Brian Walters meets with financial advisor and author Jennifer Lee to discuss her experience helping clients navigate life transitions, including divorce. Jennifer discusses her divorce checklist, which offers essential tips for people facing financially challenging times and details how to approach these situations confidently. Brian and Jennifer wrap up the episode by answering a few listener questions.
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Brian Walters: Thank you all for tuning into the For Better, Worse, or Divorce Podcast where we provide you tips and insights on how to navigate divorce and child custody situations. I’m Brian Walters, and today I’m joined by financial advisor and author Jennifer Lee. Jennifer has 28 plus years of experience in the financial services industry, even more if you count her going to work with her dad when she was a kid and founded Modern Wealth, a Sarasota, Florida based financial firm with the focus on helping individuals experiencing financial transitions. She’s also the author of Squeeze the Juice: Live with Purpose and Leave a Legacy. One of Jennifer’s focus areas is women experiencing a life change. We’ll be getting her insights for women in particular facing divorce and how they can manage their finances and advocate for themselves financially. Thanks for joining us today, Jennifer. How are you doing?
Jennifer Lee: My pleasure. Doing great. Happy to be here.
Brian Walters: Good. Well, the summer is in full force here in Texas. Hopefully your proximity to the Gulf is helping a little bit, but we’re starting to heat up here. I don’t know about you guys in Florida.
Jennifer Lee: Oh, it’s very hot.
Brian Walters: Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured. Not the greatest time of the year to be so far south. Well, tell me a little bit about your background. I always ask people to not give me kind of the boring LinkedIn resume of where I went to college and that kind of stuff. Tell us where you grew up. I know you mentioned in your press packet that you had a dad who maybe was in the same kind of field that you’re in and how you kind of got here. Let us know a little bit about that.
Jennifer Lee: I grew up with a dad in the financial world and I literally went to work with him on the weekends. It probably was difficult; firstborn, get her out of the house, go with dad to the office, get out of mom’s hair, but I got to spend a lot of time with my father and in his business and what he loved to do. Growing up I thought I wanted to be an architect and my father convinced me to get into accounting. I did that for a couple of years and I got completely bored. He said, “Do you want to join the business?” I said, “Yes.” Done. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I love numbers, love talking about money, love finance, love helping people, but I didn’t know I had to find clients, talk about stuff, be on podcasts and these kinds of things. That was an enormous learning curve, but one that I enjoy now.
Brian Walters: Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a 12-year-old daughter who’s already starting to talk about coming to join the firm with me. I don’t know if she knows what that means yet either, but we’ll see what happens. I guess the other thing of note is that you wrote a book on this topic, which I started about 20 years ago. I decided I wanted to write a book. I started that at last. I got about three pages into it and that’s the end of it. Never came to fruition. So what made you want to write it and how did you have the discipline to actually complete it, which I think is 50 times harder than starting to write a book?
Jennifer Lee: Oh my goodness. I never wanted to write a book. I had a colleague tell me that I needed to write a book and I joked with her and I said, “I’d much rather do your tax return.” It didn’t seem like a natural space to me. I have plenty of stories, plenty of experience and I do get tired of hearing myself tell the same story. So having had the book is a wonderful tool to be able to say, “I’m going to send you chapter three and I want you to kind of read this and absorb it and then let’s have a meaningful conversation about a particular subject.” That is definitely valuable. The discipline, it happened during COVID. My secret sauce is; I don’t know what your morning ritual routine is, but if you get up in the morning and have your cup of coffee quietly in the house with your three pages of your book and you just flesh it out a little bit for a half hour, it will build on itself.
Brian Walters: That’s a great idea. I’m one of those early risers and this morning for example, I did have some extra time. I took my dog on a second walk, but you’re probably right. If I was writing a book or something like that, I could have probably knocked out a few more pages or revised it or whatever instead of that. The dog would’ve been sad, but I would’ve made some progress. It’s like a lot of things, you just have to set aside time and stick with it and make it happen.
Jennifer Lee: If you think about all of your experience and your advice that you give and the advice that you provide and you just write down one of those stories every day, it’ll start to build on itself. I mean you have a lot of tribal knowledge.
Brian Walters: Absolutely. And probably especially true in my field. Well, let’s talk about the divorce checklist that you have. One of the things that I found interesting was that there’s a Stanford study that you cite that says about 70% of all divorces are filed by women. So do you want to tell me a little bit about that and then we’ll break it down a bit from there? I’m very interested in this topic and I have had a hard time finding hard sources of data, but that sounds right to me based on however many thousands of divorces I’ve handled over the years.
Jennifer Lee: The financial industry does lots of research because they’re trying to target a particular area where there’s opportunity and so of course they’re going to research. My personal experience has been that 95% of the people who reach out to me are women. That’s not to say they’re still that 5%. There’s still couples sometimes that will come to me and they realize that they want to segregate assets and start the divorce process and they’re reasonable with one another. But for the lion share, for the most part it is women that are in all walks of life and all ages. I’ve got a 36-year-old right now who has only been married two years. She has a brand new baby and the marriage isn’t working so they’re ready to move on. It’s a matter of looking at what is the strategy, how do I get a grip on the finances, what’s my life going to look like after? And they really have to understand, I have to understand what their life looks like now so we can divide and conquer and make a path forward.
Brian Walters: Yeah, I think that’s the right stats. There’s a couple ways to break that down. It says filed by women, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the ones who’ve first made the decision to leave the marriage. It could be a situation where the husband’s blatantly cheating on them and the husband won’t file and they have to. That’s different from actually filing, but it’s a fascinating topic and why that is. I’m interested to know if that’s that way in other cultures or specific to the United States and I suspect it differs. There’s some differing statistics by demographics. That is fascinating.
Jennifer Lee: My experience has been really interesting. Most divorces are less about cheating these days than they are about narcissistic behavior or narcissistic personalities and addiction. That’s been my experience and maybe that’s part of the reason for the filings is based on the type of divorce scenario.
Brian Walters: I hear the narcissism word and variations on it very, very frequently, which I didn’t before. That’s something in the last 10 years or so that became a common word. Maybe it was always there and we just put a different word on it, or people are more open to it, or realize it more. I’m not exactly sure, but it’s certainly the case. Well, let’s talk about if that does happen and if divorce is coming down the pipeline, then you can kind of go into it blindly or you can have a financial plan. How would having a financial plan make a difference in a person’s future success and happiness? How does that work?
Jennifer Lee: That’s a great question. I think a financial plan is a factual document and the process of doing it is a tool. I think most people going through divorce or initiating the process, I like to say they really don’t need me to do a deep financial plan. That you’re going to have 70 pages of information you may or may not ever read and they don’t necessarily need the end result at this time. What they need is triage. They need to be financially triaged. They need to know, what can I expect? Best case scenario; if I go all the way to court and the judge decides, what does my attorney say is my best case scenario, what does alimony look like? Am I getting child support? And then it’s a matter of, “Okay, what do we have as a family unit as marital assets? And if I’m getting half of that, can I live on that? Do I keep the house? How do we divide the assets?”
There’s all these questions and all this anxiety and stress around information that you just don’t know. Of course you don’t know it because you weren’t planning on getting divorced. I find that is the most important thing I can do for clients in the beginning stage. Have that triage and help them get perspective and help them make solid decisions that hopefully they won’t leave money on the table. Also they won’t quit too soon because that’s often what happens with clients that don’t have the support of their attorney and a coach, an advisor, sometimes a therapist, it takes a village.
Brian Walters: It’s a very disruptive and stressful situation to go through probably for most people. The most that they’ll ever go through until maybe the end of their life. Well, how does a person go about getting their financial ducks in a row? And how does that kind of planning save you on money and stress in the future, and really at the time you’re setting it up?
Jennifer Lee: I think whenever I do a talk I will have women come up to me after the talk and say, “Where were you when I was going through this? Where were you when I was going through this divorce? I didn’t have anybody advocate for me to get the alimony. I gave up too soon because I just got frustrated. I kept the house and I never should have kept the house.” So getting your ducks in a row, it’s a matter of gathering documents, gathering information, and you don’t have to understand it. I can weave through it, but I need to look at it and we need to talk about where these assets are currently. Were they developed and curated during the marriage? Also were there inheritance assets and did you commingle them?
Inevitably people commingle them if they don’t have good advice. So just for the listeners, if you were to receive an inheritance, I always recommend opening up a brand new bank account and depositing the money into that account. Do not deposit any marital assets, do not deposit your paycheck, do not add your spouse’s name to the account. That is your money and hopefully you’ll be happily married for a long time and everything is great. But if you’re not, you want to make sure that you retain that asset separately and then can transfer it to your children if that’s your desire.
Brian Walters: Exactly. That’s why they’re really sophisticated. Larger fortunes usually use a trust for something like that so it can never happen. Interestingly in history, that was very much the case. There would be in a lot of cultures of dowry or the equivalent of that, which was essentially money that came over often with the wife that was sort of held and if there was a divorce, the wife would go back to her family with the money that came over. But of course that’s not the way we do things currently in the United States, but these are actually not new concepts, but in some ways we’ve forgotten them and it’s sometimes to a person’s detriment like you’ve said. I want to circle back to something you said earlier, which was about it takes a village and you listed a bunch of different types of professionals. Can you talk about that for a minute about helping a person or what they need to manage their own self during a divorce process? Mental conditions, emotionally, financially, which are probably intertwined with each other to some degree.
Jennifer Lee: No question. I mean, I playfully say that my job is advocate advisor and financial therapist because it really is not just about the numbers. I mean, the numbers matter. I was working with a client the other day and she said, “Well, should I sell my business and get this resource or should I keep it?” And I said, “Well, we got to really, really look at what does this mean for you? If you sell your business, we can invest your money and then generate $150,000. If you maintain your business, you’re getting paid 500 grand. But you said to me that you’ve got a little kid and you want to be at home with your child. Is it worth $350,000 to you to do that?” Money is just a tool. Money is the vehicle that allows you to have a lifestyle that allows you to take care of your family. It allows you to accomplish things and maybe start a business and so on.
It’s just a tool, a vehicle to get there. I think particularly in most high conflict divorce scenarios support is needed. Emotional, mental, whether that is an actual therapist or you really need a facilitator to help you get through all the hurdles and things that you need to provide for your attorney. Provide for your advisor and keep you on track. Oftentimes a divorce coach can be a value in a less expensive way to do some of the things you have to do than paying your attorney the highest rate. And then the financial advisor the next rate, and then the divorce coach is a little bit more affordable.
Brian Walters: Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing that I would guess is a lot of folks think when they hear financial planning or financial professional, especially if they haven’t been dealing with the money, is they probably think this is going to be a complex nightmare. I’ve got no idea. And I guess one reaction to that would be, I better get a good professional to help me. The other reaction would be I just don’t want to deal with it. Yikes, I don’t like dealing with money and I’m going to kind of stick my head in the sand. So does this financial planning process that we’re talking about here, does it have to be complex or can it be simple? Where does it fall on that spectrum of complexity versus simplicity?
Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I think that’s a good observation. I will tell you that my primary clients are what I call the non-moneyed party, and by that I mean the ones who it’s not for lack of ability or intellect, they’re just not that interested and that’s okay. I don’t need you to understand your asset allocation and what you can anticipate and how the markets are going to affect your portfolio. That’s okay. You don’t need to know all that stuff. That’s my job. But what you do need to bring to me are two items. One is, what do you have? What is your income, what are your assets, what are your resources and what do you want? This is the hardest part for a lot of people. Yes, you can collect the data and you don’t want to do it. It’s a pain. It’s not of your interest level. You can gather the data, but what do you want?
What do you want in that post-divorce life? What does it look like? Where do you live? Are you working? Are you working part-time? What’s the situation with the kids? Any number of things, you have to kind of give an advisor the idea of what you want so we can map what’s in between. We can take your resources and make them as efficient as possible to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s funny that you said put your head in the sand because I actually have a chapter in my book called ‘Are You an Ostrich?’ It’s like anything, I wasn’t that comfortable writing a book so I kind of wanted to put my head in the sand about that periodically. We all have things that we are a little bit more resistant to doing, and that’s why you need your team. That’s why you need your attorney, that’s why you need an advisor, and if you’re not getting off the mark to do those activities, you need a coach or a therapist to help you facilitate through them.
Brian Walters: Yeah, it makes sense. Well, let’s go over some listener questions. We have more than the usual numbers. I think this topic has gotten a lot of interest and a lot of people have questions about it. Some of them cover it looks to me like some of the things we’ve talked about a bit. So some of our answers might be shorter or longer. The first one is what are some common misconceptions people have about financial planning during divorce and then how do you address those common misconceptions?
Jennifer Lee: I think FEAR, false evidence appearing real. People are intimidated. They think it costs too much to go to an attorney. They think that going to a financial advisor is going to be a painful experience. I think you need the right advisor. You need to have a connection with somebody. You should always interview more than one person. You should ask for a referral from your network, from your friends who’ve gone through things and have a conversation and say, “How would you help me? And what does that look like?” But I think the common misconception, again with financial people, is it costs too much.
Brian Walters: What are some red flags I should be on the lookout for when I’m seeking financial advice during a divorce?
Jennifer Lee: I don’t know that there’s any particular red flag that’s specific to divorce. It depends on how you’re doing your divorce process. Are you in a high conflict situation or are you looking to do a collaborative divorce? Collaborative divorce can be very, very valuable and you have a flat fee that you’re paying there. With my clients, what I do, and I mentioned earlier. I created this triage situation because I didn’t feel like doing a full financial plan out of the gate was necessarily valuable for the client. My book is called Squeeze the Juice. I can get the juice out of what you need to know to get through this next step. We can triage you, get you in a healthy mental space, understand what your resources are, understand your assets so you’re armed to go into that mediation. To go into that negotiation, to go into that discussion with your attorney.
Brian Walters: I’m worried about the impact of divorce on my children’s financial future. Can you provide some guidance on how to approach child custody situations from a financial perspective?
Jennifer Lee: I’m wondering whether they’re speaking of college education, the future for their children.
Brian Walters: That’s what it sounds like to me because that’s what I would read into it. How do I provide it besides feeding them when they’re under the age of 18 and keeping them in a house?
Jennifer Lee: I mean, hopefully both parents have a relationship with their kids and a desire to help educate them and get them into being contributing members of society. If that’s the case, you have to kind of negotiate that in your divorce settlement, what the future is going to look like in terms of who contributes what to future education. Of course, there’s no guarantee that that’s going to come to fruition, but that’s one component of it. You certainly can start saving on your own for them or divide and conquer and agree that it’s evenly split. But I hear horror stories many years later where there might’ve been an agreement and that doesn’t come to fruition.
Brian Walters: Yeah, that’s true.
Jennifer Lee: There are no guarantees.
Brian Walters: Do you have any practical tips for negotiating a fair financial settlement during a divorce? So maybe this is a question for both of us. You mentioned one thing that I was going to mention first, which was patience, not rushing into it, not rushing through the processes. I think maybe even the most important tip I would give, I mean you’ve already mentioned it. Any others that come to mind?
Jennifer Lee: Well, the low-hanging fruit I think is don’t give up. Okay? Don’t leave any money on the table. Make sure that you get your equitable proportion that you’re entitled to. If you have alimony and child support, I like to encourage you to have some life insurance on your soon-to-be ex to kind of garner a guarantee that that’s going to continue to happen. You’re going to continue to be a recipient of those dollars. Then a lot of times this is so silly and it’s basic, but oftentimes it doesn’t get done and it’s surprising to me. But you need to make sure that your attorney facilitates the QDRO document and gets that signed by the judge so that any IRA assets, any pensions, those kinds of things can be divided.
Brian Walters: I agree. That is sometimes a problem. I agree.
Jennifer Lee: It’s shocking how that’s missed.
Brian Walters: It is. I’m sure your profession’s like mine where there are a wide variety of competence and work ethics involved with the professionals to put it politely. Well, that’s all we have time for today. If you like what you’ve heard today, please do us a favor and leave us a review. We appreciate all your feedback, especially when it helps us better the podcast. If you’re interested in reaching out to Jennifer directly, we’ll have her contact info including a link to her book and our episode notes. Jennifer, we can’t thank you enough for joining us today. As always, if you have any follow-up questions to this episode or would like to talk to one of us directly about your situation, reach out to us at podcastatwaltersgilbreath.com or you can contact us directly through our website, waltersgilbreath.com. I am Brian Walters, and thanks for listening.
For information about the topics covered in today’s episode and more, you can visit our website at waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of For Better, Worse, or Divorce, where we post new episodes every first and third Wednesday. Do you have a topic you want discussed or a question for our hosts? Email us at podcast@waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.