Divorce with Carolyn

Can't afford to leave? Here's where to start...

• Season 1 • Episode 23

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Content warning: this episode discusses domestic and family violence, including deaths. There are links to support services below.


If you've sat at the kitchen table late at night working out whether you can afford to leave, this episode is for you.

You're not weak, and you're far from being the only one. New ABS figures put divorce near its lowest point since 1976 – in the middle of the worst cost of living stretch in a generation. That's not a sign more marriages are working. It's a sign fewer women can afford to leave.

In this episode, I talk through what leaving actually costs in 2026, answer the "just leave" argument doing the rounds at the moment, and finish with three practical places you can start. Free help exists and a lot of women don't know about it – I'll tell you where to look.

Support

In an emergency, call: 

  • 000 (Australia) 
  • 111 (New Zealand) 
  • 999 (UK) 
  • 911 (US and Canada) 
  • 112 (Europe, and from your mobile in many other countries)

Domestic and family violence support

Australia: 

  • 1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732, 24 hours. Text 0458 737 732 or chat at 1800respect.org.au Australia 
  • 13YARN, 13 92 76, 24 hours, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 

New Zealand: 

  • Women's Refuge Crisis Line, 0800 REFUGE (0800 733 843), 24 hours 

UK: 

National Domestic Abuse Helpline, 0808 2000 247, 24 hours, free 

Ireland: 

Women's Aid, 1800 341 900, 24 hours, free, with support in over 240 languages 

US and Canada: 

  • National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours 
  • Canada – find your nearest shelter at sheltersafe.ca

Anywhere else in the world: 

findahelpline.com is a vetted directory of crisis lines by country. Choose yours and it will show you what's available locally, in your language.

From WDA

Free guide: 5 Financial Mistakes Women Make in Divorce – and what to do instead. https://www.womensdivorceacademy.com/free-5-financial-mistakes

Women's Divorce Academy membership – the full resource library covering property and settlement, the legal process in plain English, superannuation, parenting, work and wellbeing. $74 a month, cancel any time. Charges appear on your statement as Stellar Content Group. https://stellarcontent.thrivecart.com/wda-membership/

Free financial help

Australia – National Debt Helpline, 1800 007 007. Free, independent, confidential financial counselling.

Elsewhere, free financial counselling exists in most countries but goes by different names. Search "free financial counselling" or "free debt advice" plus your country – and look for a not-for-profit or government-funded service, not a company selling you a debt product.

Free legal help

Australia: 

Legal Aid operates in every state and territory, alongside Women's Legal Services and community legal centres. Many offer free initial family law advice.

Elsewhere, search "legal aid" or "free family law advice" plus your country or region. In many places a women's legal service or community legal centre will give you a first conversation at no cost.

Support for men

My work at Women's Divorce Academy supports women specifically but men experience domestic and family violence too, and there are services specifically for them.

Australia: 
MensLine Australia, 1300 78 99 78, 24 hours. Free professional counselling for men, including men experiencing family violence. 

UK: 

Men's Advice Line (Respect), 0808 801 0327. Free, and calls don't appear on itemised bills. 

US and Canada:

The National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, supports people of all genders. 

Australia:
1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732, is open to anyone experiencing domestic, family or sexual violence. 

Elsewhere:

findahelpline.com will show you what's available in your country.

If you're a man concerned about your own behaviour towards a partner, please seek support. In Australia the Men's Referral Service is 1300 766 491.

Mentioned in this episode

The data in this episode is Australian, but the pattern isn't – if you're listening from somewhere else, the equivalent research and services in your country are worth looking up.


Send Carolyn a text

READY FOR MORE SUPPORT?

Women's Divorce Academy offers expert divorce support and a friendly community of women who understand exactly what you're going through.

Learn more about our membership and divorce support: womensdivorceacademy.com

CONNECT WITH US:

Instagram: @womensdivorceacademy 

Facebook: Women's Divorce Academy

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SPEAKER_00

A few friends sent me a chart last week and it's something that I'd like to talk about today. It was one of those tidy news graphics. This one that I'm talking about was from SBS. Twenty years of Australian data, two lines. Marriage rate on top in blue, divorce rate underneath in red, both sloping downwards. And in the bottom corner, sitting next to the divorce line, somebody in their design team had livened up the pretty dull graphic with a little broken heart emoji because divorce, get it? Broken hearts, of course. I looked at that little emoji for a really long time because whoever put it there made a decision, and I'm sure it wasn't even a conscious decision, but they looked at 49,148 Australians who ended a marriage last year, and they decided that the correct emotional response was sadness, broken heart, that what we were looking at was a loss. I want to talk today about what these numbers say, what they leave out, and why the story of divorce in Australia in 2026 is not a story about relationships at all. It's a story about money and it's a story about women. Two quick things before we start, though. The first is that this episode has a bit of anger in it. I've decided not to take that out because I think the anger is an appropriate response. And I'd rather be honest than uh sound measured when really I have many feelings about this. But I don't want to leave you with only that. So then in the back half, I'm also going to get practical and talk about first steps, free services, actual places you can go to get help. If you want to skip straight there, it starts around the halfway mark. The second thing is at the end, I am going to mention the Women's Divorce Academy membership, which I run because it's what I do and because it's relevant to this specific problem. I'm telling you that now so it doesn't arrive as a surprise. I'm not tricking you into some big sales spiel. There's no pressure at all, and everything genuinely useful in this episode is free, and I'll link to all of that. There's free resources I want you to have. This work is my mission before it's my business. It's also how I pay the rent, but it's not why I do what I do. I do it because I'm sick of women being disadvantaged by divorce way more than men are. I'm sick of seeing women struggle just because of their gender, and I really want to help. Right, let's get into it. I'm Carolyn Tate, founder of Women's Divorce Academy, and your guide to turning a divorce into the best thing that ever happened to you. This is Divorce with Carolyn. Let's start with what the data says. A few numbers up the front, but um, we're going to break them down. So don't, if it if you're not a numbers person, neither am I, but this is important. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its annual marriage and divorce figures last Tuesday, covering 2025. Here's what was in them. There were 49,148 divorces granted last year. That's up just over 4% on the year before. The divorce rate ticked up ever so slightly from 2.1 to 2.2. That's divorces per thousand people aged 16 and over, which is the youngest you can get married. Let's not even start about that. I have two 16-year-olds in my house and oof, boy. Marriages went the other way. So 118,804 marriages were started last year. That's down 1.7%, with the marriage rate falling from 5.5 to 5.3. And couples who do divorce are staying married for longer before they get to that point. The median time from wedding day to separation is now 9.4 years, up from 8.8 back in 2005. Now, the papers this week, out of all of those numbers, ran with the headlines about divorce rates rising. And technically, yes, divorce rates did rise, that is true. But a tiny little bump in the figures, it was minuscule. It's just noise. It's not meaningful in any way. But there is a number, I think, that matters. In 2005, so 11 years ago, the divorce rate was 3.3. Today it's 2.2. We are sitting at or near the lowest divorce rate since no fault divorce came in back in 1976. When you look at the chart, you can see a great big COVID-shaped dip there too. And it's exactly what it what you'd expect. Divorces went way down in 2020. The courts slowed down, and nobody makes life-altering decisions in those first few months when they're locked in the house, when we all didn't know how long it was going to go on for and what was coming next. It was all very uncertain. I'm sure you remember what that felt like. And then came the bounce, surprising absolutely nobody who spent that year in a small home with somebody they were already unsure about. But the line has been drifting down ever since. And that's the part that I really want to think about today. Because thinking about what else has happened since 2020, rents have gone through the roof, interest rates have gone up and up, groceries, insurance, power, petrol, we're in the worst cost of living stretch that we've seen in a generation. And through all of it, fewer people get divorced. If your instinct is to read that as Australians falling more deeply in love with each other, um, I'd really love to try on your rose-colored glasses. But hold that thought. I have some other ones. Let's go back to that emoji. Every year this data lands, and every year it gets reported the same way. Marriage is down, sad, divorce is up, sadder. The whole framing rests on an assumption that nobody even really questions, I don't think, which is that a marriage ending is a sad thing. A marriage that's failed is two really broken-hearted people. I don't accept that. I've never accepted that. A marriage that ends is not a failure. Sometimes it's a marriage that just finished. Sometimes it's two people who did the thing properly for 15 years and then had the courage to go, actually, this isn't working for me anymore. Sometimes, and I say this from being there on the inside, it's the beginning of a woman's actual life. I separated from my ex-husband in 2017 and divorced in 2019, and I know exactly what the other side of that broken heart looks like. And I promise you, it's not actually a broken heart. But the sharper problem with that little emoji that I have, and it took me a while to figure out why it was bothering me, but the chart assumes that a falling divorce rate is good news. A falling divorce rate can mean people are happy, which is marvelous, but it can also mean that people are trapped. Women are trapped, stuck. And a line on a chart cannot tell you whether that divorce is a broken heart or whether that divorce is a woman emancipating herself from a bad situation. We have no measurement for the difference between a woman who stays because she wants to and a woman who stays because she can't leave. And that gap, that unmeasured, unfunded, unremarked upon gap, is where an enormous number of women are living right now. And here we start talking about the affordability trap. So let's look at whether there's evidence for that stuck theory. There is. Professor Stephen Wheelin and Dr. Luke Hartigan are economists at the University of Sydney. They went looking at exactly this. They used Hilda Data, that's the big longitudinal survey that tracks Australian households year after year. And they presented their findings at the Australian Conference of Economists last July. Not sure if you made that one. I was busy that week, but um I'll give you the highlights. Now, up front, this study hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but it is the clearest evidence we have so far. So those two economists found that when house prices grow faster than people expect, that keeps some people in marriages they would otherwise leave. And they name who. And I don't think anyone would be surprised when I tell you it's women, women with lower education levels, lower income households, and older couples. Now, here's an interesting bit of data that might befuddle you for a moment. During the recession that we had to have in the 1990s, also a period of real financial hardship, divorces went up. Hard times pushed people apart. This time, hard times are actually holding people together. The difference between that difficult period and this difficult period is one thing, and that's housing. National house prices rose around 38% in the five years to 2025. And when you say it like that, the logic is really brutal in its simplicity. One household becomes two households, two bonds, two sets of bills, two mortgages, two lots of furniture, uh, two homes that can fit, say, two children, three children, however many children that are only there half the time. In a rental market where there is nothing available and 40, 50 people at every inspection. And on top of that, there's court filing fees, um, you know, expenses of separation and divorce, and not to mention taking care of your your physical health, your mental health, all of that stuff. And for women, often it's on a part-time wage, if they're caring for children, etc. I want you to picture a specific woman, and it might be you, you might be this woman, it might be someone you know, or it might be close to a truth that you're living right now. She's at the kitchen table at 11 o'clock at night with a notepad and her banking app open on her phone. Everybody else is asleep. She's not sitting there working out whether or not she loves her partner. She's working out whether the numbers add up, whether she can afford to leave. And that's the sentence I'd put underneath this year's chart. Instead of a broken heart, I'd put the divorce rate is not measuring how many marriages are working, it's measuring how many women can afford the exit. Now I want to plant something here that I'm going to come back to later if my ADHD brain reminds me. Because I don't want you sitting with the despair for another 10 minutes without the handhold. So that woman at the kitchen table is doing sums with the wrong numbers. Um, that feeling of hopelessness isn't necessarily something that you have to live with. Almost every woman I speak with is working off an estimate. What she thinks is in the mortgage, what she assumes she'd be entitled to, what her partner has told her about their super. And in nearly every case, when she finally gets the real figures and proper advice, they're different from what she believed. Sometimes they're worse, but surprisingly often she's in a better position than she feared. And even if she's not, she can learn the steps to get from where she is now to where she wants to be. So hold on to that. The first practical step in all of this is not leaving. It's finding out what's actually there and how you're going to make it happen. We'll get to exactly how in a moment. Now let's talk about the ledger that nobody official actually keeps. I'm going to take you somewhere a little bit harder now, and I will be sharing some contacts in the show notes and also in this podcast in a moment, because we're going to get into some trigger-worthy territory. So please forgive me, but this is really important. And I'm going to talk about a woman called Sherelle Moody, and a lot of you might know Sherelle Moody's work. She is incredible. She's a journalist and she runs a project called Australian Femicide Watch through the Red Heart Movement. What she does is she counts every Australian woman and every child killed by violence. She records them one by one. She receives no government funding. She does it because she cares, because it's important. And let's just think about that for a moment. That in this country, in 2026, there is no federal agency keeping a live count of the women being killed. A journalist does it in her own time, voluntarily. A death toll that you don't maintain is a death toll you cannot be held to. So here's Sherelle's ledger. In 2022, 56 Australian women were killed by violence. In 2023, that number was 74. In 2024, the number was 101. And in 2025, 79. This year, as I'm sure many of us have seen in the news, we had 38 women as of late July, and we are barely past the halfway mark. And let's not forget those are disturbing numbers, but every single one of those people was a loved mother, daughter, sister, friend, employee, you know, had their whole life taken from them. And I want to be really careful and accurate here because accuracy is the whole job on this. The rise from 2022 to 24 was close to doubling. The last two years have come down off that peak, and the official criminology data for 2024-25 shows intimate partner homicide is falling as well. So I'm not going to tell you that the line is currently climbing, but I don't need to for that to be awful. 38 women, seven months. That's a woman killed every five and a half days in a wealthy, peaceful country. And I don't need a trend line to tell you that that is a catastrophe. What is unambiguously rising is the reporting. Thank goodness. It feels so grim, but it's so important that we're shining a light on something that was already happening. We just got to go about our business, you know, pretending that it didn't wasn't real. In 2024-25, police recorded 97,800 family and domestic violence offenders, and that's up 8%, the largest annual jump since national reporting began. Almost four in five of those offenders were men. And the official homicide record, going further back, is not ambiguous either. Between 2010 and mid-2018, 311 Australians were killed by an intimate partner. 240 of them were women. Every single one of those 240 women was killed by a man. This is not a two-way street, and we'll come back to that phrase. It might sound familiar to you because it's been in the news a lot lately. Sherelle is calling for a royal commission into the killing of Australian women and girls. Her petition at the moment has around 120,000 signatures, I think it is. I will link to that in the show notes. And if it speaks to you, please go and sign it. I think it's so important. And in May, the Prime Minister was asked about it, and he said, and this is a direct quote, what does a Royal Commission do besides fund lawyers? Which is, you know, a funny coincidence given that the government spent $131 million on a Royal Commission into anti-Semitism after the Bondi attack. Now, I'm not here to put one atrocity against another atrocity, but what I will say is that we know exactly what it looks like in this country when someone decides something is a national emergency. We've seen the press conferences, we've seen the budget line. We know the government can do it when the government wants to do it. It just hasn't decided yet that women dying every five and a half days because of somebody they love and trust is worth the time and expense. And this brings me to the 22nd of July when Senator Pauline Hansen went on 4BC in Brisbane. The host Gary Hargrave gave her a very clean and clear opportunity to condemn men who commit violence against women. But that's not what she did. She said it was wrong, and then she said this that women can lose their cool as well, and that domestic violence is a two-way street. She went on, domestic violence, I won't do the voice, that domestic violence is a scourge, but sometimes, look, I'm not going to go into detail, but I've been through it myself in my life, and I just feel that if you're not in a house where you feel safe, you feel you don't want to be there, then you shouldn't put up with it. And then even more plainly, if these women are getting abused by men out there, then don't put up with it. If only we'd asked her earlier, what a simple solution. Separately on a podcast, she said that domestic violence takes up about 75% of police officers' time now. And her words, that's why we're not dealing with real crime out there. She's also described paid family and domestic violence leave as a holiday and ridiculous. Now there's so much to unpack in there. Let me take that police claim first. Because when I heard it, I thought, surely that can't be true. But who's fact-checking this stuff, right? So I went looking for that 75%. And it will surprise you not at all, I'm sure, to find that I cannot find a single thing that supports that number. What I can find is Victoria Police Data putting family violence at about 40 to 60% of call-outs on any given day. And I'd note call outs and officer time aren't the same measurement. But here's what I keep coming back to. Let's say she's in the ballpark, devil's advocate, let's say 75% is right. Let's say domestic violence is a huge share of what police in this country actually do. What's the leap we have to make to decide that that's not real crime? If it's the single most common thing police attend day after day, a man beating his wife in her own home, that's the bread and butter of Australian policing? Then what exactly is the real crime we're being distracted from? Because from where I sit, we have found the crime. It's happening in the houses. It's happening in the houses the entire time. And the only thing that's changed is that women have started calling it in. Women know what to call it now. They've got a name for it. They know how to ask for help and they know that there are services available to support them. Now, the just leave part, which makes me feel so sick, and I hope nobody's taking that advice on board. I want to answer that properly because it isn't a stupid thing to say by accident. It's a thing people say because they've never had to do it. And there are two answers to that: why don't you just leave? Why doesn't she just leave? The first is that leaving is the most dangerous part. This isn't hearsay, this isn't anecdotal. Australia's National Research Organization for Women's Safety has documented it very clearly. Separation is the most lethal period, with risk heightened, particularly in the three months after a woman leaves a violent relationship. When a man loses control, violence escalates before it dies down. Separation is that ultimate loss of control. Teryn Chawler, whose sister Nikita was murdered, responded to Senator Hanson last week with one sentence. I'll read it exactly as he wrote it. My sister Nikita tried to do that. He murdered her. There's nothing else to say about that. The second answer to why doesn't she just leave is that leaving has a price. And this year we know exactly what that price is. Anglocare Sydney published a report this year called Cost of Leaving. They costed it out properly. A bond, three weeks' rent up front, a hire truck, a few nights in a budget motel, the basic unglamorous mechanics of getting yourself and your children out of a house. The basics, nothing fancy, nothing grand, just getting out. The answer to how much that costs is $7,017. A decade ago, the same exit cost around $4,000. So the price of escaping a violent man has risen 71% in 10 years. Rent and bond have nearly doubled. Fuel and childcare are up around 50%. And the federal government's leaving violence program, the scheme designed for exactly this, pays up to $5,000. Except it doesn't quite actually pay you $5,000. That $5,000 is actually made up of $1,500 in cash and about $3,500 in goods and services. Bond, rent, a moving truck, furniture, car repairs. So the cash a woman can put her hands on to get herself and her children out of a house tonight is $1,500. And let's not even get into the red tape of the likelihood that she'll have that money in her hands tonight. So let me put the whole thing together because when you line it up, it confounds belief, honestly. A senator tells women in violent homes to leave. Leaving costs $7,017. The government program built to help her leave tops out $2,000 short of what she needs, baseline. And only $1,500 of it is money she can actually hold in her hands. And leaving is also the moment she is most likely to be killed. There's one more piece of it that I find really remarkable. If I may pile on slightly more. Interview where she told women to leave, Senator Hanson explained the violence itself by pointing at cost of living. She said, Everyone's sitting on a time bomb, that was those were her words, because of the pressure of paying the bills. She has, I assume without doing it on purpose, described the trap perfectly. Cost of living is the reason she says he hits her. Cost of living is the reason she can't go. The sex discrimination communister Anna Cody put the response better than I can. Any suggestion that victim survivors share the blame is harmful, wrong, and dangerous. I'd add one thing to that. Just leave is not advice. It's a way of relocating the responsibility for male violence onto the woman it's being done to. It costs the speaker nothing. It asks nothing of any man anywhere. And it lets the rest of us go back to what we were doing. It's not acceptable. Now, if any of this is close to home for you at the moment or someone you love, 1-800 respect is there 24 hours a day. That's 1-800-737-732. Or you can text them on 0458-737-732 or chat online. If you're First Nations, 13 Yarn is 139276 and an emergency, please always call 000. Now all of that sounds futile and upsetting, and it makes me really angry, I have to be honest. Um, but I want to bring this back to what I see in my own inbox every week because I am talking to women every week who are going through separation, thinking about separation in the midst of it, you know, in the divorce process. And there's something in it that I've been trying to make sense of, and I don't have it quite worked out yet, but I have some theories. I speak with women every week who tell me they can't afford to leave. That is not new. It's upsetting, but it's not new. But most of them aren't the women that you might be picturing, the ones that were talked about in that study. These are women that have equity, they have superannuation, they have a professional income, a good job, a house in a nice suburb with a good school. On paper, they're doing better than most Australians ever will. That sits really awkwardly against that University of Sydney research that we were talking about before, which pointed at lower income households, women with less education, and older people. I have no doubt that those studies are right. That's what the data says. And those women are in a way worse position by a long shot. But my inbox is full of comfortable women who feel every bit as trapped. And I think we can hold both things to be true at the same time. Here's my read on why. And I want to be really clear: this is a hunch, not a finding. I am not a social scientist. Um, but the more you've built together, the more there is to extricate yourself from. And the more you stand to lose with all of that unpicking. A woman with a good income and a shared mortgage and maybe an investment property isn't asking, can I eat? She's asking, do I lose the house? Do the kids have to change schools? Do I leave the street where I know everybody? What is everyone at school going to say? Do I have to dismantle in public the version of my life that everybody can see and that everybody thinks is so lovely? That's not the same fear as poverty, as not having a roof over your head, of not knowing where your next dollar is coming from. And I definitely won't be insulting anyone by pretending that it is. But it isn't a lesser fear either. It's a really legitimate fear. And I hope that if you're listening to this and you feel that way, there's no shame for you. This is really real. It stops women just as effectively as the other factors. And it comes with an extra layer of silence because a woman in a nice house has been trained to believe she has no right to complain. And underneath both versions, the woman with nothing and the woman with a nice postcode, same structure. She's the one who went part-time. She's the one whose superannuation has a decade-long hole in it because she raised the children. She's the one who took the flexible job so his career could keep moving. We built an economy that runs on women's unpaid labor, and then we act surprised when women can't afford to leave the men that they did it for. And, you know, the women both have the same fear for their safety. This is not a personal failing. That's a design. I'm not offering any of this as data. I'm offering it as what I hear week after week. And I would love someone with a research budget to go and study it properly because right now, those women are invisible in every number that I've read to you today. So where do you start? Okay, I promised you some practical stuff. Here's where we get to that. Before anything else, one thing that overrides everything I'm about to say, if there is violence in your home, safety comes before paperwork. Safety comes before anything. Gathering documents, opening accounts, searching things on a shared computer, all of that can be dangerous if you're being monitored. And plenty of men do that, we know. If that's your situation, call 1800 Respect First and let them help you make a safety plan. They will do that for you. Use a device that your partner can't get to, use a friend's phone, whatever you have to do. Everything else on this list can wait. Your safety cannot. And if you're concerned about being monitored, we do have a podcast episode that I will link to in the show notes with a security expert who can tell you all the ways to try to keep yourself safe. All right. So let's assume now that you are safe. Three places to start. One, find out what's actually there. Not what your partner says, not what you assume, the real, actual, tangible figures. Here's the list I'd be working from. Your superannuation balance, your partner's superannuation balance, the mortgage balance, and anything sitting in any offset accounts, savings, credit cards, personal loans, and this one can catch women out sometimes. Anything you've signed as a guarantor, including your partner's business debts, business interests, any other debts they might have. The last two or three years of tax returns for both of you, recent pay slips, any insurance policies. You can get most of that yourself. Your own superfund will tell you your balance in about four minutes online. Your credit report is free. You're entitled to one from each of the credit bureaus, and it will show you every debt with your name attached, including ones you may have forgotten about or that you may not even be aware of. That happens. I've heard about it more than I would like to have. And here's a piece of information that changes the picture for a lot of women too. So I want to say it very clearly. In Australia, superannuation is treated as property in a family law settlement. It can be split. If you took years out of your paid work to raise children or keep a house while your partner's super kept building, that gap is not your loss to absorb. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to tell you how it applies to your situation. But if nobody has ever told you that super is on the table, please go and find out what it means for you. Making a list is not leaving. It commits you to nothing. You can put it in a folder and not open it for two years, but you cannot make a decision about a life you can't see clearly. I have a free resource that I'll link to in the show notes as well that is five financial mistakes that I see women making all the time. I encourage you to download that, read it. There's some really simple traps that women fall into all the time, and I am determined to make sure women are as informed as possible so that they can make their decisions clearly. The second thing is to get expert help. And you can get it for free because it exists. You don't need to spend lots of money. This is the part that makes me want to shake something or somebody because the help is out there and lots of women don't know about it. They think they just can't afford to get this kind of help. So money when it comes to financial counselling, the national debt helpline, 1-800-007-007, it's free, it's independent, it's confidential. They are qualified professionals. They're not selling you anything and they will sit with you and go through your actual situation. Most women I mention this to have never heard of it. The second one is free legal advice. Legal aid operates in every state and territory. On top of that, there are women's legal services and community legal centers in each state, many of which give free initial family law advice. You do not have to walk into a private firm and hand over $500 just to find out where you stand. Start with the free option and see how far it gets you. And 1-800 Respect can refer you into services in your own area if you don't know where to begin with that. The third thing is if safety is the issue, there is specific financial support that you can get your hands on. That leaving violence program exists for exactly this. As I talked about before, up to $5,000, so that's $1,500 in cash and up to $3,500 in goods and services like bond, rent, moving costs and furniture, plus safety planning, risk assessment, and referrals for up to 12 weeks. I know I just spent this episode arguing it isn't enough, and I still stand by that. But it is real, it's something, and it's there now. And if it's the difference between going and staying, then please go and look at it. It's at leavingviolenceprogram.org.au, and I'll link that in the show notes as well. Okay, that's a lot we've just covered, but I want to just break it down to keep it really simple at the end. It can be really overwhelming, especially if you are in it right now and trying to figure your way through this mess. Politically, I find it so upsetting, but this comes down to each individual person and what we can do for you to help you to move from where you are to where you want to be. That's what it comes down to. So I want to give you three things to take away from here, if you remember nothing else. One, you are not weak and you are not failing. The trap is real, it's structural, and this year it has a price tag of $7,017. A woman who stays because she cannot fund an exit is not lacking courage. She's responding rationally to an economy that made it expensive to be safe and to be happy. Two, finding out is not deciding. You can get your super balance, you can pull your credit rating, you can ring a free financial counselor and read one fact sheet and still be married on Friday. Information doesn't commit you to anything. It just means that if and when you do decide, whichever way you go, you're deciding with your eyes open instead of guessing. And three, do it safely and do it with help, please. If there's violence, safety planning comes before paperwork. And whatever your situation, you don't have to work this out alone or pay for the first conversation. The national debt helpline is wonderful. Legal aid and women's legal services are all free. So to wrap up, let's go back to that broken heart emoji. Somebody looking at 49,148 Australians who ended a marriage, reached for a broken heart. If it were up to me, I'd put a different figure on that chart altogether. I'd want a line showing how many people wanted to leave and couldn't, how many did the sums at the kitchen table and put the notepad away. Or how many people left and kicked their heels up and started living their best life, finally. We don't collect that information. There's no agency counting that in the same way there's no agency counting dead women. So the number keeps getting read as a story about love, when it's mostly a story about money and about who this country has decided should carry the cost of a man's behavior. And if you're the woman at the kitchen table tonight, I want to say one thing to you directly. You are not weak for not having left yet. You're solvent. You're safe, I hope. Those are different things. And don't let anybody on the radio or anywhere else convince you otherwise. You don't have to decide anything today. Start with one thing off that list, log in, look at your super balance. That's it. That's a complete first step, and it takes about four minutes. Knowledge first, decisions after. Now I did say at the start I'd mentioned the membership, so here it is, and then I will let you get on with your day. I'll be honest about the position I'm in. I've spent 20 minutes telling you that women can't afford to leave, and I'm about to tell you about something that costs money. Not a lot of money, but money. I'm aware of how that sounds. So let me be straight with you about what it is and who it's for. Everything I gave you in the practical section is free. The debt helpline, legal aid, the women's legal services, the free guide on our website, the leaving violence program. If money is tight, use those. They're good. They're staffed by people who know what they're doing, and I'd rather you called them tomorrow than joined anything. Women's Divorce Academy membership is for the woman who has used the free help and wants the rest of it in one place. It's a content library that covers everything you need to know about separation and divorce. Property and settlement, the legal processes in plain English, superannuation, parenting, going back to work, your mental health, scripts for conversations that you're dreading. I built it with lawyers, financial advisors, psychologists, experts in their field who understand what this season looks like and want to make your life easier. I have this wonderful network of women whose mission it is to help women. And that's what it's about. You work through it when you have the capacity, and you never have to explain yourself to anyone. It is built to reduce your overwhelm, not to add to it. It's $74 a month and you can cancel whenever you like. You also have the option of one-on-one coaching with me if you would like that extra help to keep things moving. One thing about it matters more than the price, and it's the reason I'm mentioning it in this episode specifically. Some of you are listening to this on headphones in a car because it isn't safe to listen in the house. If that's you, our charges appear on your statement as Stellar Content Group. There's no mention of divorce, no mention of this academy anywhere on your bank records. I built it that way on purpose because I know who's checking. That's the whole pitch. No urgency, no countdown, nothing closing on Friday. It'll be there when you're ready. And if you're never ready, I hope the free stuff serves you really well. I started doing this because I went through my own divorce badly informed, and I don't want that for you. And as a child, I watched my mother be grossly disadvantaged by divorce while my father went on to do very, very well. The disadvantage is generational, and it makes me furious. So this is why I do what I do. Everything's linked in the show notes, along with the sources for every figure in today's episode, including Sherelle Moody's wonderful work and a link to her petition. So find your super balance, ring the free number, do it safely, and be gentle with yourself in the meantime. You're carrying more than most people know. Take care. I'll see you next week. If doing this alone feels heavy, Women's Divorce Academy offers clear guidance, practical tools, and a supportive community for the legal, financial, and emotional realities of divorce. Whether you're considering separation, in the middle of it, or rebuilding afterwards, there's something here for you.