Crutches and the Art of Zen Gardening 

Finances and divorce--they go together like a horse and carriage. Don’t like that analogy? How’s this: Tiny Tim and a broken crutch. Go ahead Scrooge; kick him; he’s down.  It’s funny.  Nothings funnier than a broken crutch.

“God bless us every—OW! That hurt! You oppressive pig!“

And where did that “funnier than a broken crutch” thing come from? Must have been somebody dealing with divorce, and I’m betting they were counting their nest egg before it hatched.

That’s the thing about divorce.  It’s a Kenny Rogers “Gambler” experience. There’ll be time enough for counting when the asset dealin’s done. Of course that’s because the person who used to take your time is now taking their toys and going home. There’s plenty of time and nothing to count, just four bare walls.

“God Bless us everyone!”

Yeah, Tiny T. Why don’t you stow it for a bit?

The funny thing about divorce finance is that it doesn’t matter which side you talk to, both sides will tell you the same story: “They took everything.” And the reality is, they’re both right.  Divorce is expensive.

MyEx and I did a friendly divorce because we love irony. We used an online service, and spent hours huddling over a computer together, hours sifting through paperwork together, and even more hours dining together so she could serve me.  Yeah, the last touch of irony that was my idea, sort of the ala mode on the divorce pie being served. Its one of the things she always liked about me.

“How’s the wine?”

“Good! How’s your salmon?”

“Fantastic.”

“Shall we get the waitress to serve the paperwork?”

“Yes, lets.”

Clink!

Of course by that time we’d already duked it out over assets.  We fought over who’d take the rolling pin, and who’d get the treadmill.  We tried to be diplomatic, but that’s hard to do dueling with soup spoons, salt shakers and open wounds.  We were both gouging salt licks and laying minefields around stuff that we didn’t really want.

That’s just the stuff though.  Then there are the wads of cash hidden in every nook and crevasse like deviant Easter eggs.

“Bend over!  I see Andrew Jackson peeking out!”

  Oh it’s not lots of cash; it’s just big stacks of ones, and those are all going to pay a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian chief financial officer. It’s money that used to be yours and it’s now going to be somebody else’s. That’s it, wave goodbye.

What’s really cool is that in divorce we pay for that privilege. We pay somebody to take our money so that our ex can’t have any.  We pay to watch them suffer.  That wasn’t my divorce. I didn’t pay to see her crucified; I just paid to wash my hands.

These days things are tough enough already.  Card houses foreclose faster than they can collapse.  Who can afford to be nasty? Some families are still forced to live in the same house because they can’t sell their property.

“God bless us everyone!”

Yeah, Tim, go tell that to your mom and her new boyfriend in the other room; I’m a little busy stoking my own fire and wallowing in self-pity right now.

When there’s no love left to bleed, we ooze money.  It’s amazing the bills that seem like nothing during marriage, but turn into a big deal during divorce.  I have an alarm service that MyEx wanted so that she could feel secure in the house.  When she left, I still had the service.  Which was funny, cuz I didn’t have nearly as much stuff to protect. Some poor burglar would break in and find the only thing worth stealing were the motion detectors and the laughing broken crutch.

That’s the thing.  We don’t have time to react from the violation of a marriage gone awry.  People who could barely stumble through a mall without falling into a sale, now have to stand on ball and balance a budget to the tip of George Washington’s nose. Add Tim and his collapsible crutch and your running a financial circus, and not a household. 

So what do you do?  You breathe.  Budgeting isn’t a circus cacophony, it’s a Zen garden: It’s symmetrical and beautiful; it just takes concentration.  You prune the dead limbs of credit cards and unnecessary cable channels (because lets face it, you won’t be in the mood for late night HBO for quite some time.)

You look at the money coming in, and find a way to match it going out. You trim the grocery fat, you cut back on he water and utilities, and do what you have to do. It’s not as hard as we make it really because it’s a function of necessity. We do what we need to in order to live.

It’s important that we accept that we can do it.  As our talent grows, we start to save.  Maybe even get Tim that new crutch he’s been asking for. It’s time we all had something to smile and laugh over.

“God bless us everyone.” Said Tiny Tim last of all.