wrong reaction to it.
Leah Hadley [00:08:49]:
And the wrong reaction is any version of dodging the question. So you want to ask the question directly and you want to get a direct response. You do not need to become an expert on this. You need to know that the questions exist and that you are absolutely allowed to ask them out loud, which that's where a lot of people get hung up. And one more thing. This person is for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong. That's what you're paying for. So what this relationship does not cover well is those 10 small questions a week that don't feel worth an email.
Leah Hadley [00:09:25]:
And those small questions, quite frankly, can be where a lot of real damage is done, just quietly compounding over the years, which is why I want to talk about rule number 2. And rule number 2 is a room of women who have no history with you. People who did not know your ex, who were not at your wedding, who have nothing at stake in what you decide. This is where the question gets asked at full size with the real number in it without the editing, because quite frankly, there's nobody in that room you have to see at Thanksgiving, right? And something else happens in a room like that. Which I didn't expect to see the first time I saw it. A woman finally asked the thing that she's been embarrassed about for a couple of years, and half the room says, wait, I don't know that either. The shame turns out to have been the expensive part, not the not knowing. The other thing a room like this does, it's, it's calibration.
Leah Hadley [00:10:28]:
On your own, you have no idea what you're dealing with is normal. Everything feels either Catastrophic or fine with nothing in between because you don't have anything to compare it to. 20 other women give you a sense of scale. Role number 3 is an honest friend. Note that I said one, and note that I did not say this person gives you financial advice. This is for the sentence you just can't say anywhere else. The one about being scared or about the thing you already did that you maybe regret and haven't told anybody. Or about the fact that you don't actually know how much is in the account because you haven't been able to make yourself look.
Leah Hadley [00:11:12]:
Choose this person very deliberately. And I wanna say this out loud. This person is usually not the friend who is closest to your ex and not necessarily the friend who's most eager to give you advice either. What you want here is somebody who can hear a hard sentence and not flinch. And not need to immediately try to fix it. This is somebody who can really listen and hear. And the 4th one is a woman who's a little ahead of you, maybe 10 years out. No formal arrangement.
Leah Hadley [00:11:47]:
Nobody has to be asked to mentor anybody. You just need some proximity to the person who's already done the thing that you're about to do. Here's what happens after divorce. For a lot of people, your sense of what is normal breaks. You don't know. What a normal amount of anxiety about money is, or a normal amount of progress, or how long any of this is supposed to take. And that gauge doesn't repair itself through reading. It's just not going to.
Leah Hadley [00:12:17]:
The way you really repair that gauge is through watching somebody who's a little bit ahead of you and doing okay. So those are the 4 roles: a professional who you are paying for a specific service, a room with no history. An honest friend, and somebody who's a little bit ahead of you. Now, I recognize that many of you listening may not have any of these filled right now, or maybe you have one or two, and I don't want this to land as one more thing that you feel like you're failing at. Okay. So I want you to pick one. Rule 2 is a very easy one. I'll give you a very easy solution, but I want you to pick one.
Leah Hadley [00:12:55]:
Okay.
Leah Hadley [00:12:59]:
Now, since I told you that was an easy one to do, let's talk a little bit about why. And this is really important because, you know, when you find a room, when you go searching for a woman, a room filled with women, right, you do have to be incredibly discerning, right? Mm-hmm. Not all of them are going to be worth your time. And quite frankly, a bad one really can cost you more than nothing. So here's, here's what I really want you to walk away with. Everyone in the room is selling the same thing. If the community exists downstream of a product, whether that is a coaching program or an insurance product, a real estate strategy, the answer to every question is going to be that product, right? You're going to notice it because the answers are all headed in the same direction, right? There's no professional— Enthusiasm. This is important.
Leah Hadley [00:13:57]:
Enthusiasm is not expertise, right? A room full of people who are all figuring it out at the same time can be wonderful for morale. And in some cases, genuinely dangerous for decisions. Questions get answered with encouragement instead of information, right? So you ask, what do I do about a 401 from a job that you left? And somebody is like, You got this, girl. Now that's a lovely thing to hear, don't get me wrong, but it's not an answer. And the big one, anyone describing a return as certain, that is a big red flag. Nobody knows what a market is going to do. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling you something or doesn't understand what they're saying, and I'm honestly not sure which is worse. Worse, but here's what a good room looks like, right? The boring questions get real answers.
Leah Hadley [00:14:53]:
Somebody is asking about a beneficiary form and the room takes it seriously because beneficiary forms are one of those quiet things that matter enormously. People are allowed to disagree in front of each other. 2 women can give you a different answer and neither of them is getting shut down. And somebody's comfortable saying, I don't know. That's the real tell. A room where everybody says that they know, or nobody says that they don't know, should tell you that what you're witnessing is a performance. Now, this is the last episode of season 6. So let me tell you some of the things that I keep coming back to after 6 seasons of these conversations.
Leah Hadley [00:15:37]:
Now I've interviewed attorneys, mediators, coaches, therapists, You know, this season I had a couple of my, my Katie friends. I had a sleep consultant. I had Katie the car lady on. I've done a lot of these on my own talking about settlements and credits and budget and retirement accounts. But the women that I watched come out of this well weren't actually the ones who necessarily had the best information. Information is available. Absolutely. It is genuinely all out there.
Leah Hadley [00:16:06]:
And honestly, we have a huge amount for free on our website. The women who come out well are the ones who had somewhere to take the information, someone to ask what it meant for them, somewhere they could say the real number and the real fear out loud and get something very useful back. Almost none of them have done it alone, and the ones who tried to do it alone were not less capable. They just spent a lot longer being stuck. And stuck in an expensive way that honestly doesn't often show up until much later. So 2 things, and then I'll let you go for this season. If your divorce is finished and you are in that rebuilding stretch, we have a free resource on our website, the Divorce Recovery Guide. Um, you can certainly start there.
Leah Hadley [00:16:57]:
And if what I described in rule 2 is the thing that you're missing, If you don't have a single room where you can ask a money question at full size, that is exactly why I built the Empowered Sisterhood. It's a community of women working on their money together with me in it. And I will say one thing about it, and I do think it's important just to know all the women in that group aren't divorced. Some are married, some were never married, some are widowed. And that turns out to be an important part of this because at a certain stage, You stop being a woman going through a divorce and you go back to being a woman who's got a life to build. And that's what the sisterhood is really about. I wanna thank you for spending season 6 with me. Everything that I mentioned today will be in today's show notes, and I look forward to seeing you next season.
Leah Hadley [00:17:50]:
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.
