In this video, Tasha tells her story about getting divorced and what it taught her about personal finance. Want to know more about Tasha? She shares her experience with motherhood here:
Hi i’m tasha from one big happy life on behalf of the financial diet and this is the lifestyle fix brought to you by skill share it’s friday february 15th aka the day after valentine’s day and what better way to bask in the afterglow of the most love filled day of the year than by talking about the exact opposite divorce in today’s video i’m gonna be sharing six
Lessons that my divorce taught me about money so before we dive into the lessons let me just give you some quick background into the state of our finances by the time we got divorced i married my ex-husband let’s call him tom when i was 21 years old as you can imagine our finances were pretty intertwined after almost a decade of building a life together we didn’t
Have a biological child together because we had held off on having more children until after i finished law school we had around $20,000 of consumer debt and around a hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of student loans which were mostly in my name which i’ve used for paying for our living expenses when i was in law school so that he could quit his job to
Become a full-time student tom also had four figures of student loan debt in his name and we were in the process of building a brand-new custom-designed house that was supposed to be our forever home so now let’s talk about the lessons lesson number one you can end up financially intertwined with someone for years after the divorce even if you don’t have kids at
The time of our divorce i was working a full-time job making $60,000 a year and he was going to school full-time and using his gi bill to cover his tuition and some of our living expenses because of the divorce we had to give up the house and lose thousands of dollars in deposits that we had put down on it we each kept our own student loans a hundred and eighty
Thousand dollars for me and less than ten thousand dollars for him as for the consumer debt split he took about fourteen thousand and i took the rest in sum i walked away from the marriage with around a hundred and ninety thousand dollars worth of debt and he walked away with less than twenty five thousand the problem was well aside from the fact that i ended up
Taking the lion’s share of loans that we had both lived on for three years was that fourteen thousand dollars worth of debt that he was responsible for was actually in my name tom was supposed to transfer the debt out of my name within six months and pay me $500 a month until it was transferred well that never happened instead of a clean break and a fresh start
After our divorce it took six years for him to pay off that debt that was in my name this often meant having to talk at least once a month to arrange for him to get a copy of the loan statement and make a payment it never occurred to me that i would be having monthly conversations with my ex about money years after our divorce it turns out that out of wedlock and
Doesn’t necessarily mean out of mind lesson number two just because a debt is awarded to your spouse during the divorce doesn’t mean you won’t end up paying it like i said when we divorced the court awarded a debt that was in my name to tom to pay off while he was technically responsible for paying that debt off or refinancing it into his own name for the time
Being it was still in my name which meant that if he didn’t pay it it would affect my credit and if the loan were to go into default the creditor would come after me and not him yes i could then in turn go after tom for the money but that wouldn’t stop my credit from being ruined what that meant was that to protect my own credit i had to make sure that the loan was
Paid on time every single month tom rarely gave me the money on time which meant i was using my own money to pay a debt that he was supposed to be responsible for and that he got month after month of interest-free loans for me sometimes it would take months of back-and-forth before he reimbursed me for the money that i paid to keep the loan current it took six
Years for tom to finally take care of that debt yes i could have taken him back to court over it but we lived in different states for most of that time which made it that much more of a hassle not to mention the costs of hiring an attorney yes i’m an attorney but i’m not that kind of attorney as frustrating as it was to take on the job of a debt collector every
Time tom didn’t send me the money to pay the loan on time i’m still incredibly grateful relieved and frankly pretty darn lucky that he eventually would always give me the money without me having to resort to taking legal action still it was such a relief to be able to finally delete his phone from my contact after that loan was paid off six years after the divorce
Lesson number three it’s always a great idea to maintain a lifestyle that can be supported on a single income went and i decided to get divorced it was just six months into my post law school career at the time i was making around $60,000 in a public interest fellowship that i hoped would turn into a full-time job we were renting a house in a nice neighborhood
With good schools for just $1,200 a month we had some credit-card debt and a freakishly large amount of student loans but we didn’t have a car payment on either of our two cars we had consciously made a decision to live on just my income because we didn’t want to add to our student loan burden and tom’s gi bill was almost gone but he still needed three more years of
College to get his bachelor’s degree even the custom house that we were looking to build was gonna be purchased using just my income though eventually i envisioned us having a cushier budget once he finally graduated from college it turns out that that was one of the best financial decisions that i could have made tom moved out just two months after we decided to
Divorce leaving me to pay everything in the household by myself including the insurance on the car that he was driving that was registered in both of our names while it was mentally difficult adjusting to being a single parent again i think fully didn’t have to worry about struggling financially even with the added cost of having to enroll my daughter in aftercare
After school until i could pick her up after work the hardest part was letting go of my dream house because i felt that while i could have bought it it would have made my budget so much tighter than i prefer i’ve stuck with the principle of creating a lifestyle that’s affordable on a single budget since then joseph my current partner and i have purchased two
Homes during the course of our relationship and have always used one income to qualify for the mortgage that means that if we ever separated or one of us lost a job became disabled or died our family would still be able to manage financially lesson number four the importance of being able to make your own money when i divorced i was the breadwinner in the family
Tom was a full-time student and was living off of student loans and his gi bill despite the fact that i took on most of our marital debt he struggled financially after the divorce for quite a while i on the other hand didn’t yes i did have to tighten my budget in some ways and there were added childcare expenses but i never had to worry about how i was gonna make
Ends meet not like i did when i first had my daughter when i was 19 years old knowing that i had the power to support myself no matter what made the whole of going through a divorce so much less stressful there’s a lot of uncertainty that comes along with going through a divorce you have no idea what your life will look like afterwards you wonder what effect it’s
Gonna have on your kids and you wonder if you’ll ever find someone else it was really wonderful not also having to wonder how i was gonna pay the bills and provide for my daughter i knew i had solid credentials and that i could go out and find a higher paying job if i needed to number five each partner in a relationship should understand personal finance and know
How to manage money throughout the course of our relationship i had always managed our household budget and not entirely by choice tom just had no interest in having to deal with the day-to-day money management i on the other hand would have preferred for us to share the responsibility i once put my foot down and insisted that he pay a bill just one bill the trash
Bill i gave him the bill and i asked him to pay it he said okay and weeks went by and nothing then i wrote the check put it in the envelope and just asked him to put it in the mailbox by this time we were no longer even getting trash service still nothing finally once our garage was filled with flies and stinking garbage i broke down and i paid the bill myself then
Slowly put out the extra trash over the course of a month until our for a until the landfill business was over then i never asked him to pay bills again this came back to bite both of us in the butt when we got divorced because tom didn’t know how to budget so i helped him create a budget that was affordable he still wasn’t good at paying bills on time so i had
To pay the loan that i mentioned earlier and hound him until he gave me the money back i’m sure that tom struggled to develop his money management skills four years after the divorce because he had left all of the money management to me for almost a decade a recent study has found that delegating financial responsibilities to a single partner in the relationship
Can cause the financial literacy of the non money managing partner to decrease over time in fact the study even found that the other partner had a harder time making sound financial decisions even when they were given expert information to help them make a good decision that is so scary number six hope for the best but plan for the worst my divorce has definitely
Impacted how i approach my finances and my relationship now it’s different but better in my first marriage i really didn’t give any thought to the financial impact our decisions would have if we ever separated when i took out hundreds of thousands of dollars to support our family when i was in law school it never occurred to me that maybe tom wouldn’t be there
To help me pay those loans back now whenever i make a financial decision in my current relationship i think of multiple possible outcomes and not just the best possible outcome so i look at what the numbers would look like if we separated if i died if either one of us became disabled if either one of us loses a job and i try to choose a path that strikes a good
Balance between all of those risks which is why when joseph asked me to marry him six years ago i said yes but not until 2020 you see once i did the math i realized that marrying joseph would only make me financially worse off my student loan payments would go up my tax payments would go up and any potential financial aid alexis might have been able to receive
Which probably would have been enough by itself given that at that time i didn’t have any money saved for her to go to college all of those things were really important i’ve learned that loving someone doesn’t mean that you need to make bad financial decisions it took joseph a little time to come around to the fact that i wanted to wait and while we had up quite a
Few hypothetical ultimatum questions in the beginning it’s been so gratifying as we’ve built our lives and our family together over the years and have done it in a way that also strengthens our financial future along the way no matter what the financial outcome ends up being this is one of the best gifts that we can give to the people we love now that i’ve shared
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Transcribed from video
6 Things Getting Divorced Taught Me About Money | The Lifestyle Fix By The Financial Diet