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Divorce Rebuild & Rise: Your Recovery Roadmap · The Diva Details

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Welcome to the Diva Details. Welcome to the Diva Detaila.
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Where bold, confident women embrace life unapologetically.
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From love and sex to wellness and reinvention. We keep it.
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Well, hello. This is Diva Mia. Today, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about
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how to rebuild after divorce.
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Divorce is not just separation of a relationship. It can weave its way into
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your money, into your identity, into your emotions, and even into motherhood.
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You need to have a recovery plan. Just like anything, when there's a natural
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disaster, you need a recovery plan.
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If your house burns down, you need a recovery plan.
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And a divorce breaks through all structures of your life and you need a recovery
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plan. But it doesn't have to define your future and it doesn't get to.
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Because today we're going to discuss how to recover financially,
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emotionally from divorce so that you can move on and have a much better life. It is a process.
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It's not instant. No matter how fast you want to move it, no matter what happened
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into the divorce, it's going to be a process.
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What happens with divorce for a lot of women is that your income disappears
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overnight. You may have been in a business partner relationship with your spouse.
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You may have been a stay-at-home mom. You may have been a top producer in whatever industry you're in.
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And then divorce kind of pulls the rug out from under you, and you just,
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you emotionally collapse for a little bit.
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What happens is then your assets, they're going to be divided.
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A lot of times they're unfairly divided, or they're divided under pressure.
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For instance, if your spouse cheated, and they ripped your entire identity out
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from underneath you, you may
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push through a divorce in order to just move on, to get away from them.
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It happens where you have a business together and you have to abandon it and
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just to be done with the relationship.
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Or you have years of unpaid labor as a stay-at-home mom.
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Now you went uncompensated and now you have to reenter the workforce and you
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don't have the skill set to get to the salary and the lifestyle that you are accustomed to.
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Society often expects women just to bounce back gracefully, to keep your head
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up and just within a couple months to be back to normal. I have had it even
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from friends where I was three months divorced and still in kind of a depressive state.
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I had a friend actually say, when are you going to get over it?
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It's been three months already.
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Everybody heals at their own time, but you need to realize that you need to
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take your time and fully heal, too.
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That can be challenging when you need to be the primary breadwinner for your family.
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So let's talk strategy, how to keep your dignity and your power, but not just survive.
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Survival is where you're going to be for a while, I will say.
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Most people fall back into a survival mode where you're just making it.
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Or you're under what's making it. The truth is, is divorce is not just emotional.
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It is a full-on economic shock.
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Some of the problems happen is because you had shared income.
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If you had one household sharing both of your income, now you have two.
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Your expenses are going to go up immediately overnight, and you didn't necessarily get a raise.
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With the shared income loss, you're losing part of their income as well.
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Even if you were working full-time, you might lose your health insurance.
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Sometimes your retirement contributions will go down. Thank you.
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If you had a business, your business equity might disappear.
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You may have an immediate hit
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to your financial situation and as well as a credit standing may go down.
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I think a lot of people may stay in relationships because they don't want to
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go through all this. Because once you lose your financial confidence,
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it takes a little bit to repair.
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It's a lot when you get, especially if you've been in a marriage or a relationship
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for a really long time, once you're wrapped in tightly with them financially,
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it's difficult to get out.
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Many women will leave divorce asset poor, but they leave it responsibility rich,
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meaning they're taking care of the kids.
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They're still carrying all the mental load for the children all by themselves now.
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They have to take care of their schedules and have stability for the children all by themselves.
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Men do sometimes too, don't get me wrong. But whoever's the primary care provider,
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I don't care what the child support is, it's not enough.
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Because what happens is, is a lot of times the child support barely covers the children.
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Now you're covering your own mortgage, you're covering all your own expenses,
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and you don't have a partner to split it with.
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So what happens sometimes is women will fall back into relationships quickly
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in order to have that financial stability and not necessarily be ready for it.
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So what we're going to talk about is how to stabilize before you optimize your
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life and stabilize you so that you can grow and learn and live without your partner.
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Your first goal is to predictably come up with your budget. It's not to create
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extreme wealth. It's to create where you're at right now.
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Get a spreadsheet or a pen and paper or whatever you do and write down your monthly expenses.
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It may be that you have more monthly expenses than you have income,
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and that's okay. But write it down.
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If you're below survival, write down below survival mode.
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If you're at where all your expenses are paycheck to paycheck,
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you're at survival, meaning that every single dollar you have is going out to
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an expense. If you're at below survival, maybe you need to cut out a bunch of things.
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But you got to get clear and realistic about where you exist today.
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Hopefully you're at at least survival. If not, we can work through that too.
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But you're going to have to do a lot of cutting. You're going to have to cut things.
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That you don't need. Cut things that you may need that you just can't afford.
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Know exactly what your monthly numbers are and break it down on a monthly basis
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so you have your survival number.
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Your survival number should be where all of your minimum payments are made.
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Your mortgage is paid, your insurance is paid, your electric bill is paid,
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you have enough money for food, you have enough money for clothing,
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you have enough money for the kids.
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That is your survival number. Survival number is very important to know because
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survival is not where you want to stay, but it's where you may be right now.
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Then separate your emotional spending from survival spending.
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Like you may have to cut out getting your nails done.
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You may have to cut out going for a massage. You may have to cut out vacations.
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You may have to cut out funds for your kids' college.
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While you're in survival mode, it's going to be rough. You're going to have
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to separate your emotion spending from survival spending because you have to
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pause your lifestyle upgrades until your income is steady.
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And build a three-month calm fund. Even if it's small, you maybe only put $25
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or $50 a month away, but you've got to put some money away. It's just there
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so you have some type of savings, just in case. It's not about.
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Punishing yourself at this stage, even though it may feel like it because you're
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not able to live the lifestyle you used to have, but it's about regaining control of your life.
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The sooner we can get you full-on survival, we can get you to move on to the
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next stage, which is stability.
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Once you have stability in your life, you can see where you were at in your
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marriage. That was probably a stability stage.
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At stability, you are paying all your bills, you're putting money away for savings,
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you're putting money away for retirement, for vacations, for the basics that you want.
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To get back to kind of a lifestyle where you were at, stability means that you're
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not struggling anymore, you're past survival, and you can breathe a little bit better.
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Stability is we want to get you there as quickly as possible.
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Then the next goal is to get you to success.
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Success is a level where you are putting enough away that you don't even have
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to think about money anymore.
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You have your children's colleges paid for, perhaps. You have your retirement funded.
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Success means you're moving on to a level of luxury for you,
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whatever that level is, where you can take one trip a year or four trips a year,
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where you can enjoy your hobbies fully.
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Success level is where you need to get to so that you can completely enjoy your existence.
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And if you want to go even further past success, you can go to significance
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where you're contributing to charities and things that you love and people that
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you love and helping taking care of other people.
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That's a significant level. But it's up to you to figure out where those levels
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are and how much you need to spend in each area.
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I like to use spreadsheets because then I can modify them quickly,
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but you can write it down on a piece of paper and a pen.
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Once you get your financial goals set and where you need to be financially,
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then you can actually break down what you need to do to get there.
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Part of getting there is reclaiming your identity. Most women,
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we lose more money than you think when you're getting divorced.
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Then we lose confidence in our ability to earn. What skills do you have that
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you got unpaid for during your marriage?
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Because maybe you were a stay-at-home mom. So is there any skills that you can do?
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Maybe you could do laundry. Maybe you could be a nanny. There's lots of different
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jobs out there for people that were married.
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Is there something you did on the computer? Did you take care of the books for
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the business? Were you an accountant?
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Income may have been postponed and you may have sacrificed a lot,
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but there's ways to get yourself back.
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Were you a lawyer before and now you need to want to go back into law?
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There's ways you can do that.
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Then you need to figure out what version of you did you silence to keep the peace?
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Because a lot of women, we stuff down our emotions and silence ourselves in
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order to keep the marriage happy.
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If you want to restart your career, go back to the people you worked with before.
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There's also part-time roles you could get. You could do work-from-home roles.
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You could do finance, operations, HR, marketing.
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There's tons of things you can do, and you may need to get a license.
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You may need to go back for certification.
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All of these things may need to happen in order for you to reclaim your life, but it is worth it.
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Your goal is to have income speed quickly and sustainable. It doesn't have to be perfect.
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You can grow it over time, but make sure you get to stability as soon as you
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can. Many women remain financially entangled and emotionally entangled with
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their partners for a while.
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You have to remember that you need to close down your shared accounts.
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You got to rebuild your credit.
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And then you have to separate guilt from all your money decisions.
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Stop overgiving to other people out of fear or peacekeeping.
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Don't overgive to your partner in order to get the divorce done and then feel
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like you're left with nothing.
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Because money clarity is emotional freedom. And the more clear you are on your
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money and what you need in order to survive, the more emotionally free you will be.
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The long-term wealth reset, once you stabilize, you can restart your retirement.
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Even if it's a small contribution every single month, you can restart it.
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And then start building assets that you control. This is your life. This is your future.
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Avoid structures where you have dependency on other people because you're going
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to need to be able to stand on your own feet. You're now the provider.
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You're now the leader of the family. Do it strategically and make sure that
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you grow through this process.
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This is where you regain your power. This is where you recover.
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This is where you take back your identity. It's an amazing time to be a woman
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when you go through a divorce because the amount of growth that's going to happen
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is amazing if you allow it.
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When you come out the other side, you'll look back and say, wow,
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I was more independent. I can take care of myself more than I thought before.
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Remember, when you lose a marriage, you also lose your identity,
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your daily routine, your activities.
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You might even lose friends in your social structure, how you hung out with
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people, even the family members on the other side.
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Then your future vision of where your life is going is going to completely get
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ripped out from underneath you.
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It may not have been a great future, but it was your future.
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Even if you weren't the happiest in your marriage, when everything shifts overnight,
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it will change your identity.
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In order to rebuild, you're going to have to start a new narrative.
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You're going to have to say, okay, that was my life, but now what do I choose for my future now?
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What do I choose for my current present now? It's okay to start over.
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It's okay to start over at 50 years old. It's okay to start over at 60.
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It's okay to start over at 70. Really, for the people out there in their 30s and 40s, it's okay.
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Because you get to release that shame and start over in a way you want and design
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your future the way you want to have it.
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You're going to grieve the dream for a little bit. You may grieve the person as well.
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You'll be sad because of what happened, whether it was planned or unplanned
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or they cheated or you just grew apart. You're going to grieve that person.
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You're going to grieve the dream and it's okay, but you're going to have to
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allow anger to be released without building your life around it.
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Let it go because the more angry you get, the more internally you will hurt your body internally.
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Healing isn't passive. It's active restructuring of your life.
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It takes work. It takes effort. You're going to have to make sure that you focus on your healing.
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A divorce coach is a good way to go. I hired a divorce coach after my divorce
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because it's not therapy, but they help you forward think from where you are now.
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What I look at therapy is, therapy is good to say, okay, where are you at now?
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How did you get here? What can we fix from your past to make sure you don't
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get there or repeat the same problems in the future?
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Because everybody's at fault when there's a divorce, not just the person that cheats.
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Everybody's got some culpability in it. If you get divorced,
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a divorce coach will help you with your business planning.
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A divorce coach will help you reframe which direction you're going.
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It'll help you re-identify yourself from wife to ex-wife.
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It seems silly, but for a while, you'll still call the man your husband.
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If you're a man getting divorced, you'll still call it your wife.
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You need to set your financial and personal boundaries right away and stick to them.
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Because I will say that you need to structure your life in a way that you can
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stand up to a lot that's going on.
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Post-divorce, your life strategy is going to be completely different.
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It's going to be a growth opportunity.
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It's going to be a learning opportunity, but you're just going to have to learn
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to get comfortable with change. You're going to have to embrace it.
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In fact, if it feels uncomfortable, if it's the change, it's probably something you need to learn.
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Don't repeat the same patterns. Don't repeat the same relationship patterns,
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or you're going to end up in the same place.
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If you're with a narcissist, don't go marry another narcissist.
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Maybe if you're a giver, go find a giver. If you're a taker,
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go find a taker. But if you're a giver, go find a giver.
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Build your life with confidence. but you're going to have to do it through extensive
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decision making, and you're going to have to face it every single day.
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You are the CEO of your life, and if you can get someone to coach you on how
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to structure your new life with a divorce coach,
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it's the way to go because it'll jumpstart you in a way that you don't have to be lost anymore.
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It'll help reground you. I do think divorce coaching is extremely important.
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It's a good way to go to make sure that you move forward instead of getting stuck.
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Nobody wants to get stuck because when you're stuck, you don't grow as much.
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It takes you longer to get to where you need to be.
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You may not have the time to move there. Now, I interviewed someone divorcing gracefully because...
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I used her as my coach when I was going through my divorce, and it helped me
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get unstuck. You're going to have to restructure your life after divorce once it's final.
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This is usually the most overlooked phase because what happens is you have to
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intentionally redesign your schedule. That's the first thing you have to do.
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Go look at your schedule and structure it the way you want. Maybe you want to
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add some workouts in. Maybe you want to get back in shape.
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Maybe you want to spend more time with the kids and structure time with the
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kids so that you get that quality time.
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But restructure your schedule so that it works for you
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it works for your family and works going on into the future
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you hopefully can have some support systems because
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if you are a single mom now which
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is who i'm talking to or even if you're just divorced and you don't have and
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you're an empty nester you still need support systems to help you through there's
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divorce groups that you can go to there's friends there's family hopefully you
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still have that you can talk to but find someone to help support you so you
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don't feel lost your social circles circles a great.
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One, but sometimes people lose their social circle when they get divorced because
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maybe they move on or maybe they were friends with the husband more.
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So your social circle can help, but make sure you have a social circle.
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Maybe you need to create a new one.
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A lot of times your home environment may not be conducive to what you need. Maybe sell the house.
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Maybe you take the money and you move into an apartment. You have the money
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to pay for your living expenses.
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Maybe you sell the house and you just downsize. Or maybe you keep the house,
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but you get a roommate. Those are possible things too.
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Your relationship with yourself and time and how to rest is important as well.
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You need to take time to rest and recuperate once the divorce is final.
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You're going to be using your brain a lot to replan everything in your life.
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You don't want to recreate your old life with fewer resources because then you're
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just repeating the habits of the past.
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It's going to be a completely new life. It's going to reset or redo who you are as a person.
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So it's going to be new systems and it's going to support your new life and
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your new growth. Now let's talk about the children, because you're going to
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have to pick up the pieces for the children, too.
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A lot of children need therapy after divorce, and the reason they need therapy
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is because they're going through it as much as you are.
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They need to have that support system.
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Children, they don't need perfection, but they do need consistency.
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They need emotional safety. You need to make them feel safe as well,
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as I know you're missing that safety that maybe you used to have.
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What helps with children, though, is if you're honest.
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If there's a burden financially, you need to tell the children,
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look, we need to cut back. We need to slow our roll. We need to decrease what we're spending.
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Emotional steadiness is important. You don't have to overshare where the finances
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are. But you do need to say, look,
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we got divorced, things are going to change a little bit. I need you guys to
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help me make sure that we don't overspend.
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Let them know right at the beginning. Just be honest.
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You don't have to give them a play-by-play breakdown of every single dollar, but just be honest.
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Even if you have child support, it may not cover the bills. It may not cover
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the things you need it to.
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I would say one of the biggest things for children is just to keep them consistent
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on their schedules and have predictable routines for them.
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That way they are not losing out on consistency because children thrive in consistency.
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When you model resilience and you don't act like a victim, they are going to pick up on that.
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They are going to see you as their hero. If you can show that you're tough and
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that you can persevere through anything, they will be more resilient as children
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as well, whether they're boys or girls.
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It's really quite interesting how single moms can really have a strong impact on their children.
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Yes, it's better if there's a happy, loving home with a man and a woman in the family.
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However, sometimes that doesn't work out that way. I think it's better sometimes
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just to show how resilient and strong you can be because then they pick up on that.
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Once they see you regain your confidence, it will give them confidence because
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children feel safer when their
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mother is capable and feels comfortable and confident of their abilities.
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You don't have to explain everything, but they will see it in you.
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They will see how much you trust yourself.
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The stability and self-trust will grow, and then it will grow in them, too.
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That will make them have a more successful childhood, and they will be happier
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with their growth as well.
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Divorce doesn't mean that you've failed at all. Divorce means that you closed a chapter.
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That chapter has ended. You're taking a step into the future with new priorities.
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You hopefully as a priority, and a new identity. You can rebuild your financial
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future stronger than it ever was when you were married.
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Because now it's you in charge.
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I think meditation is huge at this point too, because the more you meditate
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and just get into you as a woman and into your femininity, the more financial
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opportunities you will find because we are blessed.
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Every single one of us are creators.
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We have the ability to create life.
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And we have the ability to create businesses and run the businesses the right way.
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We have the ability to grow into our knowing. If you're not comfortable doing
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a business, you still have the ability to do exactly what you're doing.
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Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. You've done a lot of laundry.
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You've done a lot of housekeeping. Maybe that's something you grow into.
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It's up to you. But rebuilding your finances is not being greedy. It's being practical.
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It's being responsible. It's being a leader in your own house.
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And you're going to be a leader now, no matter who you are.
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You need to rebuild emotionally as well because you're not weak.
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You just had a huge problem happen in your life.
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You just had a grief that is going to take a while to recover from.
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It doesn't make you weak. It actually makes you strong, and you'll recover faster than you realize.
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You've got to rebuild your life, though, because it's not being selfish.
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It's being self-sustaining.
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Everything you do, your children will pick up on, and they will see how strong you are.
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They will see how much you've grown as a woman and as a mother. It's leadership.
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When you lead your household and when you lead your family, that leadership
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they will take and they will use it too.
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It's amazing how children change after a divorce. Sometimes children that were
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acting spoiled or entitled after a divorce, they turn into leaders themselves.
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You're not behind the eight ball. You're taking charge and they will see that.
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You're rebuilding with wisdom you didn't have before. Everything you learn and
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every lesson you're going to pick up along the journey, even if it's a painful
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lesson, will help you grow as an individual.
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It's going to help you be the person you want to be. It's going to help you
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find the future that you want to find.
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I have faith that you can grow into your own future and into your own identity.
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Maybe something that you should have been in the whole time that you were married.
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If you're rebuilding after divorce this is
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the place for you i hope that this helps
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you grow as an individual i hope this helps
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you grow as a person and that what you grow
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into is something that you can thrive with divorce coaching helps this podcast
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should help a great deal once you get done emotionally growing and financially
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growing you should be able to take your life to the next level then you're at
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stability and from stability you go to success i wish you all success.
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I wish you the most success possible in your journey and in your new life,
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because what's happening now is painful, but it's also going to be a wonderful life lesson.
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If you take it as a life lesson and a learning experience and you heal,
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you will grow in a way that you never imagined and into something even better than you were before.
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This is Diva Mia. I hope you have a perfect week.
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I hope you make it as perfect as you possibly can, and that joy.
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Peace, and love comes your way. Take care and have a wonderful day.
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Diva Details podcast and website are intended solely for informational and entertainment purposes.
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The content provided does not constitute professional, medical,
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financial, or legal advice. We are not licensed medical practitioners,
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Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider for medical advice,
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Any financial topics discussed are based on personal opinions and experience
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and should not be considered professional advice. The content provided does
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The opinions expressed in the podcast are solely those of the speakers and do
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not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated, organization, sponsors, or partners.
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This podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only and should not
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be considered professional advice.