The first of hopefully many blogs, this space has been created to share my thoughts on divorce and money. So why does my opinion matter? Well, here are my credentials
* I’ve worked on over $100 million of divorces advising clients on how to best preserve and grow their money. I only work with the best clients on high net worth divorces.
* Economics degree from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard: so I look at divorce as a financial transaction in a business context. I have spent many years translating the legal constructs in a divorce into financial rules and analytical models
* The law is not economically rational: my guess would be that the vast majority of divorces don’t end up at half. There are laws governing divorce which we can make into “word problems”. When we do this and try to solve the resulting equation, guess what? The answer is etiher infinity or it is impossible to solve! This means that some laws defy rationality!
* I do more than accounting, I analyze. Accountants COUNT but they aren’t as equipped to do financial analysis as I am.
If you were the CEO of a multimillion dollar enterprise and you wanted to do a merger or a spinoff, who would you call first? Your lawyer? NO. You would call your investment banker and ask him or her about the financial and tax implications of the transaction. You would be very happy to pay them to structure the transaction. Once this is done, then you call the attorneys. So why do people call a lawyer first when they think of divorcing? Perhaps they don’t know I exist. (and thus, the blog)
Since my job is to make cold hard rational financial decsions, this is not the best place place to deal with emotional issues.
I am beginning a lecture series titled “Divorce and Money”. The two presentations I have so far are:
“How to hire and manage a divorce attorney”
“Forensic accounting: what it is and what it isn’t”
These will be given in the LA (Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica) and San Francisco Bay (Palo Alto possibly Walnut Creek) Areas