Divorce Financial Analysis
Most women meet their divorce attorney without knowing what they own, what he earns, or what the marriage is actually worth. The meeting starts anyway. Decisions get made from that position, and they are difficult to undo later.
Start with the preparation guide01 The order most people get backwards
Clients come to me having already retained counsel, already filed, already agreed to something. Almost always with the same sentence: I didn't know I could ask that.
It is not that their attorneys did anything wrong. A family law attorney argues the case you bring them. They are not accountants, they do not reconstruct a decade of financial records at $500 an hour, and they will proceed with whatever picture you walk in holding. If that picture is incomplete, the case is built on it anyway.
The women who do best are the ones who understood their own finances before the first meeting. That is the work I do, and it belongs at the beginning.
And not knowing is not a failing. In most marriages one person handles the money, and that arrangement is frequently deliberate. You are not behind. You are starting.
02 When it was not an accident
You may not call it abuse. Many women do not — not while it is happening, and often not for years after.
But if you had to ask for money that was also yours. If accounts were opened, closed, or moved without your knowledge. If you were told the finances were too complicated for you to follow, and somehow the explanation never got simpler. If your name is on filings you never read.
That is financial abuse. It is one of the most common forms of control in a marriage and one of the least often named, and it frequently occurs without a single raised hand.
It matters here for a practical reason. When information was withheld on purpose, reconstructing it is different work — you are not catching up, you are recovering a record someone had an interest in you never holding. That changes what has to be gathered, and how carefully.
03 What you should know before that meeting
Every account, entity, property, retirement plan, and policy in the marriage — including the ones in his name that you may still have a claim to. Most people can name perhaps half of it from memory. The half they cannot name is where the money is.
A real figure for how you have been living, built from records rather than recollection. Support is negotiated against this number. Guess low at the start and you will be held to the guess.
When a spouse controls a business, the books, or the distributions, taxable income and actual income are rarely the same figure. Reading the difference is an accounting question, and it is answered before negotiation, not during.
04 What I am, and what I am not
I am a licensed CPA. I am not a forensic accountant, a certified fraud examiner, or a credentialed business valuator, and I will not present myself as one. If your case reaches the point of needing courtroom testimony from a credentialed expert, I will say so plainly and help your attorney find the right person.
You will also need a family law attorney, and I will not take that role either. What I do makes their work cheaper and sharper — a client who arrives with organized records and a clear financial position spends far less in billable hours, and asks for more, because she knows what there is to ask for.
If you have already retained counsel, this still applies. Later is better than not at all.
05 A private place to begin
On paper, a financial affidavit is an accounting exercise. It rarely stays one.
The form asks you to write down what your life costs, line by line. The list turns out to be a record of the life itself — the house, the schools, the things you stopped buying, the year something changed. Women stall there, and not because the arithmetic is difficult. It stops being arithmetic. The numbers are the part I can take from you.
What to gather — and what to quietly watch for — before you sit down with anyone.
Delivered by email with a neutral subject line. Open it on a device only you control.
06 If you would rather start on your own
Not everyone is ready to bring someone in, and you do not have to be. The Aligned Affidavit is the workbook I built for the part you can genuinely do yourself — every figure the Connecticut financial affidavit asks for, organized in the order that makes sense, with the arithmetic already written.
Ten sections. Excel or Google Sheets. Instant download.
See the workbookHowever this works, it works at your pace. I explain what I am looking at in plain language, I do not assume you should already know it, and I will tell you what I actually see rather than what is easiest to hear. Women going through this are handled a great deal — by attorneys, by institutions, sometimes by a spouse. That is not what happens here.
About the financial clarity sessionInquiries through this page are handled with complete confidentiality. If you need particular arrangements around how and when I contact you, say so in your message and I will follow them exactly.