The emotional wreckage of late-middle age divorce can raise chilling images: isolation, financial ruin, dark imaginings of ending your life “eating cat food under a bridge,” says Helen Stephens, founder of Aspen Wealth Management in Fort Worth, Texas.
Two such grim tales stand out for her. First, the financial crash wrecked one man’s company as divorce then wrecked his marriage. Second, a split with her husband brought one woman face to face with the realities of taking a lower paying job.
The man was a victim of the Great Recession. “He owned his own company, but in 2008 times got really hard,” Stephens says. “His business didn’t succeed. Once you’ve been self-employed for a while, it’s hard to transition back into the workforce. He has to come to grips with life not looking the same anymore.” The strain took a toll on his marriage.
Married for 15 years, this 50-something man with several kids also lost the potential backup of an alternative household income – as well as his partner in decision-making, what Stephens calls “that person to knock an idea off of at seven at night. It’s more challenging when you had that companionship, more difficult when you’ve been on a winning team that breaks up.”
The man came to Stephens a little less than a year ago, primarily for help with budgeting. He continues to seek employment. “We trimmed as much as we can,” Stephens says. “Sold the primary residence, shaved every expense we can to bring in line the outflows. But there’s still minimal inflow.”
His mindset now? “He’s gone from panicky yet hopeful, to despondent,” she says. “People in that situation start questioning everything. ‘Here I was, making all this money ...’ Until there’s an income, there’s not much more I can do for him except be positive and look for positive opportunities.”
In the case of the divorced woman, also in her 50s, she secured some assets in settlement from her marriage. Yet her income prospects have dimmed because she gave up a high-powered career almost two decades ago to raise children.
“After this time, she’s essentially unemployable for any job for any kind of salary like she had when she left the workforce,” Stephens says.
This ex-married’s tack: Grab the bootstraps. “She’s gone to pure austerity measures regarding spending, taken a minimum-wage job working crazy hours because she’s so fearful about money.” The woman remodeled her whole standard of living to get by on some $40,000 a year; she’s also managed to buy a small house.
The woman is also, says Stephens, highly atypical of clients in similar binds. “There’s usually a period [in emotional situations] when you know all this is happening and you’re sad, then you come out of the fog. She didn’t give herself that time. She just said, ‘I know I won’t get my job back from my former life.’ She got a new job – and that’s that much less that she needs to pull off her portfolio.”
No matter the attitudes, both people must now navigate a new life alone. “They just needed somebody who can really understand their situation and then guide them,” said Stephens. “Part of my job is listening, and passing tissues.”
Follow AdviceIQ on Twitter at @adviceiq.
AdviceIQ delivers quality personal finance articles by both financial advisors and AdviceIQ editors. It ranks advisors in your area by specialty, including small businesses, doctors and clients of modest means, for example. Those with the biggest number of clients in a given specialty rank the highest. AdviceIQ also vets ranked advisors so only those with pristine regulatory histories can participate. AdviceIQ was launched Jan. 9, 2012, by veteran Wall Street executives, editors and technologists. Right now, investors may see many advisor rankings, although in some areas only a few are ranked. Check back often as thousands of advisors are undergoing AdviceIQ screening. New advisors appear in rankings daily.