Frequently Asked Questions

Your attorney advises on the law and advocates your legal position. Your CPA reports on what has already happened. Neither role is built to model what a proposed settlement will actually produce for you across the next twenty years.

Many people also assume their financial advisor can fill this role, or that any financial advisor can. Most financial advisors are skilled at managing and growing wealth, but divorce is a different discipline. It is governed by state law, shaped by tax rules that only apply when assets are divided, and full of decisions that cannot be undone. There is also a structural point worth naming plainly: an advisor who is compensated on the assets they manage has an interest in where those assets land. I do not.

The modeling is my work. I examine how the marital estate is put together, how each asset behaves after it is divided, what the tax consequences are, and what your financial life looks like under each proposed scenario. Two settlements that look equal on paper are often not equal at all once liquidity, tax basis, and future income are accounted for.

I hold the CDFA® and CDS® designations and spent fifteen years inside family law firms before founding this practice. I do not manage investments and I do not sell financial products. There is no version of your settlement that pays me more than another, which means the analysis is shaped by your circumstances and nothing else.

Yes. This is one of the most common reasons a physician or business owner engages me, and it is often where I add the most value in the entire case.

A valuation report arrives looking authoritative. It is long, it is technical, and it carries credentials on the cover page. It also carries judgment calls, and the judgment calls are where the money is. Which standard of value was used. How owner compensation was normalized, and against what data. Which years were treated as typical and which were set aside. Whether discounts were applied, and why. How much of the goodwill was assigned to the business rather than to the person who built it.

None of those choices are wrong on their face. Each one is a position. My role is to identify where the report took a position, what a different position would have produced, and whether the difference is worth contesting. Sometimes the answer is that the report is sound and you should accept it. Knowing that is valuable too.

And this works in both directions. If you own the business, I make sure the value placed on it is fair and defensible. If your spouse owns the business, I make sure the valuation produced by their expert follows the correct methodology, uses the correct data, and reflects the business as it actually operates.

Goodwill is the portion of a practice's value that exceeds its tangible assets. The question is where that value actually resides.

Enterprise goodwill belongs to the business. Its location, systems, staff, referral infrastructure, contracts, and name would survive if the owner walked away tomorrow. Personal goodwill belongs to the individual: reputation, relationships, skill, education, and the referral network built over a career. It leaves when the person leaves.

The distinction matters because many states treat the two differently. In a number of jurisdictions, enterprise goodwill is marital property subject to division while personal goodwill is not, on the reasoning that it cannot be sold or transferred. Other states divide both. Treatment varies, and it varies enough that the same practice can produce materially different marital estates depending on where the divorce is filed.

Where a valuation draws that line is one of the most consequential judgments in the entire case, and one of the least examined. In a solo or small practice, it is often the largest single number in dispute.

Yes, and in the right circumstances it is the better structure.

When both spouses retain separate financial professionals, the household pays twice to produce two analyses of the same set of facts, and those analyses are then argued against each other. When the underlying financial picture is not genuinely in dispute, that is expense without benefit.

Working as one neutral means both parties receive the same analysis, built from the same records, presented to both at the same time. I do not advocate for either spouse and I do not advise either one privately. What I provide is a shared factual foundation, so the negotiation is about what to do rather than about whose numbers are correct.

This structure requires both parties to agree to move through the process in a constructive way, and to share the same understanding of their finances. Where there is a significant information imbalance, suspected undisclosed assets, or a history of financial control, a neutral is not appropriate and I will say so directly. In those cases I work with one spouse.

I also offer formal mediation through Ever After Divorce Mediation™ and hold the NCMP® designation, the Nationally Certified Mediation Professional credential.

The Confusion Tax in Divorce™ is the financial cost of making complex decisions under emotional stress.

Divorce is a high-stakes financial restructuring disguised as 'just' a legal event, constantly hijacked by emotion. Decisions of real magnitude, involving a practice, a portfolio, a decade of accumulated retirement assets, and the structure of the next twenty years, are made by people operating under sustained stress, on compressed timelines, with incomplete information, while also managing the grief of the thing itself.

Under those conditions smart, successful individuals make decisions they would never make in any other context. They keep the house because it is familiar and discover two years later that they cannot afford it. They accept an offset against a retirement account without accounting for tax basis and receive substantially less than the number on the paper. They concede a valuation position because the fight has become exhausting.

The tax is not paid at the courthouse. It is paid quietly, over the following decade, by the person who agreed to something they did not fully understand at the moment they were least equipped to evaluate it. Strategy is what prevents it. That is the work.

Divorce does not have to destroy your wealth. With the right strategy, it can protect it.