Oh. Have I got your attention? I thought that that headline would do it. Sure, it’s a bold claim. It’s also 100-percent true. Allow me to explain.

This might seem like a silly question. “Are you over-taxing your clients?” You’re not a tax collector. You’re not the IRS. You’re a family-law attorney. And no, I’m not talking about “taxing” in the figurative sense, like “putting a burden on them.” I’m talking about good old-fashioned death-and-taxes taxes.

I see it all the time. Family-law attorneys opt to bring me in to a case, as a financial expert, only when they “hit a wall” on something specialized, far downstream in the case. For everything else, they’ve “seen it all,” and “done it before,” and so all of that “basic” stuff is regarded as a do-it-yourself or DIY project.

As a family-law attorney, I know you like to get a sense of closure when you wrap up a divorce case. Once you get the decree, you’re ready, mentally, to move on to other cases.

Given my experience as a CPA, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional, and a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst® professional (not to mention a divorcée), I was recently asked, “Is there such a thing as a good divorce?” I didn’t even have to think about it. “No.” There isn’t. Every divorce is bad, is painful, is expensive. That said, there are ways that you can make a divorce “less bad”... with my help.

As much as We The People like to take swipes at our elected representatives, they actually did something very nice, pertaining to divorce, a few years ago, and I’m continually surprised by how pleasantly surprised so many family-law attorneys are when they learn about it. It’s like a little gift from above.

I recently worked on a case for a client of mine (a woman facing divorce), and the opposing counsel did everything they could to belittle me and make me look incompetent. Guess what happened after the case closed? That same attorney reached out to me, to help them on a new case of theirs. I laughed. I was flattered. In this article, I’d like to take down some poorly-rooted assumptions about what I do.

As a family-law attorney, I know you like to get a sense of closure when you wrap up a divorce case. Once you get the decree, you’re ready, mentally, to move on to other cases.

Divorce is overwhelming. But you can get through it. And you can get through it more easily if you follow these four simple yet essential steps: