How to manage your money well

How do you untangle your money when you've tried and failed before?  When you can't figure out what's going where and so many things are out of your control?

In this episode of Sara makes Sense, I talk about how to talk about your money, including specific steps to take to figure out what's going where, how to control what you can and how to work with the things you can't.

I use the example of Season 2 of this podcast- it didn't go the way I wanted, it felt like a public failure, and I had to decide what to do.    Similar to how many of us feel about our money situations, ignoring it, sweeping it under the rug and moving on wouldn't have had any benefits to me, given the goals that I have.  I chose to re-group and continue with the podcast.

Getting control of your money includes knowing how much is coming in and when, what's scheduled to go out (this is money you've already spent) and what's left over to handle the rest of your expenses for every pay period.

Managing in an environment of high inflation, economic slowdowns and job uncertainty takes planning.  It's possible and it's important.  I recommend that you include your biggest asset when you think about how to manage the 'uncontrollables': your earning potential.  Including your earning potential in your financial discussions is important when you're looking at the big-picture of what's possible.  It can help you regain control.

A few links for the benefits of telling your story, or witnessing:

https://news.berkeley.edu/berkeley_blog/the-science-of-the-story/   A long read, but hang in there; the section titled "How stories bring people together" gets into why telling our money stories is beneficial to us and others.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-web-violence/201309/resilience-and-4-benefits-sharing-your-story  The 3rd point here, Re-Affirming your Values is important.  In the day-to-day busy-ness, we can lose sight of what we value and where we're spending our money.  Re-focusing through telling our money story can motivate change.

2 books by Shannon Lee Simmons contain great stories about how Shannon works with her clients and how to manage your money with less stress
Worry-Free Money 
Living Debt Free
You can find Shannon's books in a variety of places- choose your favourite purchasing method!

Transcript

Sara (00:04):

How do you talk about your money when you feel like you've made big mistakes? How do you get any clarity about your money when it's all a big mess and you can't see anywhere to cut back or adjust? How do you get control of your money when so many things are out of your control? Inflation, mortgage rates, gas prices, the list goes on. 

I'm Sara McCullough and in this episode of Sara makes Sense, I talk about all of those things.  I've been advising for 20 years. Consistently, clients hesitate to ask questions about something that they feel is basic or they apologize upfront. They say, “I'm sorry, I know this is a stupid question.” I guarantee you if it is about money in money out and why it's so confusing, it's not a stupid question and it's not basic. About 80% of my work in a year is related to money in money out questions.  The stuff that we think is basic.  The stuff that we think that everyone knows except us. So welcome to the good news episode of Sara makes Sense- You're not asking stupid questions and you're not the only one. 

Sara (01:27):

Most of us get lost in our own money situation and we can all use a check-in periodically to get more comfortable with how we're using our money to support our goals. In this episode, I'm going to cover how to talk about your money when you feel stupid, ashamed and trapped. How to get clarity on what's coming in and what's already scheduled to go out so that you can build a framework for the rest of the money and how to control what you can in an environment that you can't control. I have two goals for you. At the end of this episode, you will have a sense of what it feels like to talk to a professional about your money, why it might make sense for you to talk to a professional about your money and leave you with an idea of how to manage change on your own, if that's your preference. 

Sara (02:16):

I firmly believe that the vast majority of us benefit by working with a financial planner in some periods of our lives for some length of time. I also firmly believe that how you manage that planning relationship is up to you. The wealth management industry has told clients that they can't do this on their own. I do believe that you can successfully make a financial plan work in a number of ways. I'm going to start with a story that may at first seem unrelated to our topic today, but it's not. I'm going to tell you a story about this podcast and what happened in Season 2. Season 2 was scheduled to start in middle of February, 2022.  As in, I was going to record episodes in December, 2021 and January, 2022 and then release every two weeks starting in mid-February. That didn't happen at all. The company that I was working with at the time kind of accidentally released an episode on January 24th. 

Sara (03:21):

That wasn't what we had talked about. It just was kind of a slip of the, you know, “upload and release at the same time” when it should have been “upload and schedule”. And so the episode was out there and had been listened to already, so !go subscribers!, but I was really frustrated. 

I was trying to figure out how to make this kind of advanced schedule work. I felt pressured and it felt public. If I couldn't get this schedule together, I was going to be publicly disorganized and I'm a planner. If you Google how to do a podcast, every single site will tell you how important a predictable schedule is. Stick to a schedule. With an episode out there on January the 24th, I wasn't going to be able to stick to my every two week plan. This accidental release coincided with my mother being suddenly scheduled for surgery. 

There was my regular work with clients, there was the rest of my life, and then the company that I had been working with sent me a new contract that I wasn't expecting and it was really different pricing than the way I had been working with them. And there was a 24 hour deadline to sign and I felt like I should sign. Like if I didn't commit to this, what were they going to think? So then I was putting more pressure on myself and then there was some scrambling. I interviewed different potential companies and then I thought about how else could I do this? Did I want to do this? There was an episode out there, I had a whole list of what ifs. So I did manage to do a couple of things and get a couple more episodes out for Season 2. Turns out that recording on my own is much harder than I expected!

Sara (05:08):

It seemed like a tiny change and it was not. It was a huge change for me. I went from recording an episode straight through on the first shot to deleting the first three attempts, going home in frustration and coming back later to try again. And none of this is what I wanted to happen. It did happen and I'm back with podcasts and I'm calling it Season 3. As we talk about how to get through your money tangles, we might as well use my podcast tangle as a springboard. So let's circle back to the first point I want to cover today how to talk about your money. When you feel ashamed, you think you've made mistakes, you feel like the only one who's had this problem, one of the first steps you could take is find a qualified advisor, make an appointment and just say, I would like my money stuff to be different and I don't know how to do that. 

Sara (06:06):

That's all the prep you need to meet with a financial planner for the first time because here's what's true, money stress is so common. I don't know how we all walk around thinking that everyone but us has this all together. The most recent survey done by FP Canada indicates that again for the eighth year in a row, money is the top stressor for Canadians ranking higher than health. A reminder that we are now into year three of the pandemic, we work in a slowing economy and personal relationships after lockdowns and money beat them all. If you're stressed and confused about your money, you have lots of company.  Stress will decrease when you're more knowledgeable, when you can make deliberate choices and you have less confusion about your financial situation. One of the fastest ways to do all three of those things is to get a financial plan from a qualified planner. 

Sara (07:07):

Why does that work? Because it's out of your head. You said the scary thing and gave details and the planner sitting across from you didn't shriek and say, “how could you be so stupid?” Clearing away or decreasing the emotional blocks so that you can relate to your money differently will go a long way to solving the problem that you're having. Going back to my podcast, tangle, I could have signed the contract that didn't work for me, signed with another company right away, or looked at other options to get this thing produced. I did get a few episodes out, mostly on my own with my new sound editor, but then again, back in Season 2, work and life commitments increased. I meant to get back to it and here we are in 2023.  Back.  Were you expecting me to talk about how awful it was that I didn't stick to a schedule? That I publicly blew it? 

Sara (08:06):

Pod faded is the word used for just not releasing more episodes. So for a number of months it looked like that's what I had done. Let's talk about another version of what happened though. I had a number of interruptions that affected how I had been doing the podcasts. I tried a new method that was harder than I anticipated. I also had other more pressing, more immediate priorities and I wanted to get back to making episodes of Sara make Sense. Nobody died because I have a ridiculous looking episode schedule for 2022. If someone decides not to hire me as their planner because of my weirdly short Season 2, okay.  The benefits of continuing outweighed the uncomfortable feelings of, ugh, this isn't what I wanted to show people. The benefits of starting to acknowledge that you don't like your financial situation and you don't know how to fix it at the moment outweigh the uncomfortable feeling of, ugh, this isn't what I wanted to say out loud. 

Sara (09:16):

I know talking to anyone, even a professional about money is difficult and scary and that's what we think of first when faced with an intimidating task. I've got some links in the show notes that talk through the benefits of telling your story to somebody, usually in very different contexts than financial. But remember, we all have a money story and until you talk through part of that, you're not going to get the numbers straightened out. So this talking through and getting through the emotion of the money is the part that can get you started in actually changing the numbers in your finances. Starting to tell your money story gives witness to yourself. It decreases the hold that your emotions have had, which lets you move into finding solutions and making change. So once you've said that you don't want to stay where you are in your relationship with money, you actually need to figure out where you are before you start making plans to move. 

Sara (10:23):

Well, how do you do that? I want you to start by knowing what's coming in. Most of us have a fuzzy idea of what's coming in. Here's what I mean by that. We often talk about and think about our salary. What was in that contract we signed. How much do we make a week? That's an important number, but in this context it messes us up because whatever we signed for, whatever is our gross income on our tax return and where our tax bracket is, that isn't what lands in our bank account and isn't the amount that we can spend. Let me give you a practical example that will hit all the relevant points. Part of the work that I do is with couples who are separating and divorcing. I often work with both people and I often work with their lawyers or their mediator depending on how they've chosen to wrap up their relationship. 

Sara (11:21):

In this situation, I had both parents and was working with both lawyers. Overspending had been an issue in the relationship. A point that came up consistently, both in my conversations with the lawyers and my conversations with the parents was “how can dad be short of money? He has a good job. He's making a hundred thousand dollars a year.” That is good money. And let me tell you why everyone was frustrated, confused and racking up debt. I'm going to walk you through the math of: he makes a hundred thousand dollars a year. So before taxes and deductions, that's true, a hundred thousand dollars a year. Also true in this situation for separation discussions, there's a number of times where we need to talk about monthly income and we like round numbers and we like to estimate, especially in a conversation where we're reaching quickly for an answer. 

Sara (12:22):

So a hundred thousand dollars divided by 12 months, uh, doesn't quite go well. It's close to 10,000 a month, right? That was the number in everybody's head -$10,000 a month. Why is dad short of money? He's making $10,000 a month. Alright. Actually $100,000 divided by 12 months is $8,333. So we're already short about $1,700 a month and that's before all of the deductions. And in this situation we had income tax, union dues, benefit costs, disability insurance payments,  group retirement savings plan payments. All of these things are very valuable to family stability. But we're not talking about $8,333 a month that can be spent. By the time I took off all of those deductions, the number that dad had available was $5,800 a month.  Did you hear what happened there? All four people, the parents and the lawyers, off the top in their heads and in their conversations were talking about $10,000 a month. 

Sara (13:39):

The reality was $5,800 a month. That's one of the reasons the parents had been racking up debt when they were together. That's one of the reasons their negotiations about a separation agreement got stuck. Once that was clear to everyone, the agreement was able to reflect not only their goals but their current situation and build a framework for how each parent was going to make future choices. So do you see how that was so instrumental to everybody misunderstanding what was happening? And we do this all the time. We so quickly overestimate and use round numbers when we're working from the wrong starting point. Figure out what's actually coming into your bank account after all of your deductions and when.  Timing can actually have a huge impact on whether you accumulate debt or not. If your expenses are mismatched to your income deposits that on its own can cause a deficit, can cause borrowing on a line of credit or charges sitting on a credit card and it can cause a deficit that's actually impossible to unwind until you know what's happening. 

Sara (14:59):

The first step in changing your relationship to your money is knowing what's coming in and how much you have control over and when it's coming in. The second step in getting control over your money is knowing what's scheduled to go out. I'm not talking about budgeting. I know most of you listening flinched right there when I said budgeting and then it took you a second to realize that I said, I'm not talking about budgeting. Well, hello relief. I'm not talking about budgeting. In my experience, the traditional idea of budgeting, that spreadsheet look, that just popped into your head, meticulously tracking and planning every nickel that we spend to get this monster under control and the underlying feeling of, “oh, if you can't do this, you're an idiot ‘cuz everyone else can.” That does not work for the vast majority of us.  In 20 years of advising, I have worked with eight clients that can do that traditional budgeting really well. 

Sara (16:05):

It's their first choice, it's their comfort zone. I am talking right now to the rest of us, how do we get this monster under control? I want you to focus on what is scheduled to go out. I'm talking about fixed expenses, things that occur regularly in roughly predictable amounts at predictable times. So think here just about things like housing payments. So rent, mortgage, any debt payments, car payments, utility bills, Netflix, apple music, kids sports activities, fees.  Don't categorize by what's necessary or by what happens often. You're going to try and put some things on that list that I don't want you to put on there. 

Add up what's scheduled to go out, what have you already decided? This is really money that you've already spent.  When you subscribe to Netflix or anything else for that matter, you've already spent that money. When your income comes in, you know where $18 of it is going, if you've got a Netflix subscription, does that make sense? Add up all of those costs and subtract them from the money that's coming in.  Timing: remember timing for your first run through for this. When you're adding up your fixed costs, use dates.  Put down the dates that the money comes in and put down the dates that the money is scheduled to go out. If there's a mismatch, sometimes you can see it right away and you can see why you're feeling tight or why you're running short. See if you can change some of those payment dates to line up a little bit better. So that's a framework for your money coming in and your fixed costs going out. There's a whole list of other costs that are absolutely necessary. They absolutely occur regularly and I bet some of you will try to put them on your fixed cost lists. 

Sara (18:07):

Groceries, gas and clothes are the big three for most of us. These aren't fixed costs and they are likely what's messing up your attempts to control your money. Why? Because these big three vary in amount spent.  Sometimes by a lot.  Sometimes for a good reason. Don't try to wrestle that into a preset number by category. You are highly likely to fail. I'd like to offer you another option after figuring out what's coming in and when, what fixed costs are going out and when. That will let you know how much you have left for all of your other costs, this variable expense category. And so that's what's going to let you know fairly quickly: how much can you spend on groceries before your next paycheck? If you pick up pizza tonight on the way home, are you overspending? If the money's available and that's what you choose to spend it on, then no, you're not overspending. 

Sara (19:13):

Stop beating yourself up. If the money's not available, then yes, you are overspending, but you've got a chance to make a different choice before you've taken on that expense. And if there's money available for pizza and you also wanted to buy a new sweater and there's only enough money for one of them, you've gotta make a choice. But do you see how you can know with this method ahead of taking on the expense whether you're overspending or not, with less time and less energy than a traditional budgeting framework? Do you see how this can cut down or eliminate confusion, stress and cycling through massive historical digs through statements, writing out numbers, assigning them to categories and then failing. Because remember, a lot of budgeting happens in hindsight. You sit down and figure out, here's what I want to do, and then you're looking backwards to see did it work? 

Sara (20:18):

And because variable expenses by their nature are really variable, this is where we fall down, we get frustrated and we give up. So we've talked about how to get started in a money conversation with a financial planner. You could also do this with your partner. You could do this with your friends if you've got a close comfortable group. We've talked about how to sort out what's happening, what's actually happening with your money in and your money scheduled to go out, not what you estimated is happening. 

So now let's talk about how to run this thing in an environment where there are so many things out of our control. 2022 delivered interest rate hikes. That's an understatement. 2022 delivered inflation, that's an understatement. And 2022 delivered the start of economic slowdowns and layoffs. Now depending on where you are career wise, this might be an understatement, a late statement or a confusing statement.  Maybe your career's not affected at all and it won't be. 

Sara (21:33):

But hang in there, the economy will affect your finances. So how do you maintain financial stability and sanity in this nonsense? Sorting out what's happening will go a long way towards increasing and maintaining your control. Once you know what's available for your variable expenses, you will be able to make choices that actually help or at least don't hurt your situation. There has been a lot written and spoken about recently regarding subscriptions. The advice is cancel them. They're tanking your finances, they're running amok and canceling will solve your issues. That's actually unlikely.  Cancelling Netflix is unlikely to solve your whole financial situation if you're really running a shortfall. One of my clients did do the historical deep dive and pulled apart where they had spent money in 2022. At the beginning of the process, he was convinced that too much money was going to subscriptions. And so once the deep dive was done, he did decide to cancel some of the subscriptions and adjust other ones. 

Sara (22:43):

But the biggest realization that he had was subscriptions accounted for 3% of their fixed costs, money that's already scheduled to go out the door. There was another area that accounted for 30% and they really needed to review that 30% area, not strictly because the dollar amount was too high, but because it was an area that wasn't lining up with their goals for the next five years and with their values. Do you see the difference there? Yes. If you are spending $20 on something and you're not getting at least $20 worth of fun out of it, or if you are in a deficit situation and your income has really dropped and your costs have really gone up, then yes, cancel it. But remember, this on its own is unlikely to significantly change the course of your finances. 

Reviewing your subscriptions can get you a quick win. 

When it comes to regaining control, it can be really motivating to help you keep going, but again, it's unlikely to solve that big picture and some subscriptions are really valuable. I'll give you a quick example. I have Amazon Prime, like millions of others. I signed up early in the pandemic and I still have it. Why? I actually listen to Prime Music, which comes with the Prime subscription for a few hours a day. Usually I use the classical music when I'm planning and doing client work and I listen to podcasts when I'm doing other tasks. For me, Prime is money really well spent and I get a lot back from it. So again, if you don't get enough back from your subscriptions or you're in a deficit, cancel. If that's not the case for you, don't beat yourself up over it. Stop tearing yourself apart because you spend money on subscriptions. 

Sara (24:43):

So let's look here at interest rates. If you've got debt, if you've got a mortgage, if you've got a line of credit, if you've renewed your mortgage recently or you have a line of credit, your increased payments were counted in that fixed expense exercise that we just talked about. Okay? So your your rates have gone up. If you've renewed and locked in, again, you know where you're going to be.  If your mortgage is coming due in the next 12 to 18 months, use an online calculator now and understand how much your payment may be at renewal. Get ahead of this, your payment will go up when you renew. Plan for that now. So while you can't control the actual interest rate that's set, what you can control is how prepared you are to deal with that increased cost. 

Let's look at inflation again. As you're recording your fixed expenses, you're actually going to catch when payments have increased. 

Okay? So those that might be new, sometimes we miss that email that says, Hey, we're increasing your rates. But as you're going through your recent bank statements looking for your fixed expenses, you will have caught the things that increased in 2022. So what can you do with things like food inflation? Food and groceries is one of your variable expenses.  If you've gone through the exercise of writing down your income that's deposited to your bank account and subtracting out your fixed costs, you're going to know how much money you have available for your list of variable expenses until your next pay deposit. And now you can start paying attention to how much of that money available, how much is groceries taking up? You can start making some choices about how you shop, where you're shopping, what are you buying? There's a number of ways that you can play around with “can we get the grocery bill down?” 

Sara (26:54):

But my big goal for you is I want you to know how much is available. I want you to write out your list of variable expenses. Where are you spending money? And then start prioritizing those. Okay? If you really can't get one expense down, something else will have to go down if you are in a deficit territory or you're near deficit territory.

What if you're not? What if you actually have the money? Then this inflation conversation is actually different. It's a very different conversation with yourself. And it sounds like this:  “inflation is aggravating. I don't like it and it's not destabilizing me. I'm okay.” Remember at the beginning of the episode when I talked about shame around money? I work with a number of clients who have a really hard time with how much they make, with how much they have. It's paralyzing, it's uncomfortable. 

Sara (28:01):

And for everyone listening who just thought, “I would love to have that problem”, you wouldn't. That grass isn't greener because the effect of not coming to terms with the fact that inflation isn't crushing you, is that you're going to miss opportunities. You're going to tighten up your spending when maybe you didn't have to. So you're going to miss opportunities to do things for yourself, to help others, to grow a business if you're an owner or decision maker, and to live life in a way that your money is a benefit to you and others. And that's not a good scenario either. 

My last point in how to manage in a nonsense environment, is to start including your earning potential in your net worth. Start looking at this as something that needs to be taken care of, maintained and acknowledged. When we talk about net worth, when I produce net worth statements, they've got the client's house on there, they've got the value, we can look up the value of our retirement savings. 

Sara (29:16):

We can look at the value in a TFSA or a non-registered investment account. We can look at stock option plans. It's harder to look at our earning potential and for most of our lives, our earning potential is our single biggest asset. Think about what you're likely to earn in the next 10 years. And in this part of the conversation, it's absolutely okay to think of your top line salary number. In my earlier example with my $100,000 a year client, we also had a conversation about how much he would earn in the next 10 years. That's a million dollars. That's a lot. His ability to generate that income needs to be protected. Your ability to generate income needs to be protected. As we discussed, you don't get to keep it all and you don't get to make choices on how all of it is spent, but all of it contributes to the economy that we have and the place that we live and the programs that we can have or contemplate having. 

Sara (30:24):

It's really worth taking a look at your career. I've done countless plans for clients where we focus on this, where we talk about how much do you need to make? What choices do you have to increase your income? What's the effect of inflation over time? Now, the conversation that I'm thinking of here was in 2019 when nobody cared about inflation because everybody told us that it wasn't happening. So for this client, once I clarified the effect of inflation, she had been at the same company for a number of years and had really gotten very, very few, salary increases. So once I did an initial plan for her and was able to show her, look, five or eight years out, you are going to start running a regular deficit and there's not going to be anything that you can really do about that except cutting back on what you are doing. 

Sara (31:17):

And I'm talking cutting back on very basic lifestyle things. Once she understood that, she was able to have a conversation with her boss, not only about her compensation, but about what was important to her about the job responsibilities that she had, what her goals were and what would really affect her decision to stay with this company or start looking elsewhere in the future. And a few weeks after that conversation, she did get a significant raise. Now look, that's not possible every time, and this is a difficult time for many companies. And if you don't know the effect that your earning potential has on your financial stability and you never have a conversation with somebody like my client had, or you never make active choices to manage your career, you won't be taking care of your biggest asset. So even if you feel that you can't approach your employer now, or you can't look for a new job now, it doesn't mean that this exercise isn't useful for you. What it can do is give you a sense of that big picture. It can give you a sense of “what opportunities do I need to be looking for in the next three to five years?” “What's my gap likely to be in the next three to five years?” “How do I still meet all my goals while managing my career well?” 

Sara (32:51):

So to summarize the episode today, when it's hard to talk about where you are in your relationship with your money, start somewhere. Write out something for yourself. Talk to your partner, close friends or family. Book a meeting with a financial planner. There are links in the show notes to previous Sara Make Sense episodes where I've talked about what a financial plan should do for you and how to choose a financial planner if you're feeling fuzzy on what a plan can do, or if you feel like “I've got a plan but it didn't answer any of these questions for me”, that happens and I'm sorry that happened. It's also possible to get a financial plan that's going to answer all of these questions for you. The second thing that we covered in this episode is how to get clarity on what's happening before you start making changes. 

Sara (33:45):

This is the pure numbers part. I want you to figure out what lands in your bank account and when. Then figure out what's scheduled to go out of your bank account and when. Focus on your fixed expenses, money that's already spent, commitments that you've already made, and when will they happen? Remember, this is not your whole list of expenses. The rest of your expenses need to be covered by the money left after subtracting your fixed expenses. So this is where again, those big three groceries, gas, and clothes happen all the time in unpredictable amounts. So get the first two things down before you tackle this last one. Otherwise, you're likely to get lost down that budgeting rabbit hole. The third thing we talked about is how to control what you can in an environment where there are huge changes outside of our control, like  interest rates and inflation. 

Sara (34:46):

Knowing your money in and money out will help you make decisions on where and what to cut if needed and what's available to be spent. 

The one area that most of us underestimate is our earning potential.  Spend some time here if you haven't in a while. Look at your skills, look at your experience. Where are you strong? What can you build on? Do you need to increase any skills to maintain that competitive advantage? Is a conversation about a raise possible, is switching careers is a consideration for you? Plan that out. Don't forget that this is your biggest asset for most of your life. 

So let's just circle back to my podcast debacle for a minute here. Season 2 didn't go the way I wanted and seemingly small changes in how I was producing the podcasts made a huge difference in the difficulty for me and it, it took me time to regroup and figure out what works and maybe I still haven't gotten it down yet. 

Sara (35:58):

And I had to take time to prioritize, plan and stop worrying about what other people thought because it turned out this is a priority for me right now for a number of reasons. If understanding your finances better and making different choices is important to you, even if you have tried and failed, it is worth trying again. It is worth finding the method that works for you to get this part of your life under control and really use your money to support your goals in life. 

We all have pieces scattered here and there in the business and decision making of day-to-day life. There are times when we need to slow down and get clarity before we make any changes. As we start a new year, I'm proposing that you understand your foundation as it is now, decide what you want it to look like and then make any necessary changes.  

From time to time, we need someone who can cut through the noise. Someone who not only gets to know you as a person, but can also really show and make sense of your financial plan. And I'm not talking about just the numbers. I'm talking about explaining what the numbers mean for you. This relationship, this plan belongs to you, not your planner. I'm Sara McCullough. Thank you for listening to Sara makes Sense. 

DISCLAIMER: The information in this podcast is intended for general information and illustrative purposes only for advice relevant to your specific situation. Meet with a qualified financial planner, lawyer, or accountant before making any changes to your situation. Sara's designations and licensing include Certified Financial Planner, registered financial planner, certified divorce financial analyst, chartered divorce financial specialist, and holding an insurance license.