What is a Divorce Financial Planner

By Lili A. Vasileff,CFP®, CDFA™
President of the Association of Divorce Financial Planners

The choices you make during your divorce will impact your financial future, sometimes indefinitely.  Do not face your divorce unprepared. You retain a lawyer to provide legal advice and guide you through the legal process. Similarly, during your time of crisis and anxiety, you are entitled to a highly qualified financial expert who analyses and advocates for your financial needs now and for the future.

The scope of divorce financial planning is integral to every legal process: litigation, mediation, and collaborative divorce.  Each party experiences a significant shift in their financial situation. Without assistance, the changes that occur can be a tipping point relative to your financial well being. Understanding the impact of financial decisions in both the short and long-term, as they pertain to your lifestyle, is knowledge you are entitled to and which is priceless. A divorce financial planner is a financial expert who assists both the client(s) and the professional in a cost efficient manner throughout the divorce process.  A divorce financial planner is a fee only practitioner who charges an hourly fee for their unbiased and objective financial expertise.  A divorce financial planner places the clients’ interests first and provides comprehensive financial planning advice that guides individuals to a reasonable, practical and workable outcome.

A Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) is the highest mark in the personal financial planning industry.  Combined with being trained as a divorce financial planner, this financial expert has a strong financial planning background and proven track record,  is trained specifically in the financial issues of divorce, and has an interdisciplinary knowledge of practical standards and state divorce laws.  A divorce financial planner with all of these qualifications can be invaluable and help you by:

• Providing specialized financial planning services within the context of divorce laws specific to your state
• Assisting you with the gathering, organizing and preparing of documentation of income, expenses, assets and liabilities.
• Providing you with on-going financial education, guidance and analysis throughout the divorce process
• Providing you with projections for the long-term impact of financial decisions
• Assisting you with the post divorce asset transfers, estate planning considerations, and long term financial planning goals.

Ultimately, a divorce financial planner can educate you, ensure you make well-informed decisions, give you peace of mind that your settlement is practical, and increase your satisfaction by reducing stress.

A divorce financial planner is the only professional who during the course of divorce is focused on providing both basic and sophisticated answers to questions such as:

• How much house can I afford?
• How much life insurance is needed to serve as collateral for support obligations and future needs?
• How do I prioritize which debts to pay off first?
• How do I protect my credit rating from my spouse’s negative actions?
• If my spouse is a business owner, could he/she use the cloak of recession to nose dive earnings. Can this tactic work?
• Is the spouse’s share of the pension limited to the amount of earnings during the marriage only; will it not be increased due to additional work beyond the divorce?
• When it comes to dividing assets during a divorce, are there any specific guidelines one should keep in mind?
• What does it mean to hide assets and what are some common strategies?  How do we find them?
• How much may fault influence a financial settlement?
• What are the tax implications of child support, alimony or unallocated support – are there other pros and cons too to be aware of?
• How do I plan for the unexpected? How do I plan for my future?
• What are the financial things I need to change post divorce?  Is there a checklist of common tasks?

The list of issues to address may be long and each case is unique.  The need for expertise, guidance, and forward planning remains the constant. A divorce financial planner is the point person for pulling all of the historic information together as well as for making specific financial recommendations that enable an individual to move forward post divorce with a sense of confidence and security.

Lili A. Vasileff, CFP®, CDFA™, is president of the Association of Divorce Financial Planners (ADFP).