How Do You Build a Secure Financial Future After Divorce?

In this episode of the Wealth Wise Women podcast, host Wes Cuprill dives into the misconceptions surrounding retirement and the financial challenges faced by divorced women. Building on last week's conversation with Dan, Wes discusses the inspiration and insights behind the book "Suddenly Single: A Divorced Woman's Guide to a Secure Financial Future." Learn about the common myths, such as relying solely on Social Security or remarriage for financial stability, and discover strategies to ensure a secure financial future post-divorce.

Explore the importance of understanding a true 50/50 asset split during divorce and how to avoid common financial pitfalls. This episode is packed with valuable advice for anyone navigating the complexities of divorce and retirement planning.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction and Recap

03:15 - Motivation Behind the Book

08:45 - Myth: Social Security as Sole Income

15:30 - Myth: Remarriage as a Financial Solution

20:00 - Myth: Relying on Children

27:10 - Strategies for a Secure Financial Future

35:00 - How to Get Your Free Copy

37:45 - Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

To order a free digital copy of "Suddenly Single: A Divorced Woman's Guide to a Secure Financial Future," visit moneyandclarity.com. If you're interested in a personalized financial planning session, head over to visitwithmc.com to schedule a meeting.
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Transcript

>> Wes Cuprill: 0:03

We address some of the myths around retirement. One of those is the idea that Social Security will meet all of your needs in retirement, that you don't necessarily have to have all of your savings squared away because Social Security will float you. And you know, unfortunately for most people that's not going to be enough. Especially considering the average Social Security check is only about fifteen hundred dollars a month. That is not a lot of money. Hello there and welcome to another episode of the Wealth Wise Women podcast. My name is Wes Caprill and and in this week's episode I want to continue the conversation around one of the topics that Dan and I discussed in our episode last week. Now if you haven't heard last week's episode, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to it. I think Dan and I had a great conversation and I look forward to having additional conversations like that in the future. But what I wanna do is expand on a couple of the things that Dan and I talked about specifically around our conversation of the sudd single books that we have written. Now, there are two books in this series, the first of which I'll discuss more in detail next week that is Suddenly Single A Widow's Guide to a Secure Retirement. But this week what I want to do is discuss our book Suddenly Single A Divorced Woman's Guide to a Secure Financial Future. I think this guide is very, very good for somebody who has found themselves having gone through divorce or is in the process of going through divor or not. It caught you off guard. I think this book has a lot of great points in it that will help you ensure that you continue to have a secure financial future. So what I want to do in this episode is discuss a little bit regarding the motivation for writing this book and then go into some of the points that are in the book. I think it helps to discuss them a little bit more in detail and then I'll tell you how you can go about getting your hands on a free copy of the book and then discuss how you can meet with us if there is an ways in which you feel we might be able to help you plan for your financial future if you have found yourself having gone through divorce or you are in the process of going through divorce. So to give you a little bit of background regarding the motivation behind this book, if you listened to the episode last week with Dan, he goes into it in a little bit of detail as well. But a lot of it stems from the story of my grandmother Jeanette. She had two kids, very, very young and then still legal. Let Me, go ahead and point that. But she was 19 and then 21 when she had her two children. And then she found herself divorced, a young single mother of two who had never finished high school. And by everybody's admission within the family, my grandfather didn't really give her a great alimony. And as a result, she had to, kind of, out of financial necessity, get remarried again. She and my grandfather Ken were married for a long time. They had a. A good marriage, but money was always a bit of a struggle for them. So between, you know, Grandma having to kind of get remarried because her alimony was up, and then financial struggles that she and Ken experienced to this day. My dad's proud to be able to do so, but he does financially support my grandmother, and we know that she's a very proud woman. So she doesn't take to this lightly, does not particularly enjoy having to be financially supported. Granted, my dad, again, is very proud to be able to do so, but. But given Grandma's struggles, it really inspired dad to say, you know what? We need to reach out to all women and say, hey, we can help you if you need it. So that's why he wrote Suddenly Single A Divorced Woman's Guide to a Secure Financial Future, to lay out various strategies that women can employ if they find themselves divorced and uncertain what their financial future looks like. Now, there's various different things that we cover in here. There's numerous points, but I want to go through a few of them more specifically, and the first of which is around Social Security. And we address some of the myths around retirement. One of those is the idea that Social Security will meet all of your needs in retirement, that you don't necessarily have to have all of your savings squared away because Social Security will float you. And, you know, unfortunately for most people, that's not going to be enough. Especially considering the average Social Security check is only about fifteen hundred dollars a month. That is not a lot of money. And what is that?$18,000 a year. And for those people who just rely on Social Security in retirement, that's a lot of the driving factor behind why many of these people find themselves now below the poverty line in retirement, when during their working years, they weren't necessarily below the poverty line, but they don't have enough savings then to add to Social Security to be able to meet their, previous lifestyle. Now, when Social Security first came about, it was in the late 1930s, and much of the focus was really for widows and disabled people. Most of that reason is because of the fact that Back then, people lived to about 62 years on average, and you had to wait until you were 65 to be able to collect benefits. As a result of all of this, you had about 42 people, 42 working people paying into the Social Security system for every one person collecting benefits. So, yes, it was a welfare system, but you had more than enough people at the bottom of the pyramid paying into it for those who were collecting. But because of shifting demographics and an aging population that is now living to about 80 years old on average, we've gotten down to just three people paying in for every one person collecting benefits. So the system is incredibly strained. And this has led to financial difficulties for Social Security, and I think is partially another reason why the payouts aren't all that high. I mean, again, it wasn't meant to be a retirement plan for people. It was supposed to support those who were in need financially, but it wasn't meant to support an entire population of folks nearing retirement. So we discuss that myth here in the book and go into strategies that you can employ to ensure that Social Security doesn't become your only source of income in retirement. The next myth, though, that I want to discuss is the idea that remarriage will solve all of your financial problems. We go into an example in the book, and I know I'm going to butcher the name here. Apologies. She was a little bit before my time, but Pauline Porozkova, she was married to Rick Ochisek. Again, forgive me if I have mispronounced that. He was the lead, singer of the. Of the Cars. And when he died, he actually left her absolutely nothing. They were going through a divorce towards the end of his life, but she was still his caretaker at that time. I don't really know the full situation of it, but when he died, he had completely disinherited her. And she had pretty much been completely unaware of the financial situation and didn't have any knowledge of any of the money or anything like that. And it sounded like all the assets were his. Now, they've since settled out of court, she and Rick's, estate. But I think it speaks again to the fact that when it comes to remarriage, it can be messy. And it may not ultimately be a great financial plan in the long run, especially considering remarriages often start on unequal financial foot footing. One person typically has a lot more assets than the other. When you marry young, you're coming in as financial equals. But when you remarry later in life, one person typically has more assets than the other. And this leads often to prenuptial agreements. And if that marriage will dissolve, one person is likely to be in much more dire financial straits than the other. So that is the second myth that we go into discussing about how remarriage is not a good financial strategy in the long term. And then another myth that we like to discuss is the idea that you can rely on your kids to help you. It's not to say that you can't. I know, speaking for myself, if my parents did need financial help down the road, I'd be more than happy to do so. You know, if they needed to live with me, that's something that I would find to be an honor to be able to help them with. But ultimately, in some families, that's not always a viable option, if you will. There's many different reasons behind this. I mean, first and foremost, if you do end up relying on your children for support and you end up living with them, one of the biggest things is that this results in you giving up your independence and freedom. And for a lot of women who we work with, one of their biggest goals in retirement is to be financially independent. They don't want to be a burden on their children. On top of all this, you know, that burden on your children and your families is more than just financial, it's also emotional. So is your child's marriage and family situation strong enough to be able to support you as well, or would that end up putting strain on the overall all family? So we go on to discuss, you know, this myth as well. And if it is something that you needed to do, what are some strategies to ensure that you don't put any strain on the family. But again, all of these myths are us trying to address them to say, hey, there are strategies we can employ now to ensure that you remain financially secure in the long term. So everything that we lay out in this book is to say, yeah, you can do all of these things, but we can help you in a way so that you don't have to go down that route of getting remarried as a financial strategy or relying on your children later on in life, or hoping that Social Security is going to float you. Ultimately, though, what all of this is meant to say is that what we've done is put together a system that specializes in helping women who are either going through divorce or who have gone through divorce and are, ah, uncertain about their financial future. So if you find yourself currently going through divorce, one way that we can help you is around, you know, what does the settlement look like? One of the things that I think is often overlooked is the idea that 50, 50 split of assets is a truly 50, 50 split. And that's not always the case because ultimately certain assets are going to have a tax implication that other assets won't have. A great example that we use, not to use any names, but somebody who we've known that went through a divorce, they came to find out that the husband had purchased a building that she didn't know about. And with the idea that this would be a development idea in the long term. And ultimately there were no buyers for this building. And during the divorce she was end up, she ended up getting stuck with half of the building and it was a non income producing piece of real estate that had a very large tax bill every single year. So because she did not know about any of this during the divorce proceedings and it was just such a messy situation, she's like, all right, I'll take half of it. Which without realizing that, oh, I'm going to have to pay half of the tax bill on this every single year without seeing any income from it. So one thing that we do in helping people who are going through divorce is we sit down and say, okay, this is what a truly 50, 50 split would look like. Not just half down the middle of everything, but saying, okay, you know, that asset actually has a huge tax hit. Why don't you take this one instead? And you might ultimately take less than 50% in an overall, dollar value, but at the end of the day, it may be a greater than 50% split because of the fact that maybe you're avoiding a lot of taxes in the long term. So that's one way in which we help people who are going through divorce. And then for those who are divorced, you know, we have various systems in place to say, okay, what's your existing financial situation? And then what we do is we sit down and create for you a comprehensive holistic financial plan that says, this is where you are, this is where you want to go. What are all the things you need to do in the interim to get there? Because again, and I probably say this in every single episode because it's true, ultimately you want an answer to one question, and that question is, will I be okay? And it's our job to help you answer that question with an emphatic yes. So if you want to get your hands on a copy of Suddenly Single A Divorced Woman's Guide to a Secure Financial Future, Simply go to moneyandclarity.com if you scroll down about halfway on our homepage, you will see a section that says Order a free copy of our books. Just click on the book that you want, fill in your information, and you will immediately get a free digital copy of our book. And if you'd like to sit down with us to discuss how we might be able to help you plan for a secure financial future, whether or not you're divorced, it doesn't doesn't matter. We would love to sit down and discuss how we might be able to help you. Simply go to visit with mc.com and pick a day and time that works best for you. That being said, I hope you've enjoyed this episode and next week I will be here to discuss the other version of the suddenly single book, A Widow's Guide to a Secure Retirement. Thank you. Take.