The new financial floor
Single income, post-settlement budget, super recovery. The honest numbers and the realistic five-year plan.
Single income, post-settlement budget, super recovery. The honest numbers and the realistic five-year plan.
The first time I sat down with the new spreadsheet, I almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because the numbers had stopped being our numbers and started being mine, and seeing them written out felt like meeting a stranger with my surname. One income. One mortgage. One super balance roughly half what it had been eighteen months earlier. A car a year older than it should have been. And, on the right-hand column, a small line called "discretionary" that hadn't seen daylight in a while.
This module is about that spreadsheet. The post-settlement one. The honest one.
If you've come through an Australian property settlement in the last year or two, the version of your finances you walked out with is probably 30 to 50 percent leaner than the version you walked in with. That's not a failure. That's the maths. The job now isn't to lament it; it's to map it, fund it, and build the next floor to stand on.
Get the new numbers in a single sheet. Not in your head. On paper.
Three columns:
The third column is where the new reality lives. Most settled men in their forties find it 30 to 60 percent smaller than it used to be, even if the first two columns look similar.
Don't fight the third column. Watch it for three months and let it tell you what your real life now costs. Budgets that work are budgets that match the life you're actually living, not the one you wish you still were.
Australian super is the silent half of most divorces. Whatever was in the family pot at separation got split, usually 50/50 unless there was a strong case otherwise. If you were the higher earner, you may have shipped 30 to 50 percent of your balance across to her account. That's not a debt; that's done. But it has a long tail.
Three things to know in month fourteen:
Don't try to "make it back" through speculation. The same product that built it the first time will build it the second time. Slower than you'd like. Faster than you think.
Five years is the right horizon. Long enough to repair, short enough to be real.
A reasonable post-settlement five-year stack, in priority order:
That's the floor. It isn't a wealth strategy. It's a "I will be okay no matter what happens next" strategy.
If you kept the house, the mortgage repayment that was once 25 percent of household income may now be 40-50 percent of yours.
The levers, in order of how much they help:
Don't treat the house as a monument to the marriage. Treat it as a balance-sheet item.
Three protections most men under-buy at this life stage:
Boring. Cheap. Done in a Saturday afternoon. The single best four hours of admin you'll do this year.
You will not earn back the financial position of your marriage in five years. You will earn back something different and, if you're patient and a bit ruthless on the spreadsheet, something stronger. Single-income wealth-building is slower. It's also a lot more legible. There's only one decision-maker now, and the discipline you bring shows up in the numbers within twelve months.
Map the floor. Fund the floor. Build slowly on top of it.
A blunt field guide to the first month after the conversation. Sleep, paperwork, the kids, and the part nobody warns you about.
5 minHow to start the talk you've been rehearsing in the shower for six months. A practical guide to the words, the room, the aftermath.
4 minWhen she ends it and you didn't see it coming. The first 72 hours, the stories you'll tell yourself, and what to actually do.
4 minA self-interrogation guide for the man considering ending his marriage. Not advice. Questions. The hard ones, in order.
5 min