Hopefully you’ve noticed that I’m on a little giveaway spree at the moment. Two lucky email subscribers have won a copy The Rebound DVD starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Justin Bartha, and one lucky reader won Divorce After Fifty. How did they win? It was simple – they were selected at random from my email subscribers. Easy. Simple.

This week, I have another giveaway – a $25 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. Now, who couldn’t use that? Entering is simple – you just have to sign up to receive my blog updates and newsletters by email. I’ll be drawing the winner at random on Friday May 4, at 4 p.m. MT. The winner needs to respond to my notification email within 24 hours and must have a U.S. mailing address.

It doesn’t matter what age you are when your marriage ends, you need to work out a plan for your financial independence after divorce. That could be quite straight-forward if you’re working full-time already earning a salary that will support yourself and your children. It’s more complicated if you’re working part-time or you’re a stay-at-home and it gets even more complicated the longer you’ve been out of the workforce.

Nancy B was in her fifties when she divorced after twenty-one years of marriage. Although she’d had a career when she got married, she’d become a stay-at-home mom and had been working in her husband’s business. She did not get lifetime spousal support so I asked her to talk about how she’s managing for money and if she has a plan for financial independence. Here’s Nancy B:

Well, it is a challenge, yeah. I need to be earning more money. Right now it’s great because I have my stuff in storage, so I have to pay my living expenses, but I don’t have to pay any rent, and it is cheaper to live here, for sure.

I got spousal support which will run out at the end of this year and he bought me out of the house . We had some investments, so I have some money, I just don’t want to go through it all because I don’t have a big retirement so I need to be smart.

I looked for a job when I was in California and I was never able to find an actual job job, so I’ve been freelancing, I have my own work for communications and my website, and I do work a lot through other PR firms, but I think I might have a better chance here, or in another state, of actually finding a job where they pay my health insurance and all that, which I would love.

Out in Los Angeles, there’s so many PR people that we’re just tripping over each other. Most of the jobs are in LA proper or in Orange County. Out where I lived, they’d be a very long drive to anything of any quality job. Even though I was applying, I’m fifty-six, so I’m kind of aged out, but hopefully that won’t make as much of a difference here. If I could go back and do things over, I would have really worked harder, harder, harder to get a job to have that stability and to have my health insurance paid.

Now one of my closest friends really wants to separate, but she has that old belief “I have to wait until my last one’s done with high school,” so he’s a sophomore now, and I keep telling her, “You need to make more friends and you need to be putting money aside.” I also told her to see a couple of attorneys now. Most attorneys will see you for a small fee or not for any fee, for the first time. Find out where your rights are in.

Planning ahead is really important if you can. It’s a crazy time. It’s just a crazy, crazy time. It’s like the ground under you let’s go and even though I desperately wanted it, it was so very hard and very upsetting. I think it’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.

When you’re trying to figure out your financial plan, there’s two sides to the equation – income and expenses. What Nancy B’s done is to trim her expenses to just her daily living expenses and she’s saving a significant amount by not having any housing expenses. That means that the income she gets and her savings may last longer and that gives her some more time to figure out her next phase. If you’ve been a SAHM or working in a family business, deciding what to do to balance the budget isn’t always easy or obvious and buying yourself time to think it through is smart. But don’t procrastinate … the penalty for putting it off could be having to take a job you don’t really love.

My divorce happened at a time when I’d taken severance from my corporate job and had gone back to college. I had health insurance through the university but one slip on the ice around graduation time, thankfully with no injuries, quickly reinforced that I needed a job with health insurance benefits. I ended up working at the university in an administrative position. It’s not the job I imagined doing but it’s worked out very well and allows me time to do what I really want to do … which is this. Even so, the job has it’s perks …getting to see President Obama when he visited campus recently will be a hard one to beat but for sure, the health insurance (and the hormones it covers!) is what let’s me sleep.

Have you figured out your plan for financial independence? How are you increasing your income? What helped you reduce your expenses?

Thank You Nancy B!

This is the last post in Nancy B’s series so a huge thank you to her for sharing her story. I met Nancy B when I attended the BlogHer Writer’s conference in last September. We immediately connected and I’ve really appreciated the moral support she’s given me. She does write a blog but asked me not to share that for privacy reasons … I completely understand her concerns and will honor her wishes but at the same time I wish I could tell you her blog because I enjoy reading it. The good news for me though is that I’ll get to catch up with Nancy B in person again when I go to BlogHer ’12 in August.

Coming Next

Nancy B’s story raised the age-old question of when is the best time for divorce and I thought it would be interesting to explore that question some more. So coming soon I have Sarah’s story – her parents divorced when she was twelve and she is now in her thirties. She’ll be talking about how their divorce felt at the time and how it feels now. However, regular readers know that I like to mix things up a little between stories so before you hear from Sarah …

• I also turned to the research and found an academic study on how delaying divorce affects children, and I’ll be posting about that;
• I’m a member of Blogher’s Life Well Lived panel and as part of that I have a post about how blogging, journaling, writing and connecting online help to increase my happiness;
• I have a post on what I learned about dating from the movie, We Bought a Zoo with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson – I thought I’d already posted it here but apparently not so I’ll publishing that;
• And … since it’s a new month, I have a guest post from financial blogger, Suzanne Cramer. This month’s topic is related to Nancy B’s story and specifically this post as Suzanne talks about setting your goals for financial independence after divorce.

Photo credit: 401K

It’s stating the obvious to say that divorce changes everything but for some people everything means literally everything and it can create new opportunities. Nancy is one of those people. She and her husband had been married for twenty-one difficult years and at the time of their divorce, they worked together in his business which he then sold. Their daughter was heading off to college and at the same time, Nancy B’s sister needed help with their mother. Here’s Nancy B:

My sister and her husband, who live in Minnesota, also have a home in Florida and they go there every winter. My sister takes care of our mom, she’s 91 and even if she didn’t have dementia, she just needs a lot of help doing things. So my sister asked if I would move to Minnesota to take of mom while she went to Florida.

She’ll be back in May, so then I’ll have five months when I don’t know what I’m going to be doing because all my stuff is in storage in California. I don’t think I’m going back to California, at least not for a while, and I plan to be back here next winter.

I think I needed a big change, I needed to shake things up, even though I was divorced, it was like when does a marriage really end? When you’re so intertwined with someone with having a child together, working together for many years…when does it end?

When we separated, we were still working together, so we talked to each other all the time, we’d have meetings together, I was over at the house. Then everything kind of converged at one time. He then sold his business, and I didn’t care for the new owner. He continued to work for the new owner for some time. I really didn’t care for the new owner, so I said I really didn’t want to keep working for him. My ex’s  girlfriend moved in with him and my daughter went off to school.

Everything kind of happened at the same time. It was just time. Everything fell together. I was needed here, but I also needed it for myself. I needed to make a break.

I had been living in an area that’s very pretty…it’s outside of LA, south of Santa Barbara, twenty minutes outside Malibu, really, really pretty area, lots of great hiking and mountains. I lived right by a lake, but I wasn’t meeting new people. It’s a very family-oriented area and I’m kind of beyond that now. There’s not much of a single life, and it’s hard to meet new people. So it was like, “OK, I’m going to do this, I’m just going to do it, for my mom and for myself.”

Where I am now is where I was born in 1955. It hasn’t grown that much. When I was growing up there were 4,000 people, now it’s 4,300. No real industry, it’s a rural, a farming town, basically. I felt it was such a step down. I’m used to seeing Broadway quality plays, I’m a big museum person. Where I lived we had this incredible library, I’m a big library person. I love to go out to new restaurants. Well, there’s none of that there.

We do have a library, but there are no great places to eat, no really even good places to eat, no great places to shop. We have a Wal-Mart, that’s the big thing. It’s just a very, very small town. Where I was in LA, if you wanted to take yoga, you could choose from probably ten different places within a ten or fifteen mile radius. Well there’s like one woman who teaches yoga, two classes a week here.

I just thought I was going to wither and die but at the same time, I felt like I had to get away and actually it hasn’t been that bad, it really hasn’t. It’s refreshing to not have so many choices, if that makes any sense, does that resonate at all?

In some ways it just makes life simpler and my mom really needs me and it’s nice to be needed. We never had a good relationship, and this is kind of a healing process. I think because of the dementia, she tells me all the time how much she loves me and how much she appreciates me…when she can remember my name, you know. But, I think it’s been very, very good. It’s not really closure, it’s coming to terms with things.

There’s a lot of beauty in this part of Nancy B’s story. There’s certainly an element of “meant to be,”  of natural synchronicity. Taking care of her mom is life coming full circle while at the same time giving Nancy B some time to transition to the next phase of her life. And I love her perspective that being with her mom is about acceptance of what has been. It creates such a calm, a peace.

Page Lambert is another of my guests who after twenty-five years of marriage returned to her home town to take care of her mom. Page says that doing that was probably the most important part of life in the five years since her divorce.

I know my mum hoped she wouldn’t have to endure a long illness – my grandfather had a series of increasingly debilitating strokes and my grandmother had cancer. Well she was spared that, she died very suddenly and unexpectedly about six months after I was married. For a long time I felt she left without saying goodbye. I know that it doesn’t make sense to say that because she had no control over it. She would have said goodbye if she’d had the chance but it is how I felt and I still feel there was too much left unsaid …

Nancy B talks about needing a big change and of course, being an empty nester makes that a lot more doable. A word of caution though … as we know, divorce is one of life’s most stressful events and when we’re stressed we don’t make our best decisions. So be careful about making decisions that involve long term commitments or large investments during this period. Nancy is doing this the smart way – her belongings are in storage so she’ll still have them should she decide to return to LA. She’s living in her sister’s house so she hasn’t bought a house and that keeps her options open. Buying into a business at this time is another example of a decision that it might be best to delay.

What about you? Do you feel you need a big change? What sort of changes are you planning?

Photo credit: myoldpostcards

One of the challenges of life after divorce is watching your ex change, change in ways you’ve wanted, change for the better. Nancy B had pleaded with her husband for years to get better help for his fears and anxiety and once she’d moved out, he did. Here’s Nancy B:

Once I moved out, within a week he had a new therapist who changed his medication, got him on a step-by-step desensitization program to get over his phobias, and the big phobia about staying alone. Then lo and behold he immediately got a roommate because he said, “I can’t live alone,”

So she moved in like the day after I left. To show you how bad it was, he couldn’t even stay alone that one night, he had to go stay with his sister. Then the roommate didn’t work out because he started treating her like he’d treat me. She’d say, “Oh, I’m going to be gone this weekend,” and he’d say, “Oh, no, I really would prefer you not.” She moved out less than eight weeks later and said, “You are a freaking lunatic, Mister!” She packed her bags and left, never to be heard from again.

I left in June and then by August, he was living on his own, and enjoying it. Just so ironic.

Also, two weeks after I moved out, after him saying he couldn’t live without me, he was on J Date, an online Jewish dating site.  He started to have coffee with people or a glass of wine or whatever, and then two weeks later, after meeting probably a dozen women, he met this woman and liked her. He met someone and they dated for a couple years and now she finally moved in last September. She’s pretty sane, she doesn’t put up with his crap. She was like, “Well, that’s your stuff and you have to deal with it.” She works a lot of long hours, so she’s not there a lot.  My daughter loves her, she’s a really nice woman, so I’m very grateful,

My daughter (who is a freshman in college now) had a terrible relationship with him for about a year, did not want to spend much time with him, didn’t spend much time with him, would come home crying a lot, said how much she hated him, went back in therapy because he was so awful, using her to get to me, and pumping her for information and fighting about money, and just on and on and on because he’s just so absorbed in himself.

He finally came out of things like a year later, he turned back into a human being, and now they have a really good relationship, and she’s really, really close to him, which is great, I’m glad!

He kept the family home when we moved out, and she loves his new partner, his girlfriend, and our family dog is there, so she really wants to go spend time there. She gets to see friends, but she wants to see me, too, and now he and I get along fine, no animosity…we’re on good terms. I was Skyping with her the other day and he came in, he sat down so the three of us were having this conversation and kidding around, reminiscing about the past.

I haven’t forgotten what we went through, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night anymore.

Michelle Leath is another of my recent guests who watched her ex change after their divorce and wondered if her marriage could have been saved. It’s tempting to think like that but before you start dreaming of romantic reconciliations, I think it’s important to recognize that the dynamics between you and your STBX have changed. Quite possibly you are no longer the person you were in the marriage and he may not be the person he was. Just because your relationship as co-parents is now working does not mean you could go back to being lovers.

Another of my guests, author Judy Osborne talks about how events and commitments can keep you bound to your ex . In particular she’s seen many couples who after the trauma of divorce do manage to reach a benign space that allows once again for a caring relationship. Sometimes, adding new partners into the mix can help. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula for reaching that space – it almost certainly involves time but how much depends on the couple. It can also involve an event, sometimes to do with a child, that brings a new perspective. It sounds like Nancy B has reached that space.

How’s your relationship with your ex? Do you feel you’re moving to a relationship of acceptance? What is helping you?

(I do just have to add that Nancy and I chuckled over the poor roommate. Can you imagine moving in only to find out you’ve moved in to be a babysitter to a grown man? It would unfold like a horror movie …Imagine the conversations at work!)

Photo credit: idogcow