Finish Line Whiplash and Divorce

You’re finally at the end of your divorce, you sign the agreement, and for a moment you can breathe again. Then the doubt rushes in and it feels like your brain is replaying every conversation, every number, every “what if I went to trial” scenario. We call that finish line whiplash, and it’s one of the most common patterns I see after years of divorce financial analysis and divorce settlement support. The hard truth is that urgency to be done and panic after it’s done are both terrible places to evaluate major money decisions. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:08

Welcome to the Divorce Rich Podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Ressler. I've been a certified divorce financial analyst for 28 years, helping clients and their attorneys navigate the often complex and confusing financial issues in divorce. If you're in the process of or considering divorce, now is the time for you to take a deep breath and give yourself permission to find clarity on the financial issues you're facing. Rich means many things to many people. I believe the best definition of being rich is someone who has access to many resources. Along with my guests on this podcast, I will be bringing you a wide variety of information so that you can make sound and informed financial decisions for your financial future. Hey, if you're recently divorced or still in the middle of it, you already know life can feel like it's been turned upside down. And let's be honest, the financial part is overwhelming, confusing, and often the last thing that you want to deal with. That's why I want to tell you about the independent wealth management team at the Center for Financial Planning. Their team of certified financial planners specializes in helping people just like you navigate life changes with confidence. Whether it's assessing your new financial circumstances, creating or updating your retirement plan, or helping you adjust to the new normal, they'll work with you to get a clear, customized plan to feel in control and move forward with confidence. So if you're interested in working with a financial planner you can trust to have your best interest in mind, and you're ready to take the next step, visit centerfinplan.com. That's centerfinplan.com and schedule a conversation. Center for Financial Planning.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Live your plan. Disclosure. Securities offered through Raymond James Financial Services Inc., member FINBRA, SIPC. Investment Advisory Services offered through Center for Financial Planning, Inc. Center for Financial Planning Inc. is not a registered broker dealer and is independent of Raymond James Financial Services. Center for Financial Planning was a sponsor of the Divorce Rich Podcast. The Center for Financial Planning and Raymond James are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Divorce Rich Podcast.

Heidi’s Settlement And The Panic

Stabilizing Before Rechecking Numbers

Divorce Webinar For Michigan Women

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Divorce Rich Podcast. This is Jackie Ressler, and today I have a solo episode about a topic that it comes up again and again in almost every case that I have. And I wanted to record this so that I have something to send to my clients when they are in this phase that I call finish line whiplash. So what is finish line whiplash? It's going from just get me out of here to did I make a huge mistake. And that's a pattern that I see over and over again in divorce cases. And it almost always happens right at the end. Someone reaches that point where they say to me, I don't even care anymore. I just want this done. And then a week later, sometimes a month later, sometimes even a few days later, I get a call that sounds like this. I think I made a huge mistake. That swing from urgency to finish to panic that you're done is what I call finish line whiplash. And it is not rare. It's very predictable. Finish line whiplash is the emotional and cognitive swing that happens at the end of divorce. When exhaustion pushes someone to make decisions for relief. And then once everything is finalized, that relief gets replaced with doubt and fear. And the key issue is this neither urgency to finish nor panic is a reliable environment for evaluating major financial decisions like divorce. But people do trust both. Now, by the end of a divorce process, people are so depleted. They've been making decisions for months, sometimes even a year or more. They're dealing with legal pressure, getting deadlines met, financial uncertainty and worry, emotional strain from caring for their family during this process. And at some point, the system narrows down to one goal, just relief. So you hear things like, or I hear from my client, I just want this over. I don't want to fight anymore. It's probably going to be fine. But relief is not a financial strategy. It leads to concessions that are made at the end of the process just to end it, not to optimize the outcome. Now I'm going to give you a real life example. I had a client, we're going to call her Heidi. We were approaching trial. And as anyone who's been to that stage knows, it comes with a heck of a lot of pressure. There's messaging coming from everywhere, from the attorney, from me, from family members. Trial is going to be expensive. Clients can be looking at$50,000 to$100,000 or more in fees. The outcome is incredibly uncertain. We have no idea what a judge is going to award. And in Heidi's case, all of that was true. So a settlement offer came in. It wasn't perfect, but it had something important, a lump sum buyout of alimony. And that meant certainty for her instead of ongoing uncertainty, a clean exit from future risk. And Heidi made a very common end-of-case decision. She said, I know this isn't perfect, but I just need it to be done. That is finish line whiplash in real time. Not a bad decision, but an emotionally compressed one. So what did she do? She signed the agreement. And then about four weeks later, I got a call. Her tone was different, completely different. She was really anxious. She was second guessing everything and convinced that she'd made a huge mistake. She said to me, I think I messed this up. I should have just gone to trial. And this is where most responses go wrong. The reason that it goes wrong at this point is that, well, there's a lot of reasons that it goes wrong, and I'm going to talk about those. But it's really important to remember that there's no way to determine what a judge is actually going to do. Even if you went to an attorney who had been who had tried a case in front of the same judge as yours with similar fact pattern in the marriage, that doesn't mean that they can predict exactly what the judge is going to do. Judges are human. People either argue with the emotion when they're in this phase, or they jump straight into spreadsheets to try to make it better from a financial advisor's standpoint. In my experience, neither works. So I asked Heidi to come in and we slowed everything down before even touching or talking about the numbers. We used what I would call a stabilization process. First, we separated facts from feelings. Really hard to do. Nothing in her agreement had changed. Only her emotional state had changed. So we reestablished that. Was trial risk real? Yes. Were the costs of trial real? Yes. Was uncertainty real? Yes. The settlement removed all of those risks. And I said, we are not redeciding this. We are reunderstanding it and the context that it was made in. Only after that conversation did we return to the numbers. And then we did rerun the projections. We looked at her monthly income coming in. We looked at her monthly expenses. We pinpointed if there were any gaps and where those gaps would come from. We talked about liquidity. We talked about the assumptions that we used in running long-term financial projections and if those assumptions had changed. Did she change whether or not she was going to stay in the home? Did she change her decision about whether or not she was going to return to work full-time? Did any of those things change and were they different? At the moment, everything was the same. And what became really clear to Heidi wasn't that the decision was perfect, because it wasn't perfect, but it was coherent and it made sense under the conditions she was facing. And that distinction matters more than people realize. It also was a decision that was made in clarity. It was a decision based not on just the feelings. Heidi had her lawyer with her and she had me with her. And the time that she made the decision, we were reviewing all of the numbers with her. So it wasn't about the finances or about clarity. It was about the post-settlement emotion. So finish line whiplash is not just about rushing into settlement. It's also about what happens after. When the emotional aftershock gets mistaken for financial failure, and the cycle looks like this exhaustion creates urgency to settle. Urgency drives the settlement to conclusion. And then the relief is there, and then the relief fades, and in its place, anxiety appears, and the decision gets mentally relitigated. But here's the key truth: discomfort after settlement is not automatically evidence of a bad decision. Sometimes it's just emotional recalibration. A healthier model is something that I call structured confidence. It doesn't mean certainty. It never can. It means you understood the trade-offs. You had real financial visibility and clarity. You understood all of your assets, what kind of assets you had, what your expenses were going to be, what the trade-offs were going to be if you went in front of a judge, what your best case scenario was and what your worst case scenario was. If you made the decision with all of that information and not exhaustion alone, the goal isn't to feel perfect at signing the agreement. The goal is to be able to revisit that decision later on and still understand why it made sense. So if you're approaching the end of your divorce or you've already settled and you're feeling that anxious wave of doubt, here's what I want you to think about. Wanting it to be over is human. Feeling uncertain afterward is also human. But neither that urgency to settle or the panic after is where good financial decisions are evaluated. That swing between the two, that's finish line whiplash. And the goal isn't to eliminate your emotions, it's to make decisions that still hold up after the emotion settles. So I'm going to encourage you if you don't have a financial advisor when the divorce is done and settling, that you consider it and you consider meeting with someone that you sit down with and go through all of the financial decisions that have been made. I'm going to link to this episode my post-divorce financial game plan checklist for you to go through. And hopefully this episode gives you some relief. The next segment of our episode today, our mailbag sponsor, Dawn, is having an upcoming complimentary webinar on what to consider if you're considering divorce. It's available to anyone. It is virtual. And I have Kelsey Minor on up next to talk about that upcoming workshop. So stay tuned. Hi everyone. I am here with Kelsey Minor, who is the managing partner at Dawn, Divorce Attorneys for Women in Michigan. And they have an exciting event coming up that I'm really happy she's here to share some details on.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

So welcome, Kelsey. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. So tell me about the event coming up. Of course, of course. So we are Michigan's original law firm dedicated to representing women. And we've been doing this work for over 30 years. Um, and we know that considering divorce can feel overwhelming, confusing, and sometimes even scary, which is why we created our webinar to give you clear, honest information so you can better understand what to expect and feel more in control of your situation or divorce if that's the route that you choose to take. The webinar is about education and support. We'll walk through the basics of divorce in Michigan, talk about some of the most commonly asked questions and the biggest concerns that we hear, we as attorneys hear, hear from women. So you're not alone in this process. Whether you're considering filing for divorce, have already filed, or you just want some information regarding the process, you are not alone, and we will help guide you through this difficult time. So the webinar will take place on May 12th at 6 o'clock PM and registration is now open. Okay, awesome. So is it virtual or is it live? So it is virtual. Okay, awesome. We know how busy, busy people are. Um, so we wanted to make this as accessible, accessible as possible. Um, you know, people have daycare pickups or other commitments.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

We want to make it available to as many people as we can.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Okay, awesome. So that's May 12th, 2026 for anybody listening. And we are going to have the the link to register in the show notes. Um, but just for for someone who's listening in, it will it be posted on your website also? It will, yeah. Okay, and what is your website address?

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Yes. So women's rights.com.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Women's rights.com. Okay, and that's coming up, and it's open to anyone that is looking for information. So there's no commitment that they have to hire anyone. It's open for anyone for education purposes, correct?

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Absolutely. We want to to share the knowledge that we have and assist in any way that we can.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

Awesome. And how long is it going to run? Do you think?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Um, approximately 45 minutes to an hour. Okay. It sometimes depends on the amount of questions that we get near the end. Gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

All right. Well, I highly encourage anybody who is in Michigan to tune in and sign up for this seminar. The more information that you have when you're thinking about divorce, the better. And a lot of people are getting really bad information nowadays on AI. And so I really appreciate that you're out there putting real information out into the community for people to tune in.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Of course. And thank you so much for having me. Thanks, Kelsey. All right, take care. Have a good Monday. Bye-bye. Bye.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen to Divorce Rich Podcast. If you like this podcast, please follow us on Apple or anywhere that you download podcasts and share this link with any friends or family that you think might benefit from this information.