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Showing posts from November, 2015

Living Apart, Living Large

This is a post in a series on divorce. The list of divorce topics  is here.  Understanding this process can be incredibly difficult, I felt compelle to share some of what I have gone through and learned personally. If you'd like to read the first post, click the link above. Once the assets have been divided, it is then time to start living a separate life. For me this meant dealing with a series of issues around money, time, and space. This post talks a little bit about the money aspect of the separation/initial divorce period...this IS a finance-focused blog after all! In the next post, Reclaiming Life, Restarting Goals, I will discuss more about the other aspects, time and space, but for this post, I am focused solely on the money aspect and the impact that living separately has on someone in this situation. Personally, I was fortunate while I divorced to have a good job and to be able to afford my own apartment and living expenses. While this may seem good at first, this in

Reclaiming Life, Restarting Goals

Reclaiming Life, Restarting Goals is the title I chose for this post, one in a series of posts about coping with the aspects of divorce. Originally I wanted to write these posts because this is mostly a blog about my finances but I also realize that largely this is a blog about life. Reclaiming Life is something that is hard to imagine, but it is an absolutely necessary step if your divorce was tragic and had a profound impact on you. I'd imagine that this is true for most people, but it is worth noting that I am speaking only from my personal experience. Reclaiming is from the verb to reclaim: re·claim rəˈklām/ verb verb: reclaim ; 3rd person present: reclaims ; past tense: reclaimed ; past participle: reclaimed ; gerund or present participle: reclaiming 1 . retrieve or recover (something previously lost, given, or paid); obtain the return of. "he returned three years later to reclaim his title as director of advertising" synonyms: get back,

Making the Decision and Having the talk

When it comes to making the decision to divorce, unless there is some overarching circumstance, I view it as a mistake to do it rashly. In order to make the decision, dealing with the feelings and emotions involved first made the most sense. Often when things get changed in our lives it is because we have become fed up with the current state in some way or shape. In this case, there is a feeling that the time for Divorce has come. Deal with your Feelings and Emotions first, noticing that there may be some distinction here. For me my emotions are concrete: Happy, Sad, Complacent, and perhaps fearful. Feelings are a bit more nebulous. I might feel trapped. I might feel subservient. I might feel powerful. None of these are truly emotions, but they are intangible, and somewhat subjective. For me, once I felt unhappy in the situation, I tried on various occasions to deal with why I had these unhappy feelings. The feelings, more than the emotions were the primary driver of the change. M