Financial and Estate Planning After Divorce w/Jamie Lima

J Rosemarie (00:03)

Sorry, I got to do something that I forgot to do while I was talking to you Don't worry about it. I edit my stuff so

Hmm.

Okay. My guest today is Jamie Lima. Welcome to Solo Mom's talk, Jamie. I'm glad to have you. Having a rough start.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (00:38)

Thank you for having me.

That's okay. That's okay. Technology, technology for the win.

J Rosemarie (00:45)

Okay. So before we start, before we get into the meat of our conversation, could you tell us who is Jamie Lima?

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (00:57)

Great question. Well, we can go back way back in the time machine to talk about some of my the childhood experiences that shaped me into who I am. But we can delve a little bit deeper into that maybe in a little bit. A few more minutes here. But I personally, I am a father and stepfather to five. Yeah. So we're leaving tomorrow, as a matter of fact, to go on vacation with three of them. So I'm.

J Rosemarie (01:13)

Hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (01:27)

I'm a little stressed out about that because you never know what you're going to get. But I'm born and raised on the East Coast. I'm an East Coast guy, born and raised. And I came out to California now. I've been out in California since just outside of San Diego since like the early 2000s or so. Professionally, I worked professionally. I started my in the financial services field.

J Rosemarie (01:30)

Okay.

Hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (01:53)

in with a company called Morgan Stanley back in 2005, 2006. And then I left there and went to a company called Fidelity Investments, where I was there for about 10 years or so. And about three years ago, I decided to launch my own wealth management company called Woodson Wealth Management, which is we're at the base of Mount Woodson here in San Diego. So that's where the namesake came from. And doing that for a few years, but one of my areas of passion and something that I've been incredibly passionate about.

J Rosemarie (02:16)

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (02:23)

not only being the product of a divorce, but also working with a lot of people that have experienced divorce themselves as a professional, but also going through a divorce myself, a nasty divorce myself in 2017. I am now a certified divorce financial analyst, and I launched a company called Allegiant Divorce Solutions earlier this year to help people manage the financial aspect of things relating to divorce.

Yeah.

J Rosemarie (02:49)

Okay, all right. So thank you for sharing you personal with us and then a little bit about what you do. And I always like to ask someone what got them into what they're into. You've touched on that a little bit. And so as someone who's divorced and have gone through the financial mess of divorce,

What are some of the things I'm going to jump right in and ask you what are some of the things we could do? Not that we're planning for divorce But what we could do To avoid some of the messes that we encounter during divorce

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (03:34)

It's a great question. I think there are several things. One being when you go into a divorce, you need to understand right at the outset what you want future you to look like. When the divorce is behind you, when the dust is settled and you've signed the divorce document, you are now a single person. You should spend a lot of time with

What do you want that to look like? Right? Do you want to travel more? Do you want to, you know, take, get a different job? Do you want to focus on the kids? Do you want to move to a different city? Whatever it is. I would spend a lot of time jotting that down because that. Sets the direction for all the decisions that you have to make along the way. I work with so many people that have, they just want, and I was in many ways this, this was me too.

When I decided I had wanted a divorce, all I wanted to do was have it be over as quickly as possible. And the mistakes that you make along the way, trying to accelerate that process can be very, very detrimental to you, not only personally, emotionally, and financially. So if you spend some time with it and really just sit down and jot down your thoughts. And one of the first things we do with all of our clients,

And it's, it sounds silly, but we literally have them fill out a document that's called the goals worksheet. And we will sit with them and say, like, you need to understand what your goals are. You need to understand what your partner's goals are and figure out if you can meet in the middle somewhere, because it will make it, it will be less costly. All the way through the, through the process. And then I'm certainly biased, but I feel like creating team you, which is a theme that I, uh, you'll, you'll hear from me. You should have.

J Rosemarie (05:11)

Okay.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (05:27)

You're a divorce attorney. If you think you can't do it by yourself, you should absolutely have a good divorce attorney in your corner and also a certified divorce financial analyst or a CDFA, just like myself, as part of TMU because what we can do is help you handle all the financial aspects of things. The attorney will help you figure out all the legal aspect of things. And it may sound counterintuitive because...

J Rosemarie (05:50)

Hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (05:54)

A lot of people go into divorce worried about finances and how they're going to afford to pay for it and so on. But the reality is, is that if you hire someone like myself to help you navigate these decisions, there's a high likelihood that you're going to spend less money in the long run because you're going to have, you're going to be much, much better organized, you're going to know where you stand financially. And when it comes time for negotiations, it's going to take less time because all the, all the cards laid out on the table, so to speak.

J Rosemarie (06:20)

Okay, all right. Okay, I understand that. Thank you. And I'm gonna touch on something for someone who is actually going through a divorce right now, a solo mom. And I'm asking this question from the point of view of someone who's still experiencing the repercussion, the financial repercussion of a divorce that occurred 20 years ago. So, yes. So I'm asking because

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (06:30)

Mm.

Wow.

J Rosemarie (06:48)

As solo moms, we're so swamped with the idea of we have to protect the kids, we have to take care of the kids, and we let our anger and our fear rule. So give us like one or two pointers that could steady the ship, so to speak, in our minds as to what we need to focus on rather than getting scared and angry or stuff like that, making bad decisions.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (06:55)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds silly to say, but you really literally just have to take things one step at a time and try not to take on too much all at once, right? I'm not a mother for obvious reasons, but one of the things that I thought about through my entire divorce was how can we make sure the kids are okay, right? And I'm sure from a mother's perspective and...

J Rosemarie (07:21)

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (07:42)

That's, you know, 10 times you feel 10 times the way that strongly, but 10 times stronger about that than I did just because that's mother's intuition. But by taking one step at a time and really getting an understanding of what you have coming in, what you have going out and just taking small steps forward from a financial perspective, I think it's going to alleviate some of the stress.

So after we do the goal setting exercise with our, our clients, we go back to the elementary basic stuff of let's, let's look at your budget, right? We need to know, you know, how much does your cell phone cost? How much does it do your, is your cable bill? How much is your car payment? Those things. And we'll organize all that information and you're going to need to do it anyway, as part of the exercise to give the information to the financial affidavit to give to the courts. But.

J Rosemarie (08:23)

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (08:40)

If you can spend some time with that and really understand, like, okay, here's how much money I need every month to live. And then here's how much I have coming in. And then if in a lot of ways, there's more money going out than there's money coming in, especially when it comes to divorce, because now you have two households usually to support. So working with a financial professional and having somebody in your corner to help you navigate some of the decisions you have to make about what do I keep?

J Rosemarie (09:02)

Yeah.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (09:09)

What do I let go of? What's most important? What's not? And helping you really navigate the, I think that's, it sounds very simple, but some of these very simple things go a long way in helping alleviate the stress.

J Rosemarie (09:24)

Yes, yes, thank you. So get a team if you can, set some goals for yourself, and take it one step at a time. So those are good advice. And yeah. Yeah. Mm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (09:39)

It sounds simple, but the reality is that a lot of people skip those steps and they get hurt in the long run.

J Rosemarie (09:43)

Yes, yes, yes. Okay, thank you. So, if someone is a solo mom and I want to go further than the divorce planning because a lot of our audience already divorced. They've already been through that, done that. But one of the things I've come across is solo moms who

who die and leave a mess behind, not necessarily because they didn't have any money, but because they didn't do any planning. So can I ask you to address estate planning? What is it and how can it benefit a solo mom's family?

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (10:33)

Oh, this is one of my favorite conversations. It is so boring sometimes and so morbid, but it is incredibly, incredibly important. Every one of the clients that we work with in my financial advisory firm, everyone we work with has an estate plan in place for this exact reason.

People think that just because they don't have, maybe they don't have a lot of assets, or maybe they don't have the money to pay an attorney to put together a plan. Or maybe it's just, they just don't want to think about their own morbidity and the fact that one of these days we're not going to, we're all not going to be here. Whatever the excuse is, you are doing your family a gigantic, capital gigantic disservice.

J Rosemarie (11:10)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (11:24)

If you don't have these documents in place, we use a company called Trust and Will, which is an online digital estate planning service that we use them because for the most of the clients that we work with, it's good enough to get started. A lot of the people that we work with, they don't have super complex situations, it's very, very cut and dried. But having these documents in place allows them to ensure that if something does happen to them, their kids are taken care of. If they did.

happened to take over a retirement account or they took, they received the home in the divorce and now they have this asset that's there. I'm gonna venture to guess that if you're listening to this and that's you, you wanna make sure that your kids and grandkids and so on down the line can benefit from that and you don't wanna squander it. Well, not having an estate plan in place, you can do just that. Things can get tied up and probate for years.

J Rosemarie (12:13)

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (12:21)

It is incredibly, it is an incredibly expensive process and it's unnecessary. It's an unnecessary pain and struggle to put your family through just because you're lazy. I've, and I see this happen all the time. It's not because they don't have the ability to do it or the funds to do it. They're just like, eh, well, I'll get to it when I get to it. It's, it's, it's a problem. And I've the longest, the longest one that I've seen in the history of my almost 20 year career now.

It's taken three years to divide up assets and probably a hundred or $200,000 in expenses going through the courts. Now we're here in the state of California, so things aren't always much more expensive compared to some other parts of the world, but it's just unnecessary. And those documents, those estate planning documents that you can put in place don't necessarily all pertain to the assets that you have. They also pertain to things like your healthcare directives and your financial power of attorney.

J Rosemarie (13:07)

Yes.

Yeah.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (13:22)

Maybe you haven't passed away, but maybe you unfortunately got in a car accident and you're laid up in the hospital for a month. You need to make sure that your kids can keep a roof over their head and somebody can speak on your behalf from a healthcare perspective. All of those documents are included in a solid estate plan.

J Rosemarie (13:47)

Okay, all right. So where does someone start? What is step one? And because when we hear estate planning, I think we think dollar signs. But I think it's so much simpler than that. I have experienced know that it's way simpler than that. So tell us where we start.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (14:08)

It goes back to goal setting. The exercise I take clients through is, close your eyes. You passed away yesterday.

What do you want to have happen with your kids, your possessions, some of the larger assets you have, and so on? Visualize it. Oh, I wanna give $10,000 to this charity. I wanna make sure my daughter can go to college. I wanna make sure that the house is sold. And literally sit with that and go through that exercise. You've now drafted the framework for your estate plan. Then you can take that information.

And go to an attorney or use a company like Trust and Will or I mean, even this is not a legal advice by any stretch of imagination, but I personally use legal zoom because I, I set my, I put, I put my plan in place before Trust and Will even existed. So you can go to any of these online places to get your there as long as they're vetted and they're, they're legal zoom and Trust and Will companies like that, you can use them in all 50 states. They're all vetted by attorneys.

Some of the documents are actually proofread by attorneys to ensure that they're dialed in. So I would sit with that and then reach out to an attorney or use one of these online tools that are available to you. And you mentioned it about the cost. The digital versions are about a sixth of the cost of going to an actual attorney. So for a lot of the clients that we talk to, we can put a plan in place for under a thousand dollars.

Now, if you have a super complex situation where maybe there are multiple properties or there's a business involved or, you know, things you want certain things to happen to, you know, maybe you don't want to have your kids get all of your money at the age of 25. Maybe you want to spread that out over 10 years, whatever it is. You probably want to talk to an attorney about that because they can get a little more granular with the goals that you have and also help you execute on that. If it's just very, very simple, I see nothing wrong with the tools that are available to people out there.

J Rosemarie (16:19)

Okay, so thank you and thank you for sharing your expertise with us. It's very important to all of us. I understand. So tell us about your business, what you do for your clients, and how we can get in touch with you.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (16:39)

Absolutely. So there's again, there's two companies. One is Woodson Wealth Management, which is my financial planning firm. We do everything from retirement planning to investment management, estate planning, insurance, taxes, you name it, we do everything there. And that website is Woodson w o d s o n w m.com Woodson w m.com. All my contact information is on there. You can schedule a complimentary meeting with you know myself or my team.

We have five advisors on the team, all certified financial planners at this stage. So we can, and we can help anybody across the country. We're not just domiciled, we're domiciled in California, but we have offices in New York, Texas, I'm here in California. Um, we're, we're all over the country at this, at this stage. So, so no problems there. If, if it's related to the divorce financial planning stuff, or you're starting to think about going through the divorce or trying to navigate your own divorce.

I do that work under a company called Allegiant Divorce Solutions, which in that website is AllegiantDS.com. And all my contact information is there. There's also some more information about where we can assist and what the process looks like that will take you through. There are a lot of free resources on the website too. So if you are going it alone, you can download some free resources that might be helpful as you're starting to think about navigating your own divorce.

J Rosemarie (18:04)

Okay, all right, thank you. And we put those links in the show notes, so people can access them as well. All right, so what is Jamie grateful for today?

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (18:14)

I am grateful for my upcoming vacation starting at noontime Pacific. So I have, we're recording this at about 9 AM. So I have about three hours left and we're going to take my stepdaughter who just turned 18 and graduated high school successfully. Thank goodness. Um, uh, a friend of hers and then her brother, um, who graduated a couple of years ago, we're going to go down to Mexico for a couple of days and let them go. Uh,

J Rosemarie (18:23)

Hehehe

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (18:42)

go play in the water and get some sun. So it's gonna be awesome. I'm looking forward to it.

J Rosemarie (18:48)

That's gonna be fun. I love Mexico. I spent six months there and I just love it. They'll have a ball.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (18:52)

Oh, nice. Yeah, we're going to port. We'll be in port of Arriarta. Yeah, it's going to be nice. Great spot.

J Rosemarie (18:56)

Okay cool yeah. All right so I'm gonna ask you as I ask all my guests to give a solo mom one piece of advice before you go.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (19:04)

Hmm.

So I'm the product of a solo mom myself. Yeah, my mother basically raised me since I was like eight, you know, and beyond. My dad was kind of like in and out. We have a great relationship now, so it's come full circle, but I think it goes back to what I said earlier. You just have to keep swimming, right? Was it finding Nemo or just keep swimming? You just have to keep swimming. And because...

J Rosemarie (19:40)

Mm-hmm.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (19:42)

The kids will be out the door before you know it. Even when you're in the, I mean, I've been there, right? When I have, with five kids across the two families that we have, man, there were some days where I didn't think I was gonna be able to make it through because of all the work responsibilities you have and the family responsibilities. And you're trying to find time for yourself and all these things, I get it. There's a lot of spinning plates, but you have to use your resources too. There are people out there that are willing to help. We do a ton, and I mean a ton.

J Rosemarie (20:04)

Yeah.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (20:11)

of pro bono financial planning work for people all year long. So if you're in the throes of it and you're like, you know, I need help, but I just don't know how to get started. I don't know what to do next. Please, please, please do not hesitate to reach out to us because we will find a fit. We're just here to help, right? And that's my way of having myself and my team give back to the solo moms that are out there that were just like my mother. You know, and had she had the resource.

available to her at that when I was seven or eight years old and we were trying to figure out how we're going to, you know, put food in the pantry or she was trying to figure out how to put food in the pantry. I think she would have been a much better spot having access to someone like myself and my team. And so we're all here to help. So don't hesitate to reach out and use your resources for sure.

J Rosemarie (20:53)

That's right.

Okay, all right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jamie Lee, for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate you.

Jamie Lima, MBA, CFP®, CDFA® (21:04)

I appreciate you. Thanks for having me.

J Rosemarie (21:06)

Yeah.