If you’re going through divorce and feeling overwhelmed by the financial decisions in front of you, you are not imagining it. There is far more to divorce financial planning than most people are ever told. Divorce creates financial challenges that most traditional financial advisors simply are not trained to handle, which is why I invited Jamie Lima, a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst and the founder of Allegiant Divorce Solutions, to the show to help demystify the financial realities of divorce.

Jamie explains why dividing assets during divorce is rarely as straightforward as it seems, especially once taxes, retirement accounts, and long-term consequences are factored in. We talk about some of the most common and costly blind spots women face, including critical documents like QDROs, along with who actually carries the tax burden when assets are divided. 

Throughout the conversation, we come back to one essential truth. You should not be navigating this alone. Divorce requires a team, and having the right financial expertise can protect your future long after the paperwork is signed.

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• What a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst does and why divorce financial planning is different from traditional financial planning (2:02)
• What a QDRO is, how it works, and why it is essential when retirement accounts and pensions are involved (7:38)
• How after tax value changes the true worth of assets in a divorce settlement (17:43)
• The most common financial mistakes people make during divorce and what Jamie wishes everyone knew before signing an agreement (31:28)

Learn more about Jamie Lima, CDFA®: After watching her parents go through a divorce at a young age, and experiencing a tremendously expensive and emotionally draining divorce herself in 2017, she launched Allegiant Divorce Solutions as a sister company to her traditional financial planning firm.

She recognizes the challenges people face as they decide how to handle their finances during divorce. Her parents struggled, and it was challenging for her as well. Looking back, there were mistakes she made during her own divorce that could have been avoided had she had the support of a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst ®.

At present, armed with this ever growing knowledge and almost 20 years of financial planning experience, she is dedicated to helping her clients navigate the complex aspects of divorce and gain a fair settlement, with much less stress.

Resources & Links:

Get Your Curated Podcast Playlist
Focused Strategy Sessions with Kate
The Divorce Survival Guide Resource Bundle
Phoenix Rising: A Divorce Empowerment Collective
Kate on Instagram
Kate on Facebook
Kate’s Substack Newsletter: Divorce Coaching Dispatch
The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episodes are also available YouTube!

Jamie’s website
Jamie on LinkedIn
Jamie on Instagram
Jamie on TikTok
Jamie on Facebook

Show Transcript:

Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. I am super excited today to have this conversation with Jamie Lima. Jamie is a certified Divorce Financial analyst. I talk about them all the time on the show. He is the founder of Allegiant Divorce Solutions, and he also is the primary financial expert on the platform, My Next Chapter, which I have, we have talked about before on the show. Jamie, thank you so much. Welcome for, welcome to the show. 

Jamie Lima: Thanks for having me.

Kate Anthony: I wanna start off with the basics like 1 0 1. What is a C-D-F-A? How is that different from being a financial advisor, for example? Why do people need a C-D-F-A?

Jamie Lima: I think the biggest difference. Is, and I’m, I have a background in traditional financial planning. As I’ve been doing that work for 20 years now, and the reality is [00:01:00] that a lot of my peers in that space, and even myself up until getting this designation and working in this area full-time now real, there’s just, there’s a lot more to divorce financial planning than people think.

Even when I went through my, even when I went through my own divorce back in 2017, prior to me having this designation and doing, starting to do some of this work, I thought, you know what? I’ve got it. I’ve got it handled. I’ve been doing I’m a financial planner. And then you get into it and you’re thinking through things like, how do we divide up our assets and how do I run these calculations and what am I gonna be on the hook for alimony?

What is my child support obligation gonna be? What about taxes and how do we handle all those things? The average financial planner doesn’t have experience handling those types of nuances in a person’s financial plan. So that’s why we spend a lot of time partnering with existing financial planners, especially if there’s somebody and [00:02:00] if there’s somebody out there that’s listening that has a financial planner that they’ve used, for years and years.

We’ll come in and work with that financial planner specifically on the divorce stuff, simply because they just don’t have an expertise in it. They know all the stuff related to investment management and retirement plans and estate plans and insurance and all the other traditional stuff that I’ve been, like I mentioned, I’ve doing that work for years and years.

But there are these little nuances that come up in divorce that you’re just not trained on. It’s not something that, it’s not the fidelity, the Schwabs of the world, the UBSs, Morgan Stanley’s of the world. They just don’t train their advisors on this type of stuff because there are a lot of.

Frankly, it’s a compliance situation, and if they give bad advice and they’re not trained for it, it can open up against some liability. So that’s where we commit. 

Kate Anthony: You would think there would be more training on it given the, proliferation to divorce. Like most things it is a separate area of expertise, which is why a C-D-F-A is necessary.

[00:03:00] What are some of the sticking points. What are some of the areas that you see or as a C-D-F-A that you were learning through your designation going, oh, as a financial advisor, I might not have advised them this way, or that’s, that was really good for me to learn. 

Jamie Lima: I think there’s a lot and we could probably had, do a whole show on the pitfalls in the blind spots that people have especially now that I have the experience both personally and professionally in this area.

But, there are things like the after tax value of an asset. You hear me talk about this at my next chapter, ad nauseum. We need to understand what the tax impact how taxes impact the decisions that we make and the value of the investments we have. It’s very easy for a financial advisor to sit and say only have $500,000 in your 401k.

And there’s $500,000 in equity over here in the house. Why don’t you just keep the house, you keep the 401k and be done with it? That’s surface level [00:04:00] financial planning. And when you take taxes into consideration, you have to understand there’s different tax situations with the house versus with the retirement account.

And they’re not necessarily equal. There’s also things like pensions that are involved. I have never a, I have never in my 20 year career seen more pension Statements, documents, valuations that need to be done in the last than I have in the last, even in the last year. We deal with a lot of government agencies.

We deal with a lot of big name employers that still have pensions. I didn’t handle pensions too much when I was working in my traditional wealth management roles, and, but now I’m seeing it. There’s a ton of them out there. There are specific mathematical calculations that need to be run based on actuarial tables and the interest rate environment and employment dates, and so all there’s a lot, that is another area that people miss all the [00:05:00] time.

They just think it’s $2,000 a month. So that’s what it is when there’s real value behind those income streams. We can go on and on, but there’s a dozen things that just come up all the time. 

Kate Anthony: And pensions. That’s one of the sort of areas where a quadro becomes necessary. Yes?

Jamie Lima: Exactly. Exactly. And this is another area that the financial advisors just are clueless on. It’s actually very simple to be honest. It’s a legal document that provides the plan, sponsor the, with the instructions of how the asset is gonna be divided between the parties. You need a special, there’s a specialization in it, and you know you have to, there’s a ton of training that’s involved and so on. We will actually help our clients draft those documents because even the attorneys get jammed up on them. 

Kate Anthony: Let’s go back, I wanna rewind. What is a Quadro?

What does that stand for? It’s a, it’s QDRO. Can you just let’s back up a little. 

Jamie Lima: Yeah, sure. It’s a [00:06:00] Qualified Domestic Relations Order. It’s used in that term is used interchangeably. The we call it quadro. That term is used interchangeably, but they’re in the state of Illinois, it’s called a quildro.

Oh, 

Kate Anthony: okay. That if you’re 

Jamie Lima: dealing with, if you’re dealing with government agencies, it’s actually called a coap, a court order acceptable for processing. In any event, if you hear the term quadro it, it’s a legal document that covers all of those different plans. And basically what it’s not a qualified domestic relations order until the plan receives the documents, review has a chance to review them, approves it, that’s when it becomes qualified. 

Kate Anthony: Okay. And so basically that, that is once that’s filed, signed off on, becomes qualified, you can, you set it and forget it and then like at retirement, when the pension kicks in, you just start receiving.

Money?

Jamie Lima: No. How does 

Kate Anthony: this, yeah. How does this work? Let’s talk. 

Jamie Lima: Okay. We get, let’s talk about the mechanics of it because I think that’s a great [00:07:00] question and something needs to be clarified What happens with this document and what we wanna try to do with this document is draft it right around the tail end of when we’re getting to settlement.

Okay? So you’re going to have, if assuming you have to, you either have a mediator draft your agreement. If you draft it on your own or you have an attorney draft it, no matter how you slice it, this document needs to be drafted right when you get, basically, when you get to the end of this. And the reason why I say that is because at that point you, you’ve pretty much come to an agreement on how this stuff is gonna get divided.

So let’s just assume for easy the sake of our discussion today, that’s just 50 50 split between in the pension or, and use Quadros for 401k plans, 4 0 3 B plans, workplace, retirement type of plan. So not just pensions. So let’s assume that we divide them up, just split down the middle, 50 50. We draft this document alongside the marital settlement agreement or the divorce decree, whatever it’s called, and we wanna send that to the courts for [00:09:00] approval by the judge first at around the same time.

Because what you don’t wanna do is you don’t wanna send the marital settlement agreement that takes weeks. Then you send another, then you have to march yourself down to the courthouse. Have another set of documents signed, which also takes more weeks. So there’s, I would, I prefer to do them concurrently because you, why not do it when you have judge, get everything done all the same time and package it together so that document comes back to you.

The judge said, okay, I now approve this. This is a fair and equitable arrangement. I’m now going to, now you or the attorney needs to send that to the plan sponsor. Let’s say it’s Fidelity investments. I’ve used, I’ve worked there for years and years, so we send it to Fi fidelity. It then sits on somebody else’s desk for weeks and weeks until they’ve had a chance to review it, make sure it’s in line with what their plan parameters are and what their, the all, we’ve checked all the legal boxes on their side.

They will approve it, then they will send it back to you for processing. So in some cases with [00:10:00] these companies automatically handle that on. At around the time that they’ve approved it. So ultimately what they’re doing is at that time, they’re going to divide the accounts, 50 50 you have yours. Your soon to be ex spouse has his or hers and that, or it’s divided up, however, you know whatever the arrangement is at that point, then you can control what you wanna do with that asset. So if you, let’s say you’re gonna get 50% of your spouse’s 401k plan or the pension. You can choose to turn the income stream on at that point, assuming you would qualify for it, or you’d have to wait till 60 or 65 whenever that income.

Whenever you can do that, or if it’s a 401k plan or other investment plan, you take that money and you can go buy a jet ski with it. You can invest it for your future. Whatever you choose to do, you get you gain control at that point. So there are a lot. You can see why the average financial planner, nothing was probably like, wait, what?

How does this all work? There are a lot of stuff and you have to do them in a specific order and you have to [00:11:00] get all these approvals. And if you don’t do it in the right order, then it gets picked back and you waste a lot of time. And if you don’t take the distribution the right way, then you deal with tax situations. It can be a, it can be a lot. 

Kate Anthony: And so what if it is a pension, like ’cause a pension at a certain point just kicks in, right? So how do you, as the recipient of somebody else’s pension, if you’re getting a percentage of, for a period of time, right? Because that’s the thing too, is it’s like it’s a percentage of the period of time that you were married, right?

Kate Anthony: ’cause it may not be the life of the pension, right? If you were only married for a finite period of time. So how do you know when you’re getting that? Are you just sitting around waiting? 

Jamie Lima: In some respects, yes, depending on how old you are. But what we do in the pension valuations is we will run a calculation show and show the spouses, here is the premarital component of this, here’s the marital component of the pension, and if there’s any post-separation [00:12:00] value, we would show them what that looks like at that point.

We’re strictly focusing on the marital component and how that’s divided up and divorced. So that’s done, like I said, by the quadra, what have you. Assuming that, let’s say you’re 40 years old and you have 25 years to wait till that income can be turned on at the age of 65, you have an account. Those assets are divided up at the plan, and you effectively have an account, a pension plan account at the pension plan.

They will communicate with you via email or snail mail, which is usually how they do it. And they will just keep you up to date and they’ll share with you the value of those accounts over time. When you’re, they’ll give you your monthly payment calculations. They’ll help you understand okay, if you take a, if you take a lump sum, you basically own your own account.

Now, even though you may not have been an employee of that company, you now by way of the divorce have an account at that pension plan. 

Kate Anthony: I really need to check my Quadro paperwork. I don’t think I’ve heard a damn [00:13:00] thing in 17 years from them. Jamie I need to have you look at my paperwork. 

Jamie Lima: I’ll take a look at it. It’s totally fine. 

Kate Anthony: God. It’s so funny you’re saying that. I’m like, wait a minute, when do I get that money? Hold on a minute. What? 

Jamie Lima: They should be communicating with you effectively. They, you now have an account on their platform. Yeah. And they should be communicating with you. 

Kate Anthony: Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna look into this today.

I love it when I’m interviewing people and suddenly I’m like, wait a minute. I was gonna say, so there’s an ulterior motive to this question. You just wanted to know for yourself how this all works. Totally. But I know that if I have the question, somebody else is gonna have the question too.

Exactly. So you know. Okay. So I know that like my Quadro paperwork was like almost as thick as my divorce, my MSA it’s, they’re, it’s big and these are complicated, but that, that, speaks to what you’re saying. This is not something that just your average financial advisor can do for you.[00:14:00] 

So I wanna talk about the tax implication thing because this is one of those things that is so complicated and divorced by the fact that I see this a lot with division of like property division. Where the attorneys will say, you’ll just decide, so and so will keep the house, party A will keep the house.

Party B will, get this other house or whatever. Whatever the property division is. Nobody is asking, can you afford to buy the other person out? Will you qualify for a mortgage? Because you have to refinance or assume a mortgage, will you qualify for that? The attorneys are just here we go.

We’re gonna divide this. And I’m hearing from you that it’s similar with division of the finances that like. Yeah it these two things may have equal dollar amounts, but they’re not necessarily equal once they’ve been [00:15:00] dissolved or broken into or whatever. 

Jamie Lima: And the it, you’re not the bash on attorneys, but yeah. They can’t be experts in everything and, renee Renee over at my next chapter. She and I always go back and forth and we joke with each other about this all the time, and I’m like, Hey, Renee listen. We’re like, we’re not bashing attorneys. But the reality is they just don’t understand some of this stuff.

Their job Sure is on the legal side. And their job is to help you get from point A to point B, which is ultimately understand where your situation and get you divorced. And to be honest, rack up and billable hours along the way to do that. They’re not thinking through what’s your future financial plan looks like or what’s your, what your goals and objectives are after the divorce is finalized.

That’s why I tell people all the time. We’re gonna help you through this experience. And when the dust settles on the divorce and that ink is dried on that agreement we’re probably only about halfway there because we now have to help you open up the right accounts and process the quadro and look at your investments and how, what does your cashflow look like and what does your budget look like moving forward?

How do we set [00:16:00] up the kids for success moving forward? Like all these fin future financial planning things, that’s why. I, there’s a marriage between the CFP work that I do and the CDFA work on a regular basis. And one of the first exercises we take people through is what are your goals when the, when this is all over, because then we can help you make good, solid decisions along the way to help you achieve whatever those goals are.

And if you’re not, if you’re not paying attention, how if you’re not paying attention, how taxes impact you? Or like you said okay, I wanna keep the house. Great. If you don’t know what your budget’s gonna look like and what kind of support you’re gonna have, how the heck do you know whether you’re gonna be able to even afford it?

And that’s where we come in. The attorneys are not gonna be able to help you figure this [00:17:00] out.

Kate Anthony: And this is, this is really speaking to why we need a team, right? Because your attorney is also not a co-parenting specialist. They are also right, like they are not helping you through all of dissecting all of the pieces of this that are. Happening all, they’re all happening at the same time.

It’s this sort of concurrent explosion of decision making and, legal, financial, emotional, psychological parenting. Like it’s all happening at the same time. And you can’t rely on one professional to do all of it. 

Jamie Lima: No. It’s just it’s maybe a terrible analogy, but I use it all the time, which is.

Think of your, in this particular space, like you would your fam your general practitioner, like your me from a medical perspective, right? Your attorney is the general practitioner. They know the legal system. They know what the process looks like, so on and so forth. And [00:17:00] your general practitioner is gonna give, do your annual physical.

They know that they’re gonna try to keep you on the right path moving forward, but if you have a significant ailment, you have unfortunately cancer or. This health issue with that health issue, they’re going to send you to a specialist to help you with that thing in coordination with the general health path that they’re trying to keep you on.

I don’t know how to best say this, but that’s exactly how you wanna look at us, is let’s get your turn. Your attorneys totally fine. Let’s get them, keep this thing moving forward. But when it comes time for these other areas that you need help in, you need to be reaching out to these specialists to get that.

The help you need in those areas, and it sometimes sounds counterintuitive to work with all, this team, you is what I call it may sound counterintuitive to have an attorney, you, a financial planner and everything else, but if everybody stays in their lane, usually the outcome is much better.

Can you save money? Because everybody’s more effective and efficiently that we’re working effectively and efficiently in there particular designations. 

Kate Anthony: Exactly. I was gonna say [00:19:00] attorneys are expensive enough, and then here we’re saying you also need a C-D-F-A and you also need a co-parenting specialist and you also need a divorce coach.

Hello. Get yourself a divorce coach who’s also a co-parenting specialist. You’re gonna save money. So that’s, hello, that’s me. It’s like such an expensive proposition and as you’re saying. The goal is to spend money, to save money. That, i’ve had clients literally say that I’ve saved them, found them over a hundred thousand dollars in assets that they didn’t know about or, saved them.

At least tens of thousands of dollars by not by being streamlined, me, helping them be streamlined with no. You don’t need to talk to your attorney about that. We talk about that. These are the questions you need to ask your attorney. So that’s one phone call, not five. Yeah. 

Jamie Lima: Yeah. Yeah. We just, we I shared this on social media over the course of the last couple months. We had one case where we found [00:20:00] $400,000 for this one gal. This most recent case, this is a same sex marriage here in the state of California. They were going back and forth on and almost ready to sign the agreement, and we found almost a million dollars that was not being accounted for in the agreement, and they were getting ready to sign.

Kate Anthony: Wow. Was it being hidden or just like they didn’t think about it? 

Jamie Lima: They fat fingered a number on the disclosures. There was a, there was some, there was $400,000 missing in one section of the disclosures that they were providing each other, and the pension wasn’t being evaluated correctly.

Kate Anthony: Oh. 

Jamie Lima: They had the pension down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 430,000 when it really came out to well over a million. 

Kate Anthony: Wow. 

Jamie Lima: So I went back and we basically drafted a whole response like here’s every every section of the agreement and this is what we’d recommend and this is what you’re missing.

The other piece of this too was. He was getting ready to sign over the house to the spouse. And they were gonna exchange, there was gonna be some equalization of some other [00:21:00] assets to be able to do that, but there were no terms on. When does he have to refinance? When does he get his name off the thing?

What is like, what happens if that doesn’t happen? All the stuff. Yes. And I’m like, why this, your attorney drafted this document. What is wrong with this attorney? Yep. Can you imagine if he went what if it’s, what if two years goes by and then all of a sudden realize, that’s right. Realize he can’t afford to keep the house, and he decides to go into foreclosure and you’re on your ex-spouse’s house and your credit screwed.

Kate Anthony: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Yep. 

Jamie Lima: This was a $3,000 investment and we found those issues along with others, and then a million dollars in assets. It’s a no brainer. 

Kate Anthony: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m so glad you said that. I have clients that for example, I had a client whose attorney got a exclusion order to get her abusive spouse out of the house, but at the same time drafted, no temporary support order, no temporary custody [00:23:00] order.

There was, so there was no, there were no parameters around this other than he can’t come to the house. How is he gonna get the children? Where is is she walking the children to the end of the street? How is that safe? How often is he allowed to see the children? How is she supporting herself if he takes all of the money now that he’s been excluded from the home?

None of these things were taken into consideration into account until she told me about it and she told me that they had drafted this order and I was like. Your attorney also needs to file all these other things because these are all these questions that are gonna be, that are gonna leave you more vulnerable than if the guy’s just in the house overlooked.

Jamie Lima: Overlooked. Exactly. Yes. 

Who is doing what by when and what happens if that thing doesn’t happen 

Kate Anthony: and what happens if it doesn’t? One of my favorite things to always make sure is included is if not, if I have to take you back to court to file a motion to have you do the thing. You are paying all attorney fees for [00:24:00] that.

Jamie Lima: Exactly. Exactly. What is my recourse? And you always wanna know that. And it’s missed all. Missed all the time. 

Kate Anthony: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I’m glad you said that. Oh my gosh. So there are so many pieces, right? And this is why you need a team, right? You need, I think you just said in one of your, another interview recently, something about get a second opinion, right?

Get second eyes on it for just that reason. You get second eyes on your MSA, you do it all the time and you find shit and it saves you money. 

Jamie Lima: All the time. Yeah, all the time. I just, I had another case that she was gonna sign off on the agreement, and he’s a million dollar life insurance policy involved, and she thinks everything’s gonna be copacetic and everything else, but what we didn’t find, we found out that he’s a smoker.

He’s not gonna be able to get, he’s not gonna be able to get insured, and there’s only $2,000 left in the pre, in the actual cash balance of that insurance policy. That policy was gonna lapse within six months, and she’s gonna lose all that coverage if something happens to him. He’s not insurable.

It’s a disaster. And the [00:25:00] attorney’s no. 

Kate Anthony: So there are all of these implications and we started talking about in the beginning the tax implications, right? Who do you, this is something that comes up with my clients all the time, and there’s always disagreement, of course, between the parties about who’s responsible for the tax burden of if I am, getting the.

$500,000 retirement account, but we’re having to break something up in order to transfer that and there’s a tax burden. Who’s responsible for that? I think I’m getting $500,000. ’cause that’s the agreement, right? My spouse thinks they’re giving up $500,000. ’cause that’s the agreement.

Somewhere in there is a. Is a penalty. Somebody’s gotta pay. Who pays that? 

Jamie Lima: The answer is it depends, and I think it, it depends on a lot of cases in [00:26:00] the type of accounts, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna divide retirement accounts between spouses, there’s no tax liability. There’s only tax liability when you take money out of those accounts later.

So let’s stick with that though. Your example about the 500,000 to $500,000, if you think you’re getting $500,000, the strategy here is. I need to gross that number up to ensure after tax I actually get $500,000 in. In other words, and that was the another point that I made to the gentleman in the million dollars scenario, he was gonna get $400,000 as an equalization payment out of the husband’s IRA, or I’m sorry out of the husband’s 401k money’s gonna go over no problem.

I kept explaining to him like, it’s not really $400,000, because eventually you’re gonna have to pay taxes on that. So it’s really worth like 3 25 if you’re lucky. So we need to gross that number up. So I told my argument back was, you’re asking for 525, 5 25 minus 25% tax is gonna get you down to, the [00:27:00] 4,000 that you actually should net in this deal.

And that’s how you have to think through retirement accounts is like the IRS is gonna come calling one of these days. If you truly need an equalization of a particular dollar, that number needs to be grossed up. So you net that number when you’re dealing with other assets homes and investment accounts, stocks and bonds and those types of things.

Those you’re dealing with capital gains issues in that respect. Usually those tax liabilities are are handled just by the way that you transfer the pro the property between one another and so on. So you can usually try to eliminate some of those, but you’re likely going to pay taxes when.

The asset is sold later, depending on what the cost basis is and so on. So we’ve gotta pay attention to all those things. But the main thing is with, if you wanna gross up any numbers in the retirement side that way actually be what you think you’re supposed to. 

Kate Anthony: And so the argument for that is if this is equalization Then I have to have $400,000 [00:28:00] net.

Jamie Lima: Exactly. 

Kate Anthony: Because I can see the argument on the other side be like if 400, if I’m paying $400,000, why do I have to pay 5 25? And the argument is because we’re talking about equalization. 

Jamie Lima: Exactly. 

Kate Anthony: It’s a we’re talking net. We’re not talking gross. 

Jamie Lima: Exactly. Because in his situation, he’s thinking his mind getting 400 grand, but after tax, he’s really getting like I said, 300, 3 25, depending on.

What his filing status would be. And tax situation in the year he takes, starts taking distributions out. But you’ve gotta factor that in and it doesn’t feel good when you’re the one making the equalization payment, but it is the most fair and equitable way of doing, 

Kate Anthony: which is, a hard pull to swallow when you’re getting divorced and there’s bitterness, right?

We’re not always thinking oh, this is actually the fair and equal thing to do. 

Jamie Lima: Yeah. Yeah. 

Kate Anthony: Yeah. What other things do you cover, like as a C-D-F-A? What other things do you see or mistakes that you [00:29:00] see people make that you wish people knew more about? 

Jamie Lima: We co, we cover a lot. We if we, if it related to the financials of divorce we’re basically gonna touch all of it.

And we just did a whole webinar series at my next chapter on this regarding the budget. But it is so elementary, and people look at it like I really need a budget. I never live with a budget. Like I didn’t have a budget my old life. Why do I need a new, a budget for my new life?

But literally every decision you make in divorce stems from understanding what’s coming in and what’s going out. And if you don’t take the time, if you don’t take a beat, sit down and go, okay what is my new life gonna look like? You’re in many ways. You’re negotiate you’re in a.

Less of a power position from a negotiation perspective, you may settle on a support number that’s not gonna get you to where you need to be. You don’t know what kind of support you’re going to get from child support and [00:31:00] support. All that stuff is predicated on the need that you have the amount of income that you have coming in.

And if you don’t know all this stuff, it’s you’re. You’re grasping at straws and you may end in a situation where you have a house you can’t afford. You have more month than money, which is a problem for all of us, and that you probably some point in our lives and the goals and objectives that you have for your future can’t be achieved because you’re just not preparing and not taking that initial elementary step is huge.

Kate Anthony: It’s hard, it’s icky. It’s a really hard. And painful thing I think to look at to have to sort through. Do you have like tools and things like that in my next chapter that help people with their budgets? 

Jamie Lima: Absolutely. We have the worksheets that are available. We have balance sheet that’s on the site.

There’s a lot of amazing resources and work worksheets that are available in our last event of this past Monday. We walked everybody through [00:32:00] each of the sections and just shared like, okay, here’s in this particular category, this is what we need to be thinking about. Here are some of the roadblocks.

Here are some of the things that people miss all the time. Don’t forget to add this thing in. And we literally took it one step at a time. We probably could have done a two hour session on it and got really detailed, but I think we did a pretty good job in the 40 minutes. We had 45 minutes we had, but I would, on the website, there are a ton of resources that are available, one being the work the budget worksheet.

It’s the foundation for everything on the financial side. 

Kate Anthony: Yes. Jamie, your position with My Next Chapter, you are the financial CDFA guru. There are obviously webinars and worksheets and you do videos and informational sessions and all of that. And where else can people find you besides my next chapter.com, which is, where you wanna go for all things.

But where else can people find you individually? 

Jamie Lima: Yeah, I think on our website is the best place to, to learn more about the work we do. Contact me if people have questions. I’m always happy to [00:33:00] help. A million times and people have reached out asking random questions, and if I can answer the question, then I’ll certainly do.

So if I need more information, it’s, some people are like can I keep my house? I’m like, I don’t have any idea I how to answer that question. Like it would take weeks to answer that question, from a fiduciary perspective. But if people have questions and we need access to resources, I can certainly point them in the right direction.

If we’re not a fit, I’m gonna tell them, let them like, Hey listen, we’re not, this is not a fit for us. This is not a case we can take. Here’s some other resources or here’s some other folks that might be able to help. I’m always happy to help in that regard. But the website is allegiant ds.com.

allegiants.com, alleg Divorce Solutions, and all of our contact info on there. We can follow us on social media there as well. We, I try to do my best to put out as much educational stuff as we possibly can on a recurring basis. TikTok Instagram, the whole thing. We’re on all of them. 

Kate Anthony: Great. Awesome.

Awesome. Jamie. And you can work with people like CDFAs are not state, don’t have to be state specific. Is that right? [00:34:00] That’s 

Jamie Lima: a good point. No, we all 50 states because we don’t have to be legal experts in every state or in know, every single statute. As long as the math, maths in two plus two is still for New Jersey and South Dakota.

Texas we’re good to go. 

Kate Anthony: Debatable these days, nevermind. All right, Jamie, thank you so much for being here. This has been a great conversation, very enlightening and I hope super helpful to our audience. So I appreciate you being here. 

Jamie Lima: Thanks for having me, Kate. Talk to you soon.

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DISCLAIMER:  THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVICE.  YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY, COACH, OR THERAPIST IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN ADVICE WITH RESPECT TO ANY PARTICULAR ISSUE OR PROBLEM.