The Most Expensive Mistakes You Can Make in a Divorce
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There are a lot of things to consider when paying for a divorce. Digging up hidden assets, accounting for legal fees, calculating the cost of life as a single person, and there's also a lot of room for emotions to get in the way. You have to think about the fact that this is a process that could end up

causing you financial harm if you don't think through some of the consequences of how you're coming at the whole issue. And if you don't think through the fact that the person you were going to be post-divorce is not the same as the person you were who got married. But luckily, there are ways to prevent these mistakes before they happen.

We'll talk with Wall Street Journal contributor Joanne S. Lublin about what you need to know to avoid these divorce-related money pitfalls. That's after the break.

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Divorce can be painful and expensive, but if you're able to take lessons from other couples' costly mistakes, you can hopefully minimize the financial strain. WSJ contributor Joanne S. Lublin joins me to talk more. Joanne, you interviewed a variety of lawyers and financial professionals for your story, which is linked in our show notes. I'm curious what they had to say.

Why is divorce such a high-cost enterprise? Because it's taking a toll on you both emotionally and monetarily. And what frankly makes divorces super costly is the fact that people get too caught up in the emotional side. And it then lasts a long time to get divorced while the meter's running, no pun intended.

for those divorce attorneys. You highlight five of the costliest mistakes divorcing couples make. One of the big things people miscalculate is their cash flow as a single person. How does someone stop that overspending before it gets out of hand? You need to think through the fact that you're going to be a different person post-divorce

not just in terms of your marital status, but in terms of your financial status. You now are going to be not only supporting yourself and supporting a separate household, you may also need a place to live where you can share custody or at least have your kids visit.

And so it's important before that divorce gets final to do some realistic cash flow projections that not only look at what your income is going to likely look like, but how your expenses are going to change.

And I know for a lot of my friends and family members who have been divorced, they've also never lived as a single person as an adult. That's absolutely true. Plus, you may have done a lot of things jointly, but the other partner, the other spouse, was the primary earner or was the person who carried the cost of that particular item. And so all those various music subscriptions that you've got,

or other kinds of what might be considered not terribly essential costs of living, but are part of what makes life enjoyable, are things that are now going to be your solo responsibility. Maybe after the divorce, you end up then taking possession of the house, but the other spouse was the one who took care of the lawn. Well, now you're either going to have to learn how to take care of the yard or hire somebody to do your lawn care.

And sometimes in a divorce, one party is accused of hiding assets. How can someone make sure they're seeing every card on the table? There's absolutely no way to see every card on the table, whether it comes to the issue of hiding assets or lots of other issues that occur in divorce.

The reason that some spouses hide their assets in advance of seeking a divorce is that once a divorce has been filed for, each spouse has to submit a financial disclosure. If they've hidden those assets in advance, then they're not going to show up in those financial disclosures. So one way you can avoid the possibility of the spouse hiding those assets is

is by filing for divorce first before the other spouse has the inkling that you want to break up the marriage and therefore head off the possibility of hiding assets. If you think assets have been hidden despite any steps you've taken to try and make sure it didn't happen, and it can be costly, obviously, depending on how long it takes,

You can hire a private investigator to try and do an asset search, or you can use a forensic accountant. Usually that is someone that is retained through your divorce attorney.

You write so insightfully, too, about the illiquid assets. And some folks are guilty of discounting these or undervaluing them. Can you tell us more about what these assets are and why they're so important in a divorce? It's something that is really hard to get rid of easily or hard to get rid of easily without incurring some kind of penalty.

Think about, for instance, an individual retirement account, an IRA. If you end up then withdrawing from it before you reach a certain age, there's going to be penalties, there's going to be extra taxes.

Another illiquid asset is something like real estate. And so I cite an example in the story in which there was a female client of a financial advisor whose husband wanted to evenly split all their assets.

but they included a 401k. And they also included some private equity holdings that were not totally liquid. So in this case, the financial advisor, Stacey Francis, advised her client, who was a stay-at-home mother, to take only the liquid brokerage accounts.

Because she knew that her client could more easily sell those holdings and therefore supplement her future income. And of course, divorce isn't a purely financial process. It's an emotional one, too. And you interviewed Maggie Kim. She's a musician and writer of Divorce or Die, the newsletter. And she said her divorce cost so much and dragged on so long precisely because of the emotions at hand.

What lessons does she want other people to take from her experience? One of the things that she advises is to treat divorce as a business transaction, not an emotional transaction. And if you view it as a business transaction, you will then be a little bit more emotionally detached. And to make sure you don't get your emotions running wild and therefore running up your legal costs,

She suggests that you put together a support army. These are friends, relatives, individuals that know and you trust. And so before you send off that nasty text to your soon-to-be ex about what do you mean you want custody of the kids, you have that support army read over your proposed text, even though you think you've been cool and calm about how you drafted it, and probably shorten it

and take out a few of the all caps or bad looking emojis. I think the most important theme here overarching to the story is you have to think about the fact that this is a process that could end up causing you financial harm if you don't think through some of the consequences of how you're coming at the whole issue.

And if you don't think through the fact that the person you were going to be post-divorce is not the same as the person you were who got married. That's WSJ contributor Joanne S. Lublin. And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Osborough with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Julia Carpenter for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.