The new financial floor

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.

The post-settlement budget, plainly

Get the new numbers in a single sheet. Not in your head. On paper.

Three columns:

• In. Salary after tax, side income, any rental, any government family payments. Net, monthly.
• Out, fixed. Mortgage or rent, utilities, insurance, school fees, child support, internet, phone, rego, fuel, groceries at a sensible baseline.
• Out, flexible. Eating out, drinks, gym, streaming, gifts, travel, kids' extras.

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.

Super, the part nobody warns you about

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:

• You probably need to lift contributions. If you can spare it, salary sacrificing the gap between your current contributions and the concessional cap ($30,000 in 2025-26) is the highest-leverage move you have. The tax break is real, the compounding window is still there, and you don't miss money you never see in your pay packet.
• Catch-up contributions exist. If your total super balance was under $500,000 at the end of last financial year, you can carry forward unused concessional cap from the previous five years. Most divorced men qualify by default. A 5-10k catch-up contribution this year can claw back a real fraction of what was split.
• Your investment option matters. Default balanced is fine for most. If you're 40-45 and looking at 20+ years to preservation age, a higher-growth option will (statistically) produce more.

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.

The five-year plan, sketched

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:

1. Emergency fund: three months' expenses, in a high-interest account. Not invested. Boring on purpose.
2. Super back on track. Contributions to the cap if affordable, catch-up triggered if eligible.
3. Mortgage offset built up to 6-12 months of mortgage payments. Liquid, accessible, reduces interest paid.
4. One personal investment account. Index ETFs or a low-cost super-style fund outside super. Modest contributions. Set and forget.
5. The fun bucket. A small monthly allocation to a holiday account. Doing nothing fun for five years is a worse plan than it sounds.

That's the floor. It isn't a wealth strategy. It's a "I will be okay no matter what happens next" strategy.

The mortgage on a single income

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:

• Recast or refinance. Shop the rate. Half a percent across a $700k loan is roughly $3,500 a year. Banks expect single-applicant mortgages now.
• Offset, not redraw. Park your emergency fund and any cash buffer in an offset account, not redraw. The interest saving is the same; the access flexibility is much better.
• Extend the term, deliberately. Going from 22 years remaining back out to 30 years drops the monthly. You pay more interest over the life of the loan but you survive year one of single-income mortgage life.
• Sell and re-buy smaller. Sometimes the right answer. Not a failure. Transaction costs are real but they're a one-off cost against ten years of relief.

Don't treat the house as a monument to the marriage. Treat it as a balance-sheet item.

The new safety net

Three protections most men under-buy at this life stage:

• Income protection insurance. If your income disappears for six months because of injury or illness, this is what stops the spreadsheet collapsing. Roughly 1-3 percent of annual income for a sensible policy with a 30-day waiting period.
• Life insurance, reviewed. Your old policy probably had her as the beneficiary. Update it. Your kids are now the beneficiaries (via your estate or directly), and the cover amount should equal the mortgage plus enough to keep the kids in their school for ten years.
• A will. The old one named her as executor. Replace it. A simple will, drawn up by an Australian solicitor for $300-$600, names new executors, confirms the kids as beneficiaries, and handles the super death benefit nomination separately.

Boring. Cheap. Done in a Saturday afternoon. The single best four hours of admin you'll do this year.

The honest part

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.

Further watching

• Transition Planning - Finances and Investments After a Divorce (Sean Sebold)
• 10 Must-Know Tips to Financially Recover after Divorce