Kim Palmer

speaker

161 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Kim Palmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast · When Marriage Ends: How to Protect Your Assets, Update Your Estate Plan, and Survive the Costs · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

And basically, as you're describing, it can start with very little.

If you have a simple situation, it could even be as low as $150.

But then it quickly can escalate to tens of thousands of dollars because there's cases where you're going through the court system and you're arguing for months or even years over this stuff.

And so the average probably falls somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

And that's just for the divorce itself.

Of course, there's other costs to consider that come after divorce, like managing two homes, additional child care, all of that.

So those can be even more costs.

And the listener asked how to manage the extra costs like legal fees.

I think it really starts with looking over your spending, seeing if there's places you could cut back even temporarily to redirect towards that immediate cost where you have to pay a professional, whether it's a lawyer or a certified financial planner to help you get through this.

All of this can really add up.

Anytime you go through a big life transition, whether it's a divorce or a marriage or a new baby, it really gives you the chance to step back and think about your big financial goals and what has changed.

Possibly going through divorce means you're answering some of the big picture questions about your future differently down to what are your dream future vacations?

How do you envision retirement now?

Do you want to move or live in a different city altogether?

So I think that it gives you the chance to really step back and brainstorm about that.

And once you've done that brainstorm and taken some time to reflect and think about what are those new goals, then you can make a plan to save for them because maybe it means making some shifts and

in your spending today so you can put aside a fund for your dream vacation in Hawaii or whatever it is.

So it's definitely important to think about that.

It depends on many different factors.

But I do think this estimate from the listener that child support and rent together will take up about 50% of their income, that sounds reasonable to me because housing itself can take up typically 30% to 40% of a person's budget.

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