Divorce often brings a range of financial challenges to divorcees. You have to live with one income, rearrange your housing conditions, adjust to new parenting schemes. This will only make it more complicated to handle your family budget and cover the financial troubles as the end of the marriage arrives. This is why many people opt for online divorce as the only solution for their unsteady economic situation.
On the contrary, they should care more about how to increase their income and control the financial operations in their family better. This makes it necessary to calculate and operate your living expenses for your benefits before, during, and after divorce. Explore the following ideas on handling your living expenses so that you can request child or spousal support and manage your daily finances without trouble.
Conduct Research
Before you can make any requests and plans as to your finances around the divorce process, you’d better conduct research. This will let you operate the data to help you make more precise estimations and conclusions on how much money you spend and need daily.
Even if you don’t track your expenses, it doesn’t mean you cannot get any recordings of your income and spending. The best sources for the information are canceled checks, bank statements, end-of-year summaries, credit card statements, and so on. Also, as soon as you decide you need to create a clear picture of your living expenses, you should start noting down all your cash withdrawals and operations.
As a result, you will have strong evidence and helpful source to calculate your living expenses. This will allow you to ask for the exact spousal and child support you need and organize your new family budget easier.
Organize the Data
After you have researched all sources about your money operations and gathered the financial data about at least a year before, it is necessary to organize everything in the divorce expenses worksheet. You can print a chart, draw it by hand, use spreadsheets, or any other helpful application on your computer or smartphone. Then you should categorize the information you managed to find by time (e.g. months, year, week, days, etc.) and spending categories (residence, utilities, insurance, personal needs, etc.). This will allow you to do the calculations quickly and more or less accurately.
Do Calculations
Now that you have the data organized, divorce budget calculator, or any other helpful application downloaded, it is time to set to calculations. Consider the following steps:
- Begin with easily-defined points that come monthly at a fixed rate (e.g. mortgage, life insurance, Internet bills, real estate taxes, etc.).
- Then, it is recommended to pass to weekly payments and calculations (e.g. groceries, housekeeping services, parking, tutoring for your kids, etc.).
- After that, you can reach service providers to get annual calculations of your bills (gas, electric, and water companies, car repairs and maintenance, vet visits, etc.). Then divide the annual numbers by twelve and add them to your monthly expenses.
- Next, go on to estimations about clothing shopping expenses, subscriptions, gifts, vacations, and similar spending.
- Finally, get a review of your calculations with a lawyer or financial advisor so that you can get a precise monthly living expenses picture and pass on the further steps.
When doing the calculations, mind the payments you do once a year first so that they don’t get lost in the end. Also, bear in mind that a month has 4.3 weeks but not 4 only so that you don’t lose the essential support money for half a week every month.
If you follow the simple tips and cooperate with the relevant specialists, it won’t be difficult for you to calculate your living expenses and care about your economic stability for the nearest future.
Agree out of the Court
When it comes to the calculation of the living expenses to get appropriate spousal and child support, it always happens that one spouse thinks they pay too much while another divorcee thinks they do get not enough.
To avoid a similar situation, it is strongly recommended to manage your financial divorce agreements out of court. If you show each other your divorce list of expenses per month, completed with accurate and clear calculations, it won’t be that difficult for you to cooperate and agree on sums comfortable for both sides. Meanwhile, the judge, as the person from the outside, may appoint inappropriate numbers for both divorcees but justified for the officials and you will have no choice but to obey or prolong your case.
So, put in the effort to do thorough financial research, show your calculations to relevant specialists, and be open to cooperation with our soon-to-be-ex so that you both can please your living expenses without many hurdles in the aftermath.
