by Renee leNobel | Jan 2, 2024 | Divorce, Finances
What do you think when you hear the word budget?
Do you think: “Ugh – I know I should do one, but I’m going to discover I can’t spend the way I want,” or, “Budgeting will confirm I don’t make enough money; there’s no way I can afford to live the life I want.” Or perhaps you think you don’t need one, as you’ve always managed just fine.
What is the thought that is stopping you from budgeting?
Very few of us proactively plan our spending – many of us spend what we have and only do a budget when we start to notice we are spending more than we bring in and are heading into a financial crisis.
What if, instead, we proactively planned how to spend our money?
If we proactively planned our spending, we would have much higher odds of living the life we want instead of being controlled by our money – much like a ping pong ball in a pinball machine, which is how most of the world operates.
When starting over post-separation, having a spending plan, that is, a budget, allowed me to build the path to my dreams.
I needed to know where I stood financially, how much money was coming in, and how much would go out. I also needed to understand how and why I spent money.
At the time of my divorce, I was a stay-at-home mom and had been out of the workforce for five years. I also had a seven-year-old and a four-year-old that I had to care for on a shared parenting basis. In BC, where I live, having a shared parenting arrangement means that each parent must pay child support to their co-parent based on their total income for the most recently ended tax year. I didn’t have any reportable income for the past year, so I agreed that I could have an income of $30,000 imputed to me – this means that I could likely earn $30,000 for the coming year. Imputed income is not actual cash flow coming in, but it did mean that I would receive less child support from my co-parent.
I had about $1,000 per month coming in for child support, some government benefits ($120 per month) and nothing else. I also had zero cash reserves, but I did have RRSP savings and an accounting designation.
I also had done my budget – I needed another $1,000 monthly to cover the basics (housing and food).
I also knew, deep down, that there was no way I was going back to the work I had been doing before I had my children. The hours didn’t work, and it had been slowly destroying my soul as it was not aligned with my values. It would have certainly solved my money problems, though. I had made quite a bit more than the imputed $30,000.
So, while my budget seemed bleak (it proved I would have to scramble to cover everything), it created a path I could follow, and while I knew I would not be saving anything for a while, I would be living the life I wanted. I would have time to care for my children without worrying about childcare and have enough to cover the basics while creating a life that aligns with me.
An essential part of the budget process is knowing yourself.
Knowing yourself and your circumstances opens up an entirely new world. If you know what drives you and what you need in life, your budget will become the empowering tool it is meant to be, a tool to help you make decisions. It is not a set of instructions you have to follow for the rest of your life – just because we put that you get to spend $2000 a year on travel does not mean you can never spend a nickel more. You could take an extra job or cut back somewhere. Your budget allows you to decide where you save and spend your money, and if you know how you like doing this, then your budget combines with this knowledge to make the decisions work for you.
My strong understanding of my cash flow and financial and life circumstances allowed me to stay on my path. I dipped into my RRSP to pay for coaching and sold a few things to give me the extra cash flow I needed to keep afloat. Soon, friends who knew I needed work started giving me the odd accounting job to give me the additional cash flow I needed. At the same time, I built my business to become a collaborative professional supporting people navigating separation, and I then pivoted to become a financial coach. The first accounting gig I got was collections work – this was certainly not something I liked doing, but I knew it was a short-term term gig, and it led me to find other short-term accounting work and introduced me to people and their friends, many of whom would turn up in my life again in my new roles as a financial neutral and then a financial coach.
Ten years post-separation, I am truly living the life I want, and I’m still budgeting to keep living the life I want. Budgeting is a process that keeps us on the path to living our dreams.
by Renee leNobel | Dec 27, 2023 | Divorce, Finances, Parenting, Tools & Tips
We do not have to wait to find happiness somewhere in the distance sometime in the future. Our old ideas about the paths to joy have evolved; we can choose happiness now.
Do you feel stuck? Do you feel like you’re living in limbo? Do you think your destiny is to keep doing the same things repeatedly – tweaking your life as best you can to survive it? Are you at the mercy of someone else? Is your money controlling you? Are the systems you find yourself in trapping you in a life you didn’t sign up for? Do you feel sorry for yourself, unloved and alone?
There is a path out of limbo, but it’s hard to find and often hard to stay on once you find it, as it requires the evolution of your beliefs about the path to happiness.
The well-worn paths we can see in front of us are the ones we naturally follow and find ourselves on. The paths the world shows us are so well-trodden and easy to follow that we need to develop our minds and eyes to see the uncommon paths that will lead us to a better place.
It can be hard to head off on a path that no one else is taking, and it often seems like we are hand-delivered right to the start of those well-worn paths. What paths does the world hold out to us?
- To wait for someone to rescue us.
- To “fix” our lives until they are tolerable.
- To silently suffer until we do something dramatic to propel us out of limbo.
If you choose path one, waiting for someone to come to the rescue, you will likely wait a long time because more people need to be rescued than rescuers. Path one has us grab onto anyone who provides us with a glimmer of what is missing from our lives. Whether it is someone who is “nice,” “fun,” or “exciting” or provides us with a different experience from the limbo we find ourselves in. While doing something different can give us a mental boost for a time, eventually, we find ourselves back in limbo, as stuck as we ever were, but now we have one more person or pursuit to deal with. We have compounded our unhappiness because we begin to notice that even with this new person or a new hobby, we are still, deep down, unhappy.
Then there is path two: fixing what is wrong in our lives or a life lived in reaction. While path two relates to what will get you out of limbo, there is a fundamental flaw: you are often tweaking things to live a life someone else has suggested is the right way to live. Path two is the most soul-destroying and dangerous way to live. While path one can invite outside danger into your life, path two creates a situation where you take yourself down into a hole that can be difficult or impossible to climb.
In path two, you usually don’t have the resources or personality to live that imagined perfect life, but that doesn’t stop you from trying. You work hard to achieve the life reflected in the world around you (especially on social media) or try to live according to what your family has told you is the right way to live. You have a vision of what a happy life looks like, and off you head in that direction, “fixing” your circumstances and yourself to get there. You become the “people pleaser” and the “master of control,” all rolled into one. But it is impossible to please others, and you cannot control the world – chaos reigns. Path two is the path many of us take – and many of us persist for years and years, working hard to get to happiness and achieving as we go. But the cruel irony of path two is when you get to your desired destination (losing pieces of yourself along the way), you realize you are not happy. With this realization that your life has been a struggle for seemingly naught, you fall into anger or depression and often despair. Path two leads to path three.
People crash their way onto the third, often travelled path, from their combined anger and depression from having travelled path two. Path three begins by doing something dramatic. Doing something dramatic does propel us out of limbo, but we have little control over what happens next. Path three is like setting off a bomb, which, while it creates change, may lead to cleaning up the debris and fallout for years to come, making it impossible to find happiness.
Finding our path to happiness
Discovering our path to happiness requires personal evolution. If you feel stuck, it may be because you have followed the well-worn path that the world has pointed out. It may take time to recognize that you are following the wrong path, especially if everyone else is continuing along that path. Once you gain awareness that you are lost, stand still, evaluate your surroundings, and consider your resources before moving forward. Instead of rashly choosing any direction to escape being lost, stop and get your bearings.
With awareness, you can begin again on your journey, slowly and steadily and savouring each step. Begin enjoying the journey, reminding yourself to look for your path, one that may not look like anyone else’s. When uncertain about the next steps, pause again to get your bearings instead of succumbing to panic and remind yourself of who you are, what you dream of and what you carry with you before heading off again. You’ll gradually identify paths that align with you. Along the way, you will encounter fellow travellers with similar aspirations. Whether you continue independently or join others on the same path, you’ll begin to appreciate the fulfillment of navigating a journey aligned with you. Cultivating gratitude for your ability to rescue yourself and navigate a fulfilling path becomes a transformative journey. Carry on, and one day, you will stop, not to find your bearings, but to notice that you have finally found happiness – it is in you, and you carry it with you. Your thoughts have evolved, and you understand that happiness is not the destination – it is with you, every step along the path you take.
by Renee leNobel | Dec 14, 2016 | Divorce
It is pretty darn easy to get married. All you need is a license; it only costs $100! Of course, some people have fancy weddings, and yes, they take a lot to organize and can be costly. But you get a choice in doing that.
You don’t get the same choice when you are getting a divorce. It only takes one person to decide that they want out of a marriage. Not so with marriage – you both have to say, “I do.” In divorce, one person can file a claim for a divorce. If the other spouse does not deal with it, it goes to the court, and the judge decides. The court does not always make the best decisions regarding families, so I highly recommend that you try to work it out with your soon-to-be ex-spouse before it gets to the courts. Court is darn expensive, too – about $ 5,000 a day. That doesn’t include the cost of preparing to get to court.
I looked up how much it costs to get a divorce, too, and it is cheaper at $80 for a desk-order divorce (if you do all the paperwork yourself). That said, it is pretty impossible to do all the paperwork yourself. Here is a list of steps to getting a divorce in BC. The main sticking point is the Separation Agreement. Yes – that Separation Agreement. Mine was 149 pages long, and each and every one of those pages described something contentious. Oh, except for the signature page, and there were two pages for signatures. So, 147 pages. It’s no wonder it took us a year to get an agreement and felt like a full-time job (and why I refer to our agreement as the “BEAST).”
This is just a start to what you have to have in your agreement in British Columbia:
You have to agree on the date your relationship started. You’d think this would be easy! But I have had clients arguing about this. In one instance, the woman travelled a lot and had a post office box as her address when she first started dating her spouse. She would stay with her boyfriend when she was in town, but she argued that they weren’t living together yet. In other instances, people forget when they moved in together. Depending on the date the relationship started, there can be financial advantages/disadvantages to each person, so this is why it can lead to arguments.
Conversely, you have to agree when the relationship ends (this is usually more tricky). Some people feel the marriage ended years ago, and some still can’t believe it’s over. Again, there can be significant financial consequences depending on what date is decided upon.
You must figure out how to support your children regarding parenting time and money. This took a big chunk of time. A big chunk. Especially if one of the parties is the primary caregiver pre-separation, there is a lot of work to be done to build the trust necessary to start parenting the kids on an equal basis. There is also a lot of learning to be done. For example, did you know that if you have a fifty-fifty parenting arrangement, one parent may still have to pay child support to the other? I’ve explained that in another blog post.
Then, you have to start separating financial assets and debts. You may discover you have assets you didn’t even know about or debt (which is more often the case). In almost every file I’ve worked on, one person had racked up some debt and hadn’t told their spouse. That usually takes some time to sort out. I just worked on one file where an asset turned up at the last minute. How does that happen? You’d be surprised. Of course – both parties had different ideas about how to treat that asset.
Essentially, a Separation Agreement is an agreement that details every piece of how your life will be going forward. And you have to make this agreement with someone you probably don’t like. It takes time and a lot of emotional energy because you are usually in a pretty dark place when building it.
So
Wouldn’t it be great if you had to have a marriage agreement before you got married? How dumb is our society that allows people to go off and get married with a $100 license (that you can order online) when they are in the happy, blissful state called love? It’s super dumb. I can’t think of a fancier word to call it right now because my brain is fried trying to help clients figure out the numbers to put in their Separation Agreement. And I get to forget about it every day and go to sleep. They don’t.
Our current system allows anyone to get married, but there are so many rules before you can get divorced, and you have to follow them. If you disagree with them, the courts will make you agree.
What if you made your marriage agreement in that happy, blissful state of being soon-to-be married?
Well, it might save your marriage or you from marrying the wrong person.
It would certainly make your divorce a lot easier. Ask anyone who has gotten a divorce. I’m sure all divorced people wish they had made a Marriage Agreement. They are convinced, but what is that called? “Preaching to the converted.”
How do we get the word out to those uninitiated to the Divorce Club? Those happy, blissful people who want to get married?
I don’t know. I only ever see the aftermath of those without a marriage agreement. How about you? Can you help spread the word?
by Renee leNobel | Sep 26, 2016 | Divorce
If not, there’s a good reason.
My divorce was a Collaborative Divorce. What does that mean? On the surface, it means that you agree to keep your divorce out of the courts. That was one of the reasons why I agreed to try the process when I was getting a divorce from my husband. There had been more talk about the Collaborative Approach to Divorce at the time of our separation as the family law in British Columbia was undergoing a change and as part of that change, lawyers were required to begin informing their clients about Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR – an acronym that lawyers use a fair bit – did you know what it means?).
So we heard from many at that time that the Collaborative Approach to divorce was the new way to get a divorce. It was the better way and so those two concepts (new and better) convinced me and my husband at the time to try it to get our separation agreement so we could get a divorce.
So we tried it.
And I really did not like it.
Of course, divorce is incredibly stressful and trying to come to an agreement with someone that you are in conflict with is already a challenge so it is no wonder I didn’t like it. But I think I hated it even more than what I imagined the alternative was, which was to have a no holds barred fight.
I had been trained all my life to avoid conflict. Many of us are. I had also been trained to think I was a reasonable person that could deal with almost any situation. What this meant for me was that I tended to let things go a lot. But I didn’t really let them go. Instead, I buried them and sat on them and then tended to explode when I couldn’t do that anymore. That was where I was at when I finally separated from my spouse and had to figure out a way to now come to agreement so we could get a divorce.
The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the all consuming war that I had been training up for and which I have to say many of us envisage when we think divorce. We think fight. We think courts and nasty revenge. We think there will be at least one loser in this war and often there are two. We have been trained by society (TV really) to have a certain picture of what divorce looks like.
The first four way meeting in our Collaborative Divorce we went to with our lawyers I almost had a coronary. I should explain what a four way meeting is. It’s a meeting with you, your spouse, your lawyer and your spouse’s lawyer present. You get to a separation agreement by way of these four way meetings. I don’t know if either of our lawyers could have talked any slower. And the stuff that was coming out of their mouths? Seriously? I felt like I was back in kindergarten where I was being told how important it was to share. At the same time I was thinking “this is costing us two hourly lawyer rates to sit here and learn about manners.”
I already knew what the answer to our problem was and so sat through this “Collaborative Approach.” for 8 months until we got there. In the end, the agreement we got was pretty close to what I had wanted. “Hey – I guess the Collaborative Approach worked for us” is what I thought at the time.
Little did I know that I never really understood “Collaborative” even after we were done.
Why is that? How could I have spent 8 months in meetings with 4 different professionals that practiced the Collaborative Approach to divorce and still not understand how it was supposed to work? They had all explained how it was supposed to work – at the beginning of the process, during all the meetings and at the end where they said – “see, we have an agreement – it all came together.” And when I think back on it now, out from the fog of emotion, I know that they did. They were explaining it clearly but something was preventing me from hearing and understanding it.
How did that happen?
Well, I think part of the reason that happened is that I had each spent 40 years learning a different way to resolve conflict. I had spent my life learning how to avoid conflict. Then I had learned that if the conflict was still there and bothering me, I had to really stand up for myself and battle through to make that conflict go away. My belief about myself was that I don’t get all bent out of shape over minor issues but watch out if someone crosses me. I switch from being an avoider to being a highly motivated person who is going to win at all costs.
So instead of seeing how we had just resolved our conflict a different way than I knew; because how can you learn a new way of doing conflict in 8 months after spending your entire life training a different way to do conflict, I slotted our divorce into my old way of seeing things. I had avoided separating from my husband and then when I realized it was unavoidable, I found a solution and hammered it through. Because deep down, I felt like I had been the one driving our agreement process. I had made sure the meetings happened, I made sure my ex did the “homework” and I made sure our agreement got signed.
And….
How can you learn a new way of doing conflict when you are at your most emotional point in life? I was not calm or rational. I was alternating between being sad and angry on a minute by minute basis. The only thing I was focused on was revenge. I could not hear a thing those professionals were telling me. I was living in an extremely stressful situation where I was sharing a house with a person I did not want to have anything to do with anymore and I had two small children that I was extremely worried about. I was not at my best for learning new concepts.
So, while we used the Collaborative Approach to divorce, it was only on the surface. We stayed out of court. Oh wait – no we didn’t. We ended up in court after we were separated and divorced.
Our agreement allowed us to get a divorce but we were still in conflict and were still not able to resolve it. We reverted to our old patterns and styles of managing conflict as soon as we were released from our professional team.
I think this is what it is like for many people. Everyone has learned a certain style of conflict. Some people may have learned a more collaborative approach to resolving conflict and when they enter the Collaborative Approach to divorce, they get it and things progress and it works.
So what about the rest of us? Those of us who have been trained throughout life not to do things collaboratively?
We need more help. We have to be told again and again what it means and how it works because it is a difficult concept to grasp when you are in the midst of emotional upheaval and have years of resolving conflict in a different way.
I myself only started to understand what it meant about a year after my divorce was finalized and after I had started to train to become a Collaborative professional myself. Here is part 1 and part 2 of posts I wrote when I finally did start to understand what Collaborative means.
Now I find myself helping people with their own Collaborative Divorces. I have heard them say exactly what I said during my divorce: the meetings with the Collaborative professionals are slow, it doesn’t seem like actual issues are being addressed and the divorce is not progressing.
These words have become signals for me to sit up and pay attention. I have to remind myself how much time it took me to understand how Collaborative works. I realize that the best way I can help people is to help them gain that understanding too. I have to fight my natural inclination to go back to my life training to be a problem solver and solve these people’s problems and remember instead I am helping to facilitate a Collaborative process so they can figure out the best way to move forward with hope.
by Renee leNobel | Jan 19, 2016 | Parenting
When I think back on my life when my first born was in his first year, I recall thinking that I was soooo glad that I wasn’t a single parent. I was in awe of people that were living as single parents.
Fast forward a number of years and I find myself living as a single parent of two spirited boys for half of my life. The other half I am footloose and fancy free (well, not really, for the other half I’m catching up on work that I didn’t get done when the kids were with me).
So I don’t think of myself as a true single parent…except on the days that I am. Fortunately, I don’t have much time to self-reflect on those days but occasionally some thoughts creep in such as “single parenting really sucks.”
On those days I wake up at my usual 5:30am (as my body just won’t stay asleep – darn morning person genes) and I sneak to my work nook and start working to maximize my time. That is, if I manage to sneak quietly enough so my morning child doesn’t hear me get up. He has instant mommy sense and knows when I’m awake. He will follow me down and start pestering me with “can I watch TV?” So if I do manage it, then I work. If I don’t manage to dodge the kid then I get sucked into entertaining him until his late-sleeping brother wakes up. I make their breakfast and lunch and hustle them out the door for school. I come back, work, work, work and then get them from school, make dinner, clean up mounds of detritus that they haul home from school with them, get them to bed and then try to work some more only to pass out and wake up to do it all over again. Was that a run-on-sentence? I think it mirrors well what my days are like when I have the kids.
Occasionally my kids’ dad goes away on work trips and I have the kids for two week or more stretches. It is during those stretches that I realize how well and truly being a single parent sucks and I thank my lucky stars that I will get a break in the near future to recover when my co-parent comes back.
Of course, having a co-parent isn’t all rosy. After all, my co-parent and I could not live together for many reasons and so it is still quite challenging to parent together. Some days when we are having significant differences of opinion I start to think to myself that I would love to be a single parent and be in control of the situation and not have to deal with my unreasonable co-parent.
Then I get the kids back and try to figure out a way to deal with my co-parent again.
My experience is leading me to some pretty set ideas about how to make my life run more smoothly.
The first idea is that single parents need a lot of support. A lot. I have been working at building myself that support.
What kind of support do I need? I need breaks to recharge. These breaks don’t have to be everyday but I need to know that they are coming so I can continue to get myself up everyday to power through when I do have the kids. I also need people who are in a similar situation that I can talk to. It also helps to know that if I do crater, I have a backup plan (i.e. my co-parent).
I have been working at implementing this system for the past few years and it is getting there. Society is beginning to recognize that being a single parent is hard and there is support out there if you look for it. I also build my own and I started to do this because my friends, family and society understand that single parenting is hard and so pester me to find support.
The other idea that has been flitting around in my head is that society tends to talk about single moms but not so much about single dads. They are out there too and they also need support. My brain has been wondering if dads have had this idea planted into their brains enough. We all hear about single moms, but what about single dads? Is there support for them?
The reason I’m wondering about this is because I’m relying on my co-parent to be there when I need that break. I’m also wondering if dads have been hearing the message that they need support. If they are not hearing this message, then they are not going out to get it. I’ve done a brief survey on the internet of support for single dads and the closest support group I could find was in Toronto on the other side of the country. Perhaps this is why dads often seem to jump into new relationships more frequently than women. They need to get another “mom” involved to help because there aren’t societal structures in place for dads.
My last thought on this subject is that for me to rely on my co-parent, I have to get along with him and him with me. I’m not going to ask him for help if I’m not speaking to him.
I have gone through stages where I’ve been fairly angry with my co-parent. I was at my angriest when we first separated. I held myself back from going in for the kill during our divorce process and chose the Collaborative approach to divorce where both parties agree to stay out of the court system. I chose this based on my understanding that it is conflict between parents that affects kids most. I chose the path of least conflict and convinced my co-parent to do the same. It is only now that I realize that this path has benefited me and my lifestyle as a parent going forward. I can talk with my co-parent and through this process we have developed systems and strategies for getting along. What would we have done if we had both gone for the jugular and dragged the other through the court process? One major support system would be gone for both of us. Who suffers? Kids who have burnt out parents and of course parents.
If you are embarking on a life as a single parent, understand it is hard. Try to build in systems that will support and sustain you to live as a single parent.
