Where a Financial Coach Fits on Your Divorce Team

Most women getting divorced don't realize until it's too late that they don't need one expensive attorney handling everything. They need the right professional for each question, and a team that works together, rather than asking a legal representative to be a financial expert.

That's the central argument of Divorce by Design: How Building a Divorce Team Can Help You Get Divorced Efficiently (Without Going Broke!), by Melissa Murphy Pavone, a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA), and founder of Mindful Divorce Partners. She recently sent me a copy, and she's right about that point.

Melissa outlines the potential team members and their roles: a divorce coach, a CDFA, an attorney or mediator, a Certified Divorce Lending Professional, and Certified Divorce Real Estate agents, estate planners, therapists, and co-parent coaches, who often become part of the picture, too. It's a smart, well-constructed list, and I agree with almost all of it. What I want to add is a role that isn't on it: the financial coach, who has a place both during the divorce and in the months after it closes.

The Team Is Built for Decisions. Life Happens Between Them.

Every professional on that team is focused on making a decision or a determination. The CDFA models what a proposed settlement would mean in dollars. The CFP or financial advisor builds a plan for retirement and long-term investing. The CDLP checks whether a spouse could qualify for a loan or a refinance after divorce. Each is essential and a point-in-time analysis. Once the model is built, the plan is set, or the determination is made, that piece of the work is largely finished.

A woman doesn't live in that single point in time. She lives in the weeks and months after the paperwork is signed, when she's managing money on her own, often for the first time, and still catching her breath after everything the divorce required of her. That isn't a long-term planning question, nor is it a legal question. It's a right-now, this-month question, and almost no one on a standard divorce team is oriented to sit with her there.

That's the seat a financial coach fills. It's also the seat where the emotional weight of the divorce meets the actual numbers. In my experience, those two are never as separate as a settlement document makes them look.

You Don't Pay Long-Term Rates for a Short-Term Question

Melissa makes a smart point in the book about cost: you don't want an attorney billing at attorney rates for something that isn't actually a legal question. Bring in the right professional for the right piece, and the total cost of the divorce goes down because everyone is working in their lane.

The same logic applies on the financial side of the team. A CFP or financial advisor is oriented toward the long-term horizon: the portfolio, the retirement timeline, the big picture. A question about this month's cash flow, whether she can cover what's coming due, or how her spending needs to shift now that her income has changed, isn't a long-term planning question. Paying advisor rates to ask it is the same mismatch Melissa warns against, just one step further down the line. That question belongs with a financial coach, and it costs less because it genuinely is a different kind of work, not a discount version of the same work.

Even a Full Team Can Miss the Day-to-Day

Here's where I want to be specific, because it's easy to assume a full team covers everything. That isn't always true.

A client of mine came to me after she had signed her divorce papers. She has a financial advisor she's worked with for over a decade. She didn't know about CDLPs, so she didn't have one on her team. When she wanted to refinance her mortgage after the divorce, no one had checked whether she would qualify.

Her lawyer didn't raise it, nor did her financial advisor, who was focused on her long-term investments. There wasn't a CDLP to flag the mortgage question early. She found her way to coaching because she needed someone paying attention to her current financial standing, not her ten-year horizon and not a one-time legal check.

Together, we worked through the obstacles between her and approval and made the changes step by step. This week, she signed her refinance papers.

The Team Approach Still Holds

None of this is a critique of the model Melissa lays out. It's a strong, well-considered team, and following it will genuinely spare a woman a great deal of the expense and confusion that come with going through a divorce without one. I'd simply add one more seat at that table: someone attuned to the days in between the decisions, when emotional spending might rear its head, and who stays with her through the part of the process that doesn't end when the paperwork is signed.

If You're the One Building the Team

If you're in the middle of a divorce, or on the other side of one, you've probably already discovered how much of this falls to you. You're the one holding the whole picture, translating among professionals who each see only one piece of it, and answering this month's questions on your own after everyone else's work is done.

You don't have to hold that part by yourself either. A financial coach is the person who sits with you during the ordinary weeks, when the settlement is signed, and the real question is what this month actually looks like now.

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If you're navigating a divorce and want someone on your team who's focused on the day-to-day, I invite you to schedule a free Money Conversation. We'll talk through where you are and what kind of support would actually fit.

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Financial Coach Sabrina

Insight Financial Coaching

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