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]:
"Recalculating" You know that voice. You are driving along, you miss a turn, and your GPS announces it like you just did something wrong. Recalculating. I want to talk about that word today because I think it's one of the most important words in the divorce process, and not for the reasons that you may think. Welcome back to Intentional Divorce Insights, and welcome to a brand new season. I'm Leah Hadley, and I am so excited to be here with you today.
Leah Hadley [00:00:55]:
This season also marks 10 years of Intentional Divorce Solutions, and I'm going to be sharing more about that as we go. I want to start this season by sharing something I'm really proud of. This fall, I had the opportunity to give the keynote at the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts conference. The IDFA, is the organization behind the Certified Divorce Financial Analyst or CDFA credentials. So the room was full of divorced financial professionals. Now, these are people who sit with women like you and help them understand the numbers. So my talk was called Recalculating, and it was about what happens inside us when the numbers change partway through a divorce and why smart, capable people react the way that they do.
Leah Hadley [00:01:51]:
And the response was honestly more than I had hoped for. And afterwards, I kept thinking that the professionals in that room weren't the only ones who needed to hear it, and you do too. So today I'm going to take that same talk and turn it around so that it's for you sitting on your side of the table. So be honest with me, when your GPS says recalculating, do you feel that little flash of irritation? I do every single time. And here's the funny part, right? A lot of the time the new route is actually faster. The GPS saw traffic you couldn't see or a closed road ahead. And it found a better route and we still resent it anyway.
Leah Hadley [00:02:35]:
And why is that? Because along the way we've lost something, right? We had this picture in our mind. We made peace with the old route. We had kind of an idea about where we were headed, um, and when we'd get there, right? And when that picture changes, it can feel like a loss even when the new route is better. And that's not you being irrational, right? That's just you being human. Yeah. And so that is exactly what happens in divorce. You make peace with a set of numbers and then new information comes in and everything shifts. Evaluation comes back different.
Leah Hadley [00:03:10]:
An account turns out to be partly separate property. Somebody's income changes, the route changes, and it can feel like the ground underneath you is moving. So I want to give you a different way to hear that word. By the end of this episode, my hope is that recalculating starts to send to sound less like a failure and more like the system really doing its job. So let me paint you a picture. I'm going to call this client Dana. She is not a real person, but I'm guessing that some part of her story will sound familiar. Um, she's been married for 18 years and she stepped back from her career when her second child was born and her husband has handled the money ever since.
Leah Hadley [00:03:55]:
Now, early in the divorce, before anything was formally valued, the two of them talked about their house. They looked at it online. It was worth about $450,000. They owed about $150,000. So there's about $300,000 in equity. That's the number that stuck. Dana did the math in her head. Her half was $150,000.
Leah Hadley [00:04:17]:
And she kind of started to build some plans around that. Maybe she'd keep the house. Maybe that $150,000 would be a cushion for her while she went back to work. And then the formal appraisal came back in and the formal appraisal came back in at $390,000. So at $390,000, the equity is actually $240,000. So her half would be $120,000. So on paper, she just lost $30,000, right? It doesn't matter that the $150,000 was never real. It was just kind of a rough guess based on a number that she saw on a website.
Leah Hadley [00:04:54]:
But it can still feel like something was taken from her, right? Recalculating. Here's what I want you to notice. Nothing about what Dana actually needs changed that day. She still needs a safe, stable place for her kids. She still needs a cushion while she gets back on her feet. The only thing that changed was the number that she had attached herself to. And that feeling of loss. It can actually continue to shape every decision that she makes going forward unless somebody helps her see what's happening.
Leah Hadley [00:05:29]:
So in my keynote, I talked about 3 patterns that show up again and again when the route changes. The research world has fancy names for them. I'm going to give you the driving versions because I think they're easier to catch in yourself. So the first is ETA, right? When you first plug in your destination, the GPS tells you when you're arriving, right? So let's say it says 2:15, then there's traffic and now it says 2:30. You're still going to get there, but 2:30 can feel like losing because you had already seen the 2:15, right? That first number becomes the yardstick. Everything after it is getting measured against it. That's a fancy name for, uh, the fancy name for that is anchoring, right? That's what happened for Dana. Her first ETA was $150,000.
Leah Hadley [00:06:19]:
The real number was $120,000. And so it felt like a loss, even though she never really had that $150,000 to begin with. Now I see this all the time, and so do the attorneys and mediators that I work with. When a client turns down an offer that's actually fair, she's often not measuring it against her real needs. She is measuring it against a number that she may have heard. And that's why when numbers come out, Matters almost as much as the numbers they say. So what can you do whenever you hear a number early in your divorce? I want you to ask one question. Is this a real number or is it a placeholder? Write the placeholders down as placeholders so you don't build your plans around them, right? We want to identify them.
Leah Hadley [00:07:08]:
The second thing, driving the roads, you know, even when the GPS offers a faster route. A lot of us take the roads we know. Familiar can feel safer. The fancy name for this is loss aversion. Losing something hurts more than gaining the same amount feels good. So in divorce, this shows up most with the house, right? Dana wants to keep the house. And I always want to ask, what does the house mean to you? And usually the answer doesn't have anything to do about square footage. It's often stability for the kids, a sense that the ground just isn't moving, right? It's not wanting to lose one more thing.
Leah Hadley [00:07:48]:
And those are very real needs, but the house, it's the route, right? Stability is the destination. So once you can see the difference, then you can really ask whether there's another route to that same destination. Maybe the house, you know, keeping the house gets her there, or maybe a smaller place near the same school. With money left over actually gets her there with a lot less stress, right? So when couples argue keep or sell before anyone asks what the house really means, they're kind of arguing about that route before even focusing on what that destination is. And that's often where a case can get stuck. So what can you do? Write down what you're fighting for and then write down what it gives you. Okay. And the second list, that's really the destination and we can always come up with lots of different solutions to get to the same destination.
Leah Hadley [00:08:46]:
And the third is the passenger seat. Dana says something that I hear from so many women, and that is, I'm not the numbers person. And if that's you, I want you to hear this because this is really important. That isn't a fact about your ability. Okay. It's a seat that you have sat in throughout the course of your marriage for years. Somebody else drove and you rode in the passenger seat, and that may have made sense for your family at that time, but now it might be a time for you to drive. And nobody hands a brand new driver the whole map at once, right? I wrote my book, When It's Just Not Working: A Practical Divorce Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms, for exactly this woman.
Leah Hadley [00:09:30]:
You do not have to become a numbers person overnight. You just have to know the next turn. So what can you do? You can ask your team to slow down one decision per meeting, ask for a picture or a chart instead of a spreadsheet, if that's helpful. Um, if you are feeling overwhelmed, that is not a sign that you can't do this. And I want to be very clear about that. It's a sign if you're feeling overwhelmed that you're getting more information than you can take in that particular day. So one more thing for the professionals that are listening. When a client was right about one number, it can actually make her more certain about everything else.
Leah Hadley [00:10:13]:
So being right once can make people completely stop listening. So it is worth watching for on either side because it definitely happens. Now let's talk about when the signal drops, right? You know, when you're driving through a tunnel and you just lose the GPS that keeps guiding you, But it's working off of old information. Okay. The longer you are in that tunnel without the signal, the more likely it is that it's going to send you the wrong way. The exact same thing happens in divorces when new information doesn't make it to the table. So maybe you got a job offer. Maybe a family member gave you money.
Leah Hadley [00:10:54]:
Maybe you found out something about an account. Now I understand the instinct is to hold onto it for a while. It can feel protective, especially if you're worried about how it's going to affect support or how your spouse is going to react. But the challenge is that everybody at the table is now calculating the route on the old data. And when that information comes out later, most of the time it really does cost more than if it had come out upfront. So it costs you trust, it costs time, it can cost money in terms of legal fees and things like that, for sure. So when something changes, I always encourage people to tell their attorney first, tell them early, let them help you figure out what needs to be shared and how, right? That's what they're there for. And attorneys and mediators can only work with what's on the table, right? So a client who brings new information in early Is a client where they can keep that case moving.
Leah Hadley [00:11:55]:
Now, in the keynote, I closed with 6 things that professionals can do to be a good GPS for their clients. Now, today I want to hand you the version that you can use yourself, because in this case, we're talking about you're the one driving, right? So first and foremost is confirm that destination, right? Before you argue about an asset, I want you to really get clear about what you need your life to look like after this, right? Mm-hmm. Where do you want to live? What do your kids need? What monthly number will give you some breathing room? Then I want you to judge every offer against that, not against a number that you might be anchoring to in your head. All right. 2 is to treat early numbers as placeholders, right? Online home values, rough estimates, back of the napkin math. Write them in pencil and remember that we're waiting for the real number before we build a plan around it. Okay. Test drive the route.
Leah Hadley [00:12:58]:
If you want to keep the house, consider living on your post-divorce budget for a couple of months before you fully make that decision, right? You can look at what the real monthly numbers are and just see how that feels living in that, you know, new budgeted situation. Force to take one turn at a time. You don't have to understand absolutely everything this week, right? Ask for one decision per meeting. Ask for pictures instead of pages of numbers if that's helpful for you. The 5th thing is to name the recalculation out loud. When something changes, say, this is new information and it's normal if I feel thrown by it. Okay. Naming it takes some of the sting out of it if that's something that you're And it can keep you from making a big decision if you're feeling kind of that first wave of loss, which is normal.
Leah Hadley [00:13:56]:
And last but certainly not least, keep your hands on the wheel. A good team gives you information and helps you to see your options. But remember, this is your life and these are your decisions, right? A good GPS is never going to grab the wheel. If you take one thing from today's episode, I want it to be this: recalculating is not the GPS telling you that you failed. It is the system doing its job, right? New information arrived and there is still a way to get where you're going. Now, I know that some of you listening aren't going through a divorce yourself. You might be attorneys, mediators, financial professionals. You sit across from clients like Dana every week.
Leah Hadley [00:14:45]:
If this episode made you think of a client who turned down a fair offer or dug in on the house or froze when it was time to decide, I love to bring this conversation to your team. I give a version of this talk for, um, bar associations, CLE programs, and professional groups. And we will include the details in the show notes along with a free guide that I had created for the talk that I gave last, um, Uh, last month that is, uh, designed specifically for the IDFA audience, but it's called Be a Good GPS. So we'll include a link to that as well. And if you're in the middle of your own divorce and the numbers just changed on you, you don't have to figure out this new route alone. You know, our team at Intentional Divorce Solutions helps women to see the full picture so they can make decisions from a steady place. So the next time that your GPS says recalculating, hopefully it might put a little smile on your face. Remember, the destination didn't change, the route did, and you are still the one driving.
Leah Hadley [00:15:53]:
Thank you so much for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Leah Hadley [00:15:58]:
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.
