A “regular” divorce (one without all of the extramarital drama mine had) will include several decisions that must either be negotiated or determined by the judge at trial, including

• How to divide the marital assets 
• Whether alimony will be awarded and how much
• Child custody and child support (given the age of our girls, this was not a contentious issue)
• Potentially other details such as health and life insurance

It is therefore critical to become an expert on your family’s financial picture. In negotiations, it will be your guardrail, telling you whether an offer is a good one. If a trial is required, it will be the detail you need to testify about your family expenses and lifestyle, in particular.

Understand Your Family Assets 

Depending on your net worth and the nature of your assets, this can be either a relatively easy analysis or so complex you need your lawyer or even a forensic accountant to figure it out. In the end, you should invest the time and effort in making sure you understand the assets, even if you have your attorney or accountant analyze it for you.

In my case, our family asset picture was quite straightforward and did not require a great deal of analysis or research to determine what they were. I had a retirement fund, we had a non-retirement investment fund, the girls’ college funds and two real estate assets. 

Understand Any Assets Your Spouse May Have Through His Business

The retirement and other assets Scott had as a result of being a partner in a large consulting firm were extremely complex. To really understand it required going through employment documents from his firm (which had to be subpoenaed) and discussions with representatives from his firm (which could only be done by lawyers). Luckily my lawyer Patrick was very good at this and went to great lengths to find all of the assets Scott held through his firm, explained them all to me and even identified a particular annuity I ultimately got a piece of. 

Scott’s testimony in deposition didn’t reflect an understanding of the complexity of how he was paid or the assets he had through his firm. Maybe he played “Mickey the Dunce” by design. Scott should have documented these in his Financial Statement, but it was quite clear he either omitted or misrepresented pieces of his income, expenses and assets. He either intentionally did this or he was estimating and in his words “swagging” it.

Alimony: Be an Expert on How You Have Spent Money in the Past – This is the Cost of Your Lifestyle

The amount of alimony you can secure depends on you and your spouse’s respective incomes (“capacity to pay”) and what is required to pay for the lifestyle you had during the marriage (“your needs”). My income was a contentious issue as Scott believed I could and should be making over twice the income I was making at the time of our divorce. Expert witnesses were ultimately brought in by both of us to testify on what I could earn and how. Scott’s income, like his firm-related assets, was very complicated. Patrick took responsibility for determining Scott’s income and then explained it to me.

I was in charge of calculating and detailing “my needs.” I didn’t like the term since what counted from a legal perspective was the lifestyle you had and what it cost. I therefore always described my analysis as an historical picture of what it cost to maintain the lifestyle the girls and I had enjoyed.

It is well worth your effort to become an expert on how you and your children have spent money. Your spending will be subject to intense and possibly even embarrassing scrutiny in your deposition and at trial if it comes to that.

I believed the only way to be credible was to build an historical picture of spending. As a result, my answer to any question would be “Look – this is what I spent on that expense category in the last year. You may not like the size of the number, but it is an accurate picture of what was spent. My actual spending is a reflection of the cost of my family’s lifestyle, even if the spending does include paying a guy to come clean up after the dogs every two weeks.”

To build this analysis I did the following (and was able to describe it at trial in a clear and concise statement):

• Used Quicken Financial Software as a way of capturing and categorizing a year’s worth of spending into expense categories that could then be used in the court-required Financial Statement
• Quicken download, directly from the financial institutions, a year’s worth of 
  • Bank Account outflows (debits card transactions, checks and ATM withdrawals) from our joint account
  • Individual credit card charges from the two credit cards I used during the year
• Chose the time period after Scott left, so the spending was relevant to me and the girls only
• Went through the outflows, one by one, and assigned them to appropriate categories
  • For example, any checks or charges that were horse related were put in the horse expense category and may have even been subcategorized within that
  • Some outflows were ignored as they related to Scott’s personal spending
  • Knowing my spending would be scrutinized, I used as little cash as possible during the time period. I used debit or credit cards instead as the bills would indicate how the money was spent. I could capture the cash withdrawn as a separate category, but was unable to detail how it was spent
  • I was later asked to separate out my spending from the girls so I re-categorized the outflows to show the breakout
  • When asked by my attorney, I could also do an update of the analysis (and did so a number of times).

I was an EXTREMELY credible as a witness in regards to the cost of the girls’ and my lifestyle. Having myself done the step-by-step analysis, I could answer any question posed to me by the very thorough judge assigned to my case. It was based on actuals, which made Scott’s counter-argument quite difficult.