I have been married now for close to twelve years now, and though there have been some tough times, my wife Deidre and I are still hanging in there and love each other.  We have a number of friends who got married before and after us, who have the same story.  However we know of many who have started out on the journey called marriage but decided that there was not enough  The subject of divorce is a difficult one whether you're in Christian circles or not.  The truth of the matter is that divorce is that elephant that is standing in the middle of a lot of our rooms but no wants to acknowledge it.  The question is what do you when faced with it and how do you handle the subject of dissolving a marriage when there is so much involved and invested.

Handle Your Business

What is often difficult to keep in perspective is that you almost have to view divorce like a business transaction rather than the end of a relationship.  Over the life of a marriage, property is acquired, accumulated, and disbursed.  When its time to dissolve a marriage relationship, the spouses have to take on the mind of a mergers and acquisitions manager, and stay objective, or you will become emotionally charged and eventually make the wron decisions.  I know it sounds cold and calculating (no pun intended), but what may have started out as a passionate love romance must, oftentimes, be relegated to a four-person board meeting (if you count the lawyers).

Despite my desire to go straight to retirement after graduating from college, the reality of bills convinced me to enter the workforce. After several small jobs, I finally found myself working as a financial advisor with a major brokerage house where I learned an important lesson about retirement: it requires money.


At the age of 24, I was charged with the responsibility of helping clients—many of whom were at least twice my age—determine the wisest way to invest what was often their life’s savings. For some of my clients, retirement was barely five years away, yet their retirement accounts were barely five figures. When I first started, $50,000 seemed like a lot of money to have saved up by the time you were 60 years old. But then I realized that if you had spent the past 40 years working, you’d only saved about $1,000 each year. On top of that, people are living longer. So if you retired at 62, it was very possible that you could still live another 20 years. That $50,000 seemed even smaller.