Episode Description - What No One Tells You About Divorce and Your Money
What if everything you think you know about divorce and your money is keeping you trapped in financial anxiety? Phil Telpner, a financial advisor, former hedge fund manager, and president of Breakout Private Wealth, reveals why even women with substantial assets find themselves paralyzed by money decisions during and after their divorce. He also reveals the simple system he created that will turn that around.
Phil breaks down the most common questions women face post-divorce: “Can I?”, “How much?”, and “What if?”. He also reveals how you can turn your answers to these questions into the foundation of a strong financial plan.
Phil also unpacks the hidden landmines that can derail your financial future after divorce, including maintenance changes due to job loss, and the tax implications that come with switching your filing status post-divorce.
Phil challenges conventional financial wisdom and offers practical strategies for maximizing your wealth and minimizing your financial risks after your divorce. His insights offer a lifeline for women who want to build financial security while modeling financial strength for their children.
Throughout this episode, Phil’s message is clear: Action eliminates anxiety. You don’t need to have every financial issue figured out from the start. You just need to take your next best step.
Show Notes
About Phil
Phil helps recently divorced women take their finances from overwhelm and anxiety to opportunity. He is the author "Million Dollar Divorce- How To Avoid Money Anxiety After Divorce, Without Sacrificing Your Lifestyle) and the "Gen X Guide To Financial Independence" Husband, Dad, Financial Advisor, Owner Breakout Private Wealth.
Connect with Phil
You can connect with Phil on LinkedIn at Phil Telpner. To explore how Phil can help you achieve your goals visit his website at Breakout Private Wealth. You can email Phil at [email protected].
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Phil
- Former trader and hedge fund professional turned financial advisor, Phil Telpner now specializes in working with women, especially those recently divorced.
- About 80% of his clients are women, and he blends financial guidance with support for the emotional side of money management.
- Even high-income women often experience financial anxiety due to lack of financial education and major life changes like divorce.
- Clients usually come seeking answers to three questions: “Can I?”, “How much?”, and “What if?”—covering life goals, affordability, and possible scenarios.
- Most approach Phil after their divorce, often feeling overwhelmed by handling finances alone.
- Common post-divorce financial landmines include inadequate liability insurance, overreliance on spousal support, keeping a costly home instead of investing, healthcare coverage gaps, and poor tax planning.
- Phil stresses proactive tax planning—distinct from tax preparation—to optimize deductions, adjust to post-divorce tax brackets, and leverage strategies like Roth conversions and HSAs.
- He uses “what if” scenario modeling to prepare for income shifts, investment choices, and risk management, always tailoring advice to the situation.
- Believes small, consistent actions reduce anxiety, with coaching and accountability as key components.
- Phil treats financial planning as an ongoing process, recommending quarterly reviews covering investments, taxes, risk, and estate planning.
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Transcript
What No One Tells You About Divorce and Your Money
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
investments, divorce, planning, insurance
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Phil Telpner
Karen Covy Host
00:10
Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making so we can discover what keeps us stuck and, more importantly, how we can get unstuck and start making even tough decisions with confidence. I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator and arbitrator, turned coach, author and entrepreneur. And now, without further ado, let's get on with the show.
With me today, I have the honor of speaking with Phil Telpner. Phil is a financial advisor and the president of Breakout Private Wealth, a firm that helps recently divorced women take their finances from overwhelm and anxiety to opportunity. Phil is the author of Million Dollar Divorce how to Avoid Money Anxiety After Divorce Without Sacrificing your Lifestyle, and the Gen X Guide to Financial Independence. Phil, welcome to the show.
Phil Telpner Guest
01:12
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Karen Covy Host
01:14
I'm excited to talk to you and I can't wait to dive into your book. I've got it all right here, all ready to go. But before we get into that, can you share with the listeners a little bit about yourself? How did you get here? What drew you to this particular line of business?
Phil Telpner Guest
01:33
It was an accident. I started. I was a trader. I was a member of the Board of Trade in Chicago. I traded for a hedge fund.
01:48
I went to Morgan Stanley and managed portfolios, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was talk to people about their money. Having been in probably hundreds of meetings, it didn't take too long before I realized that what people cared about wasn't necessarily the performance of their portfolio, although that's important, but that's what Wall Street wants you to think. What they cared about was showing me pictures of their grandson playing baseball or getting married or picket, and slowly I kind of evolved into that and I find it to be the advice side the human side of it, if you will to be far more interesting and rewarding, quite honestly, than the numbers and all that, the working with women. I was at a conference, a Morgan Stanley conference a bunch of years ago and I had to present a whole plan, a whole thing, and the woman said you know, you really should work with women.
03:12
I think that you're great at this and I'm like it's kind of a dude, it's kind of you know, I'm like, and I go home and I tell my wife and she kind of laughs at me and fast forward five, six years and I'm working with a coach that looks at my clients and she's like they're 80% women. Don't you think that you should concentrate in serving these people? I enjoy working with them. They're great clients. I can really help them and that's how this whole thing kind of evolved, you know.
Karen Covy Host
03:55
I know that because you and I have talked too. You work with a lot of really high powered women, you know I mean women across the board, but even high powered women who have assets you know to manage. They have a lot financially but they still have tremendous anxiety around money. Why is that? You would think that once you were successful and had a certain level of wealth, you wouldn't worry about it anymore.
Phil Telpner Guest
04:29
Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? There's a study out there and I think the break point is like $75,000, where after like $75,000 or maybe $100,000, your basic kind of needs are met and then everything else after that, like the incremental value of that next dollar, if you will after a while stops I'm not going to say having meaning, but stops having the same kind of meaning that it did. The anxiety, I find, is a combination of a few things. Number one people. You know they're very successful in their world. My world is something that nobody ever you don't learn about it.
05:26
Most people, unfortunately, learn about financial planning and all the things that go into that long after they should and it's just not taught in school, it's not taught the right way, and so people get to this kind of tipping point where they have this great career, kids, family, sometimes working through a divorce, and they don't know what to do. And you know better than anybody. That's where the anxiety comes from. I always tell my clients that action's the antidote for anxiety like tiny, tiny, tiny.
06:19
Like you want to lose weight, don't like, don't worry about the carbs. Like take two, two 10 minute walks outside every day. Like it's. It's small actions over time, compounds, like your portfolio, like everything else in life, and it just takes coaching, obviously, uh, accountability, um accountability, and really magic can happen. It's so cool, but it's not easy.
Karen Covy Host
06:56
No, I think nothing that's worthwhile in life ever is, but it's interesting. I want to get into your book and you say in your book that financial planning is fundamentally about answering questions, which isn't a definition that I've heard other financial planners use. And then you say for post-divorce women, these questions often revolve around three main concerns Can I? How much? and What if? Tell me more about those questions.
Phil Telpner Guest
07:32
I believe strongly that people hire advisors, financial planners, because they have questions. I've never met anybody that they may verbally say I want a plan. Okay, that's what you read on the internet or whatever. What you really have is questions, otherwise you would never like, you would never reach out or you would never agree to a meeting. So we all have these questions.
08:04
Okay, can I, you know, send my kids to private school? Can I send them to the college that they want? Can I help out a sibling or heaven forbid a family member that's going through some challenges? Can I invest in another business? Can I quit the job I hate and do something else? You know, that's the soundtrack for people and just being able to be there in the beginning of the relationship and not sit there. And here's what the industry does.
08:56
Thanks for coming in, Karen. Tell me about your goals, like, yeah, okay, I don't want to run out of money, I don't want to live under a bridge. Okay, everybody's got the same goals, but that's not why you decided to come in. You decided to come in because you have questions. How much do I need to be able to quit my job and be financially independent? What if the maintenance changes? What if I fall in love, whatever and decide to marry again? What if I need to help out my parents Because heaven forbid they're having some challenges? Those are the questions. That's what we need to do with our clients at the beginning.
Karen Covy Host
10:02
So let me interrupt you for a second. Let's say I come to you oh, excuse me. And so I come to you and I say can I do what I want to do with my money? How much do I need? How do I not live under a bridge? What do you say to me? How do we start the relationship?
Phil Telpner Guest
10:25
Well, there's obviously some analysis that has to happen to that right. You know we would have to look at everything, everything that you have going on, anything with a dollar sign, including not just life insurance but property casualty. It's amazing to me. Here's a pro tip it's amazing to me how many people don't have enough umbrella liability insurance. So, if you're listening, I don't want the compliance police after me, but double check your umbrella policy. It's cheap and an extra few million dollars, especially if you have kids, is a requirement.
Karen Covy Host
11:12
Just for those who don't know what is an umbrella policy know what is an umbrella policy?
Phil Telpner Guest
11:23
It's a liability policy that goes over your whole, I guess, for lack, keep it simple, all of your other insurance policies. So it will add, you know, millions of dollars, so to speak. Onto heaven forbid. Your child's involved in a car crash. Or you go out of town for a weekend and little Timmy has a few fellas over drinking some beers Real world stuff that happens. So it's relatively inexpensive and very, very critical. What we would call risk management very sexy term but it's one of the things that people just especially if there's been a lot of paper back and forth and a divorce and stacks of this and stacks of that, sometimes that can just fall right aside. Unfortunately it's until it's too late. So yeah, I mean I use those questions and I want to answer your question. That gives us the direction that relationship should go right from the beginning. Okay, so it just helps people clarify. I think I'd be doing a disservice to people, I know I would be if I wasn't answering their questions.
Karen Covy Host
12:53
No, that makes total sense. But the question I have for you is let's say that there's a woman who's going through a divorce. At what point does it make sense for her to start asking these financial questions? I mean, should she be looking for a financial advisor in the beginning of her divorce? Should she wait till the middle when their settlement talks start? Should she wait until after she's got the money and then says What do I do with it? At what point do you get involved and do you recommend that people get someone like you involved?
Phil Telpner Guest
13:30
I can just tell you, most of our clients come to us at the point after their divorce is finalized, and sometimes longer than I would like. But there seems to be a little bit of a pattern Now there is there's some high profile, high net worth divorce that there's somebody that sits and walks through side by side and that's super cool and helpful. But what I see is somebody that's been divorced a year, six months, maybe a little bit longer, that just lays there going, oh my God, like how am I going to deal with this? I've got six hockey games, four baseball practices and two dance classes I have to be at and, like I have a stack of investment accounts. I don't even know what they mean. I don't know if this is right, because my husband took care of it and it just. It becomes really overwhelming, I guess, so to speak.
Karen Covy Host
14:51
Do you find that a lot of the clients that come to you have a certain level of shame for not being on top of this, or they feel guilty. It's like I should have known better, and so that keeps them from reaching out?
Phil Telpner Guest
15:09
So good, I would say in some cases. I know that's, that's prevalent. But, to be honest, like the women, that and maybe this is why that step forward are very, you know, there's a little bit of oh I should have paid attention to this or oh, my God, like I don't know my savings rate or you know, but I think we all have that. To be honest, in some things I don't. I just think that they're motivated because of, perhaps, their experience. They're motivated and sometimes it comes through the lens of their children. If children are involved, they want their children to see mom taking care of business. They don't want to see mom curled up on the couch crushing bottles of wine, watching bravo or something that that the image is. I want my kids to know that mom's like, mom's got this and if anybody's listening and is struggling for motivation, I think that's pretty powerful right there.
Karen Covy Host
16:52
Yeah, no, I agree, children learn by what they see, not by what you say. And seeing their parents both parents seeing them taking care of business, seeing them confident, makes a whole lot of sense. But there are so many potential landmines that can blow up people's financial future after a divorce. I know you talk about some of them in the book. What are some of the landmines that somebody needs to pay attention to, hopefully sooner rather than later?
Phil Telpner Guest
17:32
Uh, how about liability insurance?
Karen Covy Host
17:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phil Telpner Guest
17:39
So there's a couple that we've identified in the book Spousal support maintenance. You know and I haven't seen it personally, but I know it's out there anecdotally as large firms have started laying people off. I just read Google offered I don't know how many 10,000, 20,000 people early retirement packages or something like that, retirement packages or something like that. So we may be in one of those cycles where somebody that's had stable employment for 20 years now finds themselves to be 45 to 50 years old and situation changes that can result in a change in maintenance. If gone through the courts and done correctly, well, I mean, if there's not planning involved, if that is the sole source of income, so to speak, that can be problematic. So sometimes, you know, sometimes we can manage it. Certainly we can talk about it, certainly we can provide alternatives or provide you know what if? Because that certainly can happen, that certainly can.
Karen Covy Host
19:17
I think that's an important conversation these days because you hear everything with the advent of AI and that AI is going to replace so many jobs. And when somebody gets awarded spousal support, whether that's the man or the woman they expect they're going to get what the court order says they're going to get for as long as they're going to get it. And you and I both know that that's not necessarily true. If the paying spouse loses their job and there is no more income to pay support, all that spouse has to do and what they're going to do is go to court and say hey, judge, I don't have a job. We need to put a pause on this, or we need to reduce it or we need to eliminate it. And now you've got two ex-spouses who are both in financial. You know they both have financial problems because the only breadwinner lost a job. So what can you know? Do you have any solutions for this? How can women deal with that?
Phil Telpner Guest
20:21
Well, I think it depends on the lifestyle and the size of the settlement in general whether there's a way to generate some income replacement there, whether it almost becomes an early retirement, if you can envision taking distributions for all my accounts. But again, that has to be thoughtful, right. There's a lot I have seen like messed up QDROs and like people just taking retirement distributions prior to 59 and a half and getting destroyed in taxes and penalties and like that's when you need you know before you do anything, please, please, get some advice. So there is a way, there is a way to you know, maybe there's a, maybe there's a reasonable gap that part-time work would fill. If you know, as you transition from let's just, you know, stay at home mom to you know something, you know what's.
21:46
You know the house is always a big one, right? I? I see people trading long-term growth assets for the comfort of the family house and I struggle with that I understand the emotional part of it, but a home is a place to raise your family. It's really a poor investment, generally speaking, and trading your long-term growth 8%, 9%, 10%, whatever that is for a home, that costs you a lot of money to keep going. You a lot of money to keep going like care needs to, like that needs to be a well thought out and you need to run the numbers on that too, you know I think you're bringing up a really good point, because most people the analysis.
Karen Covy Host
22:46
When you're trying to figure out should I keep the home or should we sell it right, and you're 100 right, everybody's like we got to keep the home for the kids, okay, cool, and you know, sometimes I understand you're in a certain school district, there's not a lot of rentals in your area, there's a lot of reasons to keep the house. But what you're pointing out that most people I don't hear a lot of people talk about and they don't think about is that if all of your money is tied up in your house, that money isn't growing in the same way that it might in if it was invested in stocks or bonds or some other kind of account. Now, everybody always thinks that the value of the house is always going to go up, so it's an investment, but I remember 2008.
Phil Telpner Guest
23:36
General advice. If you have, let's just you know, 1% or 2% probably of the value of your home, you need to sidecar for roof, hvac leaks, all the real fun stuff that us as homeowners have to go through, and when you kind of back out all that, I think your home is not a good investment. It's a great place to raise your family. You need a place to live in, a nice area, of course I do not call it an investment. That's like saying a CD is a great investment. No, no.
Karen Covy Host
24:22
Gets you a few dollars in interest and that's about it.
Phil Telpner Guest
24:24
Yeah, taxable interest no, not great. Yeah, Other ones. Healthcare big thing yeah, Huge thing. Husband's a corporate guy has a plan. Family's been on the plan. What's that going to look like? Tax planning huge thing. Going from married filing jointly to either head of household or single, lower standard deduction, all sorts of tax things. We do tax planning as well.
Karen Covy Host
25:08
You could actually pay more taxes just because your standard deduction decreases than married filing jointly. So how would somebody, if somebody's thinking about the, they listen to you, they're like, ah, I never thought of this, I better check this out. Where do they even go? Do they go to a financial planner? Do they go to a CPA? Do they go? How do they figure out what their post-divorce tax picture is going to look like?
Phil Telpner Guest
25:32
Great question. So there is a distinct difference between tax planning and tax preparation. Generally speaking, CPAs will work in the rear view, right? You bring them all your 1099s, you bring them your W-2, you bring them some K-1s if you have partnerships. Blah, blah, blah. They give you your return. You're like, oh no, and that kind of goes on. After that, after that, we have a team that does CPAs and that does tax planning. So again, the heavy lift to all of this is just a lot of documents. I tell when clients start I just have a secure vault.
26:25
I said anything that has a dollar sign, I don't, doesn't matter what it is. If it has a dollar sign, send it over and we'll parse it out. But yeah, you know, we can model that. What does that look like? Right, when are your break points? If you need to take, you know, might be the time, depending on what the situation is, If your income goes down for some reason, might be a great time to do advanced stuff like strategic Roth conversions or something, Right. So there's a lot of moving parts here. I like to kind of that's all the work that we do behind the scenes, I guess, so to speak.
Karen Covy Host
27:09
Yeah, right.
Phil Telpner Guest
27:10
Right, and then it just becomes a presentation, meeting and making sure that you know whether action's taken or not. At least the education's there. Sometimes it takes people a little bit. It's totally understandable. That's why you know the book, you know the. The theme is really like. Planning's a verb, right, like, like planning is an ongoing process. We're with our clients every quarter, like a couple of meetings face to face every year or zoom. But it's it really becomes a process because, like, there is just no way it has to be done on a cadence, on a quarterly cadence, looking at certain. One quarter could be investments, one quarter's tax, one quarter's risk, one quarter's estates right, so it's a lot.
Karen Covy Host
28:12
You raise a really good point, though, because as a non-CPA right I'm not I know a little bit about taxes, just enough to be dangerous, and I would think, just as an ordinary person, that my tax bracket is what my tax bracket is, and that you know, when you talk about tax planning as somebody who might have a 401k, a job, a few miscellaneous, you know, an old IRA from somewhere or other that there wouldn't be a lot that I can do Now. If I have my own business, then it's a different story.
28:48
But are there things that your average person, whether they own a business or not, and especially if they do that they can do to adjust how much taxes they're going to owe at the end of the year, assuming they don't wait till December 31st to do it?
Phil Telpner Guest
29:07
always um depends on, of course, their situation. Um, you know, I have some clients, we, you know, very charitably inclined, right. So we do donor advised funds, not, you know, not that complicated, but you could take some of your assets out of your estate, set up basically your own charity, right, and that's charitably inclined to state planning. But, you know, with it just depends If you have a house, uh, and let's say, w-2 income you're at, you're employed for a company, um, you know little things that people forget is how to use their hsa, their health savings account, how to max that thing out hot, that it needs to be invested, like you can invest those things that should be invested. That, if you don't touch it and keep and max out, that grows, triple tax deferred forever, so reduces your taxes. Qualified healthcare expenses on the way out tax-free grows no capital on the inside of that, so grows and compounds tax-free. It's the best investment account known to man.
Karen Covy Host
30:36
That's really cool. I really hadn't thought of an HSA, a health savings account, in that way before but when you say it. That makes complete sense.
Phil Telpner Guest
30:46
Yeah. And you could. I mean, let's just come up with an extreme example You're 35 years old, you could have a million dollars in that and use it for your Medicare supplement. Let's say, you know, or little Johnny needs another set of braces. There you go, right, I mean, um, so there's always little things in there.
31:12
I think you know a lot of it becomes scenarios, right again, like what if the questions right, you know what if I take two years off, does it make sense to take some of these 401k that will now became an IRA after the split? Does it make sense to turn that into Roth, pay the taxes now as incomes low and then grow and compound that Roth without tax consequences forever? Yeah, so again, it's very situational dependent, but modeling scenarios is really critical. And another thing too, is like if people are listening and they're working with it or they're thinking about an advisor, , everything that I've ever seen in this business really has a big it depends to it, so I don't like being a lawyer yeah, it does, though, right, like, whole life insurance does not solve every problem, right?
32:29
Okay, a well-managed investment account does not solve every problem, right, it depends, right? Right.
Karen Covy Host
32:42
So what I'm hearing you say is that, unless people are well-versed in financial issues and financial vehicles themselves, they need someone like you, they need a financial advisor just to help them navigate the territory, especially if it's post-divorce and they're not used to living in this world, the financial world.
Phil Telpner Guest
33:09
Well, I, of course I would agree strongly to that. I'm not going to shy away from that. But we all have blind spots and anybody that doesn't or thinks they don't, kind of scares me. So we all have blind spots, and having somebody with a keen eye on these things to help you talk through those blind spots and make the best decision possible I mean, decision-making is a is a skill. Good decision-making is a skill. The book was written the way it was, because anxiety is a. You cannot make good decision. Good decisions can't be made in a state of anxiety, of course, and so all these things that we talked about are what we do to dial that down, if possible, and then clarity and better decision-making can come from that, and that's amazing for you and your future. That's my version of financial planning.
Karen Covy Host
34:33
But that makes all the sense in the world, and I experience and work with clients in a similar way when they're going through a divorce, because when you're going through a divorce you're going to face more important life decisions in a constrained period of time than you are at any similar time period in your life. You have got to get your head in the game. You can't think clearly, you can't analyze something completely if you're an emotional wreck about calming things down, calming your brain down so that it's not on fire when you're trying to think about something that's complex and has, to your point, a lot of moving parts.
Phil Telpner Guest
35:19
Yeah, I could not agree more. The benefit of coaching, the benefit I always tell people if I wasn't doing this, I'd coach peewee hockey or something like that, cause you know the benefit of. I've been coached a lot in my life Um, I still am in a variety of different areas. Uh, I, I just every successful person I know has a coach, and the more successful they are, the more coaches they have. And I'm not sure if that's a chicken or an egg thing, but it is true. So I just think, like clarity, and again I'll get back to my original point about action. Can't get stuck. Got to have to keep your feet moving. The, the, I, I'm not a psychologist, but rumination right, the spiral, the. That's the worst place to be.
Karen Covy Host
36:20
Yeah, A hundred percent.
Phil Telpner Guest
36:21
That just takes you down to someplace you don't want to go, and the only way to get out of that is to take the next best step.
Karen Covy Host
36:32
Yeah, and you're right. I think a lot of people think they have to have everything figured out from now until eternity. That never happens. All you have to know is what's your next best step.
Phil Telpner Guest
36:48
You know we have a dashboard of, I guess, financial vital signs or you know that we monitor so savings rate, liquidity, like you know how much cash war chest, how much comfort you have, and we'll just take savings rate. If I could get somebody's savings rate from 15% to 20, 25% over time, the compounding on that number is mind blowing and nobody ever knows that I did it, except that we talk about it. It can just be those small incremental changes and the long-term benefits of that are huge.
Karen Covy Host
37:35
Yeah, yeah, Phil, this has been such a helpful conversation and I know a lot of women are going to get a lot out of it. If somebody wants to work with you, if they want to follow up or learn more, where's the best place for them to do it?
Phil Telpner Guest
37:51
My website Breakout Private Wealth. Pretty easy, but anybody that's listening, any of your great viewers, shoot me an email. Pt at Breakout Private Wealth, my firm. Pt for Phil Telpner at Breakout Private Wealth all one word. We'll find some time to talk. We'll bounce emails around. It'd be great. Just to help, if I can.
Karen Covy Host
38:20
Phil, thank you so much. I really appreciate your sharing all of your advice and wisdom and smartness and all the things, so thank you so much for being here.
Phil Telpner Guest
38:30
This was great. Thank you so much for having me.
Karen Covy Host
38:33
You're welcome and, for those of you who are out there watching or listening, if you enjoyed today's episode, if you'd like to see more episodes, just like it, do me a big favor. Give this episode a thumbs up like. Subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel. It makes a bigger difference than you realize and I look forward to seeing all of you again next time.
