Guest Gabrielle Clemens - For Better, Worse, or Divorce

In this episode, Brian Walters meets with Gabrielle Clemens – Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, Accredited Estate Planner, and author of the book “Marriage is About Love, Divorce is About Money.” Gabrielle wrote her book to be a step-by-step guide through the legal and financial aspects of divorce and guides on developing an action plan and strategy for anyone going through the divorce process. Brian and Gabrielle discuss several topics in her book, including navigating the legal process, understanding how to document finances, and how to build an emotional support system.

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Brian Walters: All right, well, thanks for tuning in to the For Better, Worse, or Divorce Podcast where we provide you tips and insight on how to navigate divorce and child custody situations. I’m Brian Walters here, and today we’re joined by Gabrielle Clemens. She’s a certified divorce financial analyst, an accredited estate planner, and author of the book, Marriage is About Love, Divorce Is About Money, I think that’s a really excellent title and very accurate based on my career, which is a step-by-step guide through the legal and financial aspects of divorce.
She provides guidance on developing an action plan and strategy for anyone who is contemplating navigating or recovering from the divorce process. That’s a lot of people in this country, unfortunately. Some of the topics included in the book are navigating the legal process, understanding how to document finances and how to build an emotional support system. We thought her insight would be a great resource for our listeners, so we’re excited to have her here today to discuss her book and some of her pro tips more in depth. Welcome.
Gabrielle Clemens: Thank you. Thank you very much, Brian. Nice to be here.
Brian Walters: Yeah, definitely. Well, tell us a little bit about your background. Start with where you grew up and where you went to school and how you ended up where you are now.
Gabrielle Clemens: Sure. Oh, well, I grew up in Massachusetts in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I went to school in Massachusetts, and after college I went to Europe and I spent about five years there going in the real estate industry. I was helping develop, sell, market real estate in Spain, London, and Sweden, and came back to the US to attend law school. I went to law school in New Hampshire and got my LLM in taxation at Boston University School of Law and transitioned to financial services when my son, who will be 26, transitioned when he was about one years old, because I needed some flexibility in my schedule.
I was practicing tax, estate and trust and divorce law and felt that my skillset was perfect for helping people go through the divorce process, understand their agreements, at the time when alimony was taxable, understand the tax impact of their short and long-term financial decisions as they went through the process.
Brian Walters: Okay, well, great. I’ve spent some time in Europe myself in Denmark and Germany and Poland and some other places.
Gabrielle Clemens: Oh, wonderful.
Brian Walters: You got to Spain, which is a lovely place to visit, but I never got to live there. You’re fortunate to spend some time there. A really amazing place.
Gabrielle Clemens: It is very special, a very special place.
Brian Walters: All right. Well, the book that I just showed and we’re talking about is called Marriage is About Love, Divorce is About Money and the subtitle is The Business of Divorce. I think that’s a really accurate thing. It’s difficult, right? I mean, it’s difficult to go from love and walking down the aisle and having babies together and all that other wonderful exciting stuff, and then suddenly you’re ending things. If you don’t have kids anymore or the kids are grown or whatever, really that’s kind of what we’re talking about is money, what’s left, how we express ourselves in this society for better or worse.
Let’s talk about some hints and thoughts you have and break it down into three categories about before the divorce, during the divorce, and then after the divorce. Before the divorce, you have thoughts or suggestions or things we should be thinking about before someone actually starts that process? Of course, if you’re blindsided by it, we’re going to go right to stage two, but for most people I think there’s some sense that it’s coming.
Gabrielle Clemens: Absolutely. The first thing I advise my clients to do and people that I consult with is to engage the skills of a therapist. I think you really have to have your emotions intact, be prepared for what this journey is going to take emotionally, psychologically, and of course, financially. But as I say in my book, it’s all about your fortress, your family, your finances. I mean, it’s just the perfect storm. And especially if you weren’t anticipating this, you’re really caught off guard and it throws you into a panic.
It throws you into a what we call divorce shock, and it can be debilitating. Even if you have been contemplating this for a long time yourself and you initiate the process, I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as you think. From the minute you inform your perhaps unsuspecting spouse, you’ve got to have a grip on how to handle their reaction and the right path going forward for you and your family.
Brian Walters: I agree. There’s nothing easy about it, even if you’re the one stepping out and pulling the trigger first, for sure. One of the characteristics of a divorce versus just if you’re not married and you have kids together or you have post divorce and you have to modify your visitation arrangement is money. I mean, it’s about money. One of the first things I ask folks to do even before they do a consult a lot of times is fill out a property spreadsheet or finances and assets worksheet, something like that. It’s startling to me how few people can do that accurately.
The classic example of someone who might be a stay-at-home spouse who doesn’t touch money and just takes care of the kids or whatever, but actually it’s even common when it’s the financial management spouse. I often ask a question early on in a divorce consult of what’s your net worth and you either have a quick answer to that that’s pretty precise or you don’t, but 10% probably do, who even know what that is and could tell us that off the top of their head. What do you suggest someone does who’s getting ready to get divorced and how would they put that kind of information together?
Gabrielle Clemens: Sure. No, that’s a great question. I recommend that people start using Quicken. They start gathering their documents, get the last three years of your tax returns if you don’t have them on hand, talk to your accountant or access TurboTax, wherever you keep your tax returns safe. You should go there and make at least a few copies of the last three years. I would recommend that you make a list of all of the accounts that you have, whether they’re retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, savings accounts, 529s. Just start to gather all that information that you’re going to need as you fill out your financial affidavit.
Some states call it a financial declaration, a financial statement, but you’re going to need to get your hands on all of this information. The financial affidavit in your case is the most critical document in this divorce process. We need to know where the money’s coming, where the money’s going, and where we can find it. I would start there. If you don’t know what your electric bill is, you can always call the electric company and ask them for last year’s bills. On the average, what are you spending? It can be tedious, it’s not very fun, and it’s going to change a lot.
Having access to this worksheet or keeping it like I said in a Quicken, start a Dropbox file, a Dropbox account and drop all of your information, all of these statements in the Dropbox so it’s easily accessible. You can share it with your financial advisor, your attorney. Every time you need to update this information, you can easily access it, because you don’t want to keep rummaging through all of your files looking for your most recent mortgage statement.
Brian Walters: Absolutely. It also can be a key indicator, in my opinion, about something’s wrong. If you have a statement that says there was half a million dollars in a money market account three months ago and your spouse, their affidavit says no more money in that account that’s current, that would be a red flag. Where has the half a million dollars gone? But we might never know that. We might just assume, at least initially, that there was just never anything in that account or not much. I think it’s helpful in case there’s been any shenanigans on the other side.
Gabrielle Clemens: Well, Brian, what I’m also finding is people are not… They don’t have clarity around even what their spouse is earning. Once you start gathering this information and you look at the last three years of tax returns and you look at a pay stub and you start to gather all this information, I’ve had many clients say, “I had no idea there was a bonus, or that we had equity in the company that my spouse works for,” because a lot of these executive compensation plans, these programs, there’s not a lot of transparency into them. They don’t even know what questions to ask.
Brian Walters: Right, or the opposite. I’ve, unfortunately, had where people assumed, they didn’t pay attention and they were living a particular lifestyle and it was at or above where probably they could afford to be and they assumed their spouse, let’s say, was making $2 million a year and is actually making half a million. It’s better than most people, but not what was expected. That’s certainly the case. I think the next point you make about before the divorce process is developing a strategy. What does that mean? What strategy would someone be developing before the divorce? It sounds a little bit could be evil, but I don’t think you mean it that way. It sounds like you mean something else.
Gabrielle Clemens: No, we’re not trying to get away with anything. There’s no strategy that’s going to not give you everything that you’re entitled to or that you wish for, maybe not everything that you wish for. But I like to tell my clients to start to build the future first. Let’s start with, what would you like your post-divorce life to look like? Let’s paint a picture. Let’s start a vision board. Let’s think about the kinds of things that are important to you that we can hold onto throughout this process. So when you’re faced with a proposal or you have numbers to crunch and numbers to run, you’ll have a sense of, well, actually I could live on that, or you’re more engaged in your future rather than avenging the past, if you will.
That’s what I find works well. If you have a therapist and you start focusing on the future, divorce should be about a vision for the future, not about the past. Don’t define yourself by your divorced state. You want to make sure that you can build upon the important aspects of your life in the future. Strategically, if you know that you’re going to have enough money, then build a life around being comfortable and having peace of mind knowing that you’re creating the future that will make you happy.
Brian Walters: Okay. And then last section, a major section you covered before the divorce seems pretty obvious, but it’s actually I think something that’s commonly overlooked is picking the right attorney. I will not blow my own horn. I’ll let you tell what they should be looking for in a lawyer.
Gabrielle Clemens: Well, I think you want a lawyer that is the right fit for you. My first question or what I recommend the first question be is, do you have time for my case? Right now, as you know Brian, there’s a pandemic on marriages. I’m sure if we looked at the numbers throughout the country, there are just the highest numbers ever for people who are going through contemplating this process of divorce. You have one lawyer, maybe you have a team of lawyers, but your team or your lawyer, they have multiple clients, and you just want to make sure that attorney that you’re choosing has time for your case.
You build an understanding around how you’re going to communicate, how often you’re going to communicate, what are the expectations around when can I expect a response from an email that I sent yesterday? Should I expect 24 hours? Is it going to take three days? If your attorney is on trial, it could take you a little bit longer. Is someone going to call me and say, “Your attorney is not going to call you back for three days, but we got your message and we understand that you have this question and your attorney will call you as soon as possible?”
I think having an understanding around the communications with your attorney is critical, because the last thing that clients like to do, and you know this, Brian, they’ve reached out to you, you’re not responding, it’s not that you’re ignoring them, it’s just you have to manage the relationship and they need to understand what those expectations are.
Brian Walters: Yeah, 100%. I mean, it’s 30 or 40% of our practices, people hiring us as the second, sometimes third lawyer because they’re unhappy with their first one. The number one complaint is, the lawyer doesn’t communicate with me. It’s really simple stuff. It frustrates me a lot because I don’t like my own profession to have a bad reputation, although it helps me because I get a lot of clients. But I mean, it’s real simple most of the time. All my clients, for example, have my mobile phone and they text me, which annoys my wife sometimes, I will say. Most of this stuff takes 30 seconds for me to shoot a quick response, “Yes, that’s going to happen, or don’t worry about it,” or whatever the response is.
I think lawyers in the olden days, and by that I mean 10 years ago, there’d be a call that came in, I remember this, and you’d get a… I’d come back from court and there’d be like 12 little pink slips on my desk. These 12 people called, flipped through them. It’s Friday afternoon. I think the easy thing to do is just go home if you’re a lawyer and figure eight of the 12 will deal with it and they’ll forget about it by Monday. But the hard thing is to stay there on Friday afternoon and return the phone calls, especially the ones you don’t want to talk to, the difficult. You just got to be committed to that as a lawyer.
It’s hard to tell who’s going to do that. I think that’s why I think so many folks change lawyers. I mean, their reviews and word of mouth, I think those are helpful. Reviews are just a different type of word of mouth. And then I take a look at the intake process. I’d call several lawyers and see what their offices are like. You call three lawyers on a Monday morning at 10:00. One answers the phone and sets you up with an intake right away. Two of them you leave voicemails, one of them gets back to you at 4:00 that afternoon and says they can meet with you on Wednesday. The third one calls you back on Thursday and says we can meet with you in two weeks.
Well, probably a pretty good indicator of which of the three lawyers is going to be most responsive if their staff is who’s in charge, the lawyer. It’s a cultural thing I think in a firm, we’re going to respond to our clients or not. Next big stage is during the divorce. You want to protect your finances and budget for the divorce. Partly that’s your lawyer’s job, but what can you do as a client and what can you help them with to do that?
Gabrielle Clemens: Well, I think helping them choose a process is one of the initial ways to budget for your divorce and have a good understanding of what the options are and what the cost is of each. And not just the financial cost, but the emotional cost and the psychological cost as well. Dragging out a divorce for two or three years is a lot of emotional turmoil on your family, your finances. You don’t know where you’re going to end up living. Now people are starting to get involved maybe with other people. Now you’re handling relationships that have nothing to do with your family and children are going back and forth.
I think it’s best to really sit down with your attorney and have them perhaps talk to the other side and see, would mediation work for this family for this case? Would collaborative law work? Are these people a good fit for that? What are the issues of the case? There are a lot of special needs or families with special needs children that need certain support that other families without children. It’s an asset division case. Maybe you could just do what we call in our state a four way and hammer out an agreement or at least get a proposal on one side to the other and start that way. It really depends on what the issues are in your case as to which process is best.
But having that conversation and saying, “Sure, we can file, but then what? What happens next?” And talking to your attorney and your financial person, your financial advisor about what this is going to look like post-divorce, what are the trends, what’s going to happen, and how collaborative can you be throughout this process to save time, money, and emotions and get on with your life when everyone’s ready.
Brian Walters: I agree. It makes a lot of sense. To some extent, to be fair, it’s under your control, and some extent it’s not as a client, right? I mean, if your thesis is being totally unreasonable, you may not have a choice. But I agree. It’s generally, like most things in life, it’s two people and they can make it worse or less worse depending on their own input into it. I think the next section is understanding child and spousal support. Let me say upfront, every state is different. This is state law, federal law. Texas is probably the most unique of them all. I’ve dealt with most of the big states and many of the small states.
Every year lawyer in the other states shakes their head about it somewhat in jealousy, sometimes somewhat in dismay, but everything’s different. You don’t want to go online and say, “Oh, I’m going to get 20% of my spouse’s income for the rest of my life as spousal support because that’s what I read on the internet, or I’m going to get blah blah blah for child support.” It’s very specific has been my experience with it so far. How would you approach it or how would you advise folks to approach that issue?
Gabrielle Clemens: Well, I think becoming familiar with the guidelines and the laws in your state is very important. Some states are starting out with just a 50/50 parenting time and you go from there. It depends if you work. It depends on what your schedule is, your travel schedule for work or your spouse’s travel schedule, and I think coming up with a realistic parenting plan that is sustainable. Be sure to keep contemporaneous notes on the calendar as to how often you have your child, what activities that you’re taking part in, what does your child need to do. It’s really child centered. I mean, your child is involved in basketball on Saturdays, then maybe their schedule has to go along with that.
You need to take that into consideration. But child support and alimony financially really gets bound by the laws of your state. Massachusetts has an online calculator on their mass.gov. It’s called mass.gov is the state website. You need to gather information and plug those numbers in. But again, going back to your attorney saying, “Are there reasons to deviate from those calculations? Is somebody special needs? Is there special tutoring?” And remember that child support may change over time. As a parent’s income changes, there maybe cause for modification. The child may need tutoring and extra services that they didn’t need when they were two, but they need when they’re 12, 13, 14.
I think being flexible and understanding that as your child grows, these things are going to change, but you want to do everything you can to support your child within your means. Alimony, again, every state is different with respect to how they calculate alimony, how long alimony lasts, and under what circumstances it terminates. In some states, if you cohabitate with a romantic partner and someone else who’s contributing to your household, that is going to have an impact on your alimony.
You don’t even have to get remarried anymore. You want to know the rules, know the guidelines, have an understanding of what your state’s rules and guidelines are and talk to your attorney about it, and then you can help build your lifestyle around what the financial support is going to look like.
Brian Walters: I very much agree. Lastly for this section, one of the most common questions I get is, what about the family home? Am I going to be able to stay in the home? Can me and the kids stay here either short-term, maybe two different answers, and long-term post-divorce? How should someone who’s going through the divorce process view that and deal with that issue in your experience?
Gabrielle Clemens: Sure. Well, that has to be handled immediately. You have to either have the attorneys work out some financial arrangement that someone’s going to pay the mortgage, the taxes, the insurance, and then they leave. During the course of the litigation, there has to be some kind of financial support. It can be temporary. If it’s a temporary order, it could be considered final at the final stages of the divorce. But if you don’t have access to funds, your attorney can go into court and ask for an emergency distribution or disbursement of funds so that you can feed the children, feed yourself, and tend to your immediate financial requirements.
And then as you go through deciding, do I want the house? Not everybody wants to keep the family home. Some people want to start fresh. Some people enjoy spending time in another area and they aren’t interested in maintaining and paying for and managing the family home. It just depends on what you want, and then looking at the finances and seeing what your spouse wants and even what your children want. Some people go look at other houses. They like to rent. They don’t want to have the responsibility during the course of the divorce to manage the household, or if they just want to leave the household because they don’t want to be there with their spouse in an estranged relationship.
It can be very liberating just to do a rental. There’s something called nesting, and it’s when the parents leave and find temporary quarters every weekend or every other weekend and the children stay in place, which I think can really work well for many families. Because if you’re concerned about keeping your children stable and this could work for you, then it keeps the kids in one place and the parents go from place to place on the weekends or every other weekend, whatever the schedule is.
Those kinds of questions that are financial in nature can be answered throughout the course of the divorce process as you’re crunching the numbers, as you’re getting the financial, the marital estate inventory in place, finding out, is there enough cash flow to keep two households, to maintain two households? Those answers are going to vary. But also keeping in mind that you don’t have to keep the house and maybe you shouldn’t keep the house. Maybe you can live elsewhere and you also don’t want to be house poor at the end of this too.
Really thinking about, again, focusing on what you want the future to look like. Do you want to travel? Do you want to have extra money, or do you want to maintain the marital home forever or at least until the kids are out of school? These are all questions that you need to explore as you go through the divorce process.
Brian Walters: Very much agree. All right, then lastly, the process of after the divorce. Most people think, oh, it’s done. I just get on with my life. Not quite so simple.
Gabrielle Clemens: No.
Brian Walters: If you have children with your ex-spouse, adult or minor children, there’s actually still some interaction even if your kids are grown. I think you have a post-divorce to-do list in your book on page 218. What are some highlights of that that people should be thinking about doing and work down that list?
Gabrielle Clemens: Okay, I’m going to pull up the list because I was driving, so I’m going to pull it up and go through it just quickly. But 218, wow, you are good. Yes, getting organized. There are a lot of things that need to take place immediately after the divorce process. It’s when if you are working with a financial advisor, giving them a copy and starting to gather all the information to transfer the assets. If you have a brokerage account, what I recommend is if you have 1,000 shares of Apple, you each get 500 shares of Apple, instead of saying, “Well, you take the apple and I’ll take the Google stock.” Make sure you’re splitting positions and you’re not just splitting…
Brian Walters: Sharing the risk. Yeah, absolutely.
Gabrielle Clemens: Exactly. Because especially in a non-retirement account, anything you do with positions, these investments could trigger a capital gain or capital loss. To keep it fair, you want to make sure that you divide everything 50/50. In addition, the retirement process, the retirement assets, that whole division of assets could require a QDRO. We explain what a QDRO is. It’s a qualified domestic relations order. It requires the court process in a court order in order to do that because these assets are protected by ERISA, a federal law. That process can take three or four months. It really depends on your specialist who drafts that QDRO.
It depends on how backed up they are, how backed up the courts are, how busy everybody is. It could cost five, six, $700 depending on the specialist. If you have more than one 401(k), even if you could pay more, you’re going to pay per QDRO. You want to be efficient with that. If you can take from IRA assets, again, these are things that you’re going to want to discuss during the divorce process. But if you can take from an IRA, a non-ERISA protected account, then you won’t have to pay for that QDRO. It doesn’t require a QDRO because it’s not protected by ERISA and you could have your money in a couple of months.
One other nice thing about splitting an IRA is that you may not have to liquidate, sell off the assets, like you would have to in a 401(k). Other types of things, you have to open up your own checking account, open up your own credit cards if you haven’t already done that. You may have to transfer the deed to the house. If you’ve decided to keep the house or you’re giving the marital home to your other spouse, your ex-spouse, you’re going to have to see the attorney to have them draft a deed transfer.
Whether or not you’re on the mortgage, depending on if someone can be removed from the mortgage, you’re going to have to refinance to remove the other spouse, the other person, the other party from that mortgage so that they’re not encumbered by that if they’re not responsible for it. That’s something in today’s environment with higher interest rates, that’s a little tougher to do financially. I mean, procedurally, it’s not difficult, but going from a 3% mortgage to a 6% can be a little frustrating. For some people, we’re extending that until rates come down a little bit. But again, that’s on a case by case basis for each family.
If you’re changing your name, if you’re going back to your maiden name, you have to contact social security, get your passport changed, your driver’s license, your accounts. Everything has to be done. Now, in Massachusetts, we can file a name change at the time of the divorce and the judge can grant you your maiden name back. If you haven’t done that, then you may have to go through a separate process to do that. If that’s something you intend to do, that’s something that is a great thing to do at that time. There’s a lot. Then there’s the whole estate planning, your estate plan that you have to create all over again.
Certainly want to remove your ex-spouse from being your healthcare proxy. If you’re not doing well, you want to make sure you have somebody who is standing in your shoes making your medical decisions for you who has your best interests and your best health at heart. You want to make sure you draft a new will, maybe some trusts if that’s what you need. Again, healthcare proxy, power of attorney, you want to name someone that you trust to step into your shoes if you become unable to manage your affairs, and also how you want to leave your assets, change all your beneficiaries on your retirement accounts and your will and your trusts and things like that. There’s a lot to do.
There’s definitely a lot to do. But I think the first thing you should do is take a weekend away. Just exercise some self-care. You can get to all of these technicalities and this process, these administrative procedures in due time, but take some time, breathe, really think about your next steps. Hopefully if you started what I mentioned in chapter one, which is to build your vision board and you’ve built on that throughout this process, you’ll be really well-prepared and ready to take the next steps towards your future life, because this is something you’ve been processing for the last 3, 6, 12 months, maybe two years by the time you’re done with this process.
Brian Walters: Yeah, or if you’ve been considering divorce for years, you’re right, it may be the end of a five-year journey from the time you started thinking about it.
Gabrielle Clemens: Right. Exactly right. Exactly right.
Brian Walters: I think at the end of the book you have a list of financial, legal, emotional resources, et cetera, which the folks can review when they get your book, which we’ll have information about in the show notes. Well, that’s all we have for today. Appreciate you coming on. If you like what you’ve heard today, please do us a favor and leave a review. We appreciate all your feedback, especially when it helps us do a better podcast. If you’d like to reach out to Gabrielle directly, we will have her contact information, as well as a link to purchase her book in the description.
Thank you so much. We can’t thank you enough for joining us. If you’d like to talk to one of us here at the firm directly about your family law or divorce situation or anything else you’d like for us to cover in future episodes, please reach out to us at podcast.waltersgilbreath.com. I’m Brian Walters, and thank you 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 in to 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.

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