Yardley Wealth Management: Joe Dillon on Divorce Mediation and Financial Planning

Hosts: Mike Gary and Madison Demora, Yardley Wealth Management
Guest: Joe Dillon, Equitable Mediation Services

---

Host: Today’s guest is Joe Dillon, a nationally recognized divorce mediator with over 17 years of experience helping couples navigate one of life’s toughest transitions. With an MBA in finance and advanced training in negotiation and mediation, Joe brings both expertise and a deeply personal perspective to the table. As a child of divorce, he saw firsthand the emotional and financial damage traditional litigation can cause, and it’s what led him to create a better way forward.

Whether you’re going through a divorce, supporting someone who is, or want to understand the financial side of major life transitions, Joe’s insights are ones you do not want to miss. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe: Hey, thanks for having me.

Host: To start, can you tell us about your personal journey and what ultimately inspired you to become a divorce mediator?

Joe: My parents litigated their divorce. This is back before mediation was really a thing, and I am the walking stereotype of everything you should not do in a divorce. My parents pitted me against each other. I sat in the back of the courtroom watching them argue. This is a great way to spend your teenage years – you’d rather be out playing sports or hanging out with your friends.

Unfortunately, it dragged on for a really long time. My mom ultimately is who I lived with full-time, and they fought and yelled and screamed so much that the last time I saw my dad was in the courthouse when I was 15. I never really heard from him again. I got a letter once or twice – one telling me he was getting remarried, and then the other letter I got was in 2019 saying he had died from his lawyer, from his estate. Those are the only two communications I had with him once my parents divorced. That’s a span of about 35 years.

For me, it’s like, “Hey guys, this didn’t have to go down like this. There is a better way to do this.” A lot of folks think, “Oh, no, no, no. That’s not going to happen to us. We’re going to be friendly and all this.” Then somebody says something or a lawyer gets involved, and before you know it, you’re off to the races like my parents were.

It really just bankrupted them emotionally, probably my mom almost financially. She still worked well into what should have been retirement years. I kind of do this to help people avoid what happened to me. I’m sort of the walking wounded but also a walking warning sign. I think that lends some credibility when you say to people, “You don’t think this can happen? You’re talking to a guy as a kid of divorce that it happened to.”

Host: I remember when I was in law school, I had a friend who got divorced. He said, “Look, we’re in our 20s, we don’t have any kids, we don’t really own anything. This should be easy.” Then like a year later he said, “You know what? If she wants this fork, I’m going to fight over it now.” He’s the most reasonable, easygoing guy, but unfortunately people go through a process and the situation really takes a toll on their humanity.

Joe: When you said that, I thought I’ve heard that so many times – “Oh, this isn’t going to be that bad.” And then it more often than not is. I think a lot of it has to do with communication. When you’re working with a mediator, there’s direct negotiation. Think about all of us with our friends or family – think about a friend where you just sent a text off-handed and they write back, “What did you mean by that?” And you’re like, “Whoa, nothing. It was just an off-hand remark.”

People get upset when they don’t have the ability to correct that communication right away. It takes time to go through the channels from one lawyer to the other. Attorneys are busy folks, so these communications can sometimes fester for days or weeks. It could have been a simple off-hand comment that got resolved right away when working in mediation where you’re directly resolving conflict in real time.

Host: For listeners unfamiliar with mediation, how would you explain the key differences between mediated and attorney-led divorces?

Joe: With a mediator, you’re working with one professional like myself. As I say to clients, I don’t represent either of you, but I advocate for both of you and your kids when applicable. We’re all working together in real time to resolve all the issues you need to resolve in a divorce.

I’m going to create options. I’m going to share my experience. I’m going to take you through financial processes because, like you and I have in common, the numbers don’t lie. Here’s the reality of your financial situation whether you want to know it or not. That’s how we’re going to craft these settlements – reality-based settlements, negotiating from a position of information, data, and discovery, trying to get people to understand that you have to give to get.

As I like to joke with my clients, if both of you are slightly unhappy with me at the end of this process, I’ve done my job, because it means somebody’s gotten something but they’ve also had to give something.

If you’re working with an attorney, your attorney represents you and only you, just like your ex or soon-to-be ex-spouse’s attorney represents them and only them. They’re advocating for their clients as they are trained and paid to do. Their concern is not what the other side gets – their concern is to make sure their client gets as much as possible.

Those of us in this profession know there are attorneys who are cooperative and there are attorneys who are scorched earth. They will go to the ends of the earth and burn the house to the ground just to make sure they get the proverbial fork.

There are times where mediation may not be appropriate – where there’s domestic violence or someone’s hiding assets. But we always say, when you try mediation, mediation isn’t binding until you make it. When you go through mediation, the agreement you come out with isn’t binding until you enter that formal legal filing process. So why not try mediation? Our rate is about 98% of our clients reach agreement. You’ve got a really good shot if you’re willing to engage in it.

There are times where you have to have both parties willing to engage. One party might think, “Oh, I’m going to just fold my arms and dig in my heels.” That’s unfortunately where you need to involve attorneys.

Host: Do you ever have problems where one soon-to-be ex-spouse sees your website and says, “Oh, I think this would be a great idea,” and the other one’s like, “No, if you want that, it can’t be good for me”?

Joe: Absolutely. “This is your mediator.” I hear that a lot. I’m like, “Wait a minute. I’m not your mediator. I’m our mediator.” The collective.

You also get people where, “Oh, he’s a guy. He’s not going to stick up for women.” Meanwhile, what they don’t know is I was raised by my Italian mother and my Italian nana. If anything, I tend to lean in that direction – not professionally, of course, but personally. I know what it’s like to grow up with a single mom. I’m an only child.

That’s part of the misunderstanding – we don’t take sides. We want to get you collectively the best deal because I’ve seen it in my own family. My mom, for example, ran out of money in her divorce, so she finally gave up on my dad’s pension. She was still working into her 70s and early 80s, and you’re like, “This doesn’t seem mathematically proper.” The numbers weren’t there for her because she just couldn’t afford to continue the fight, which was unfortunate. She was 45 at the time, but it impacted her 40 years down the road.

Host: Do you think mediators have similar personalities? Do you think to be a good mediator, you have to be pretty even-handed?

Joe: I appreciate the nice remark. I do think – and I say this jokingly to my friends who are attorneys – I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are attorneys, and I always ask them, “How do you go from advocate hat, where today I’m a lawyer, and then I also want to be a mediator and now I’m neutral?” I find that attorneys have a lot of difficulty being neutral because that’s not what they’re professionally trained to do.

As a finance person, I’m looking at everything pretty analytically from the kids’ perspective, from the family’s perspective. I’m saying, “Look, you two, here are the numbers. Here’s your budget, here’s your budget, here’s your retirement, here’s your retirement. Tell me, do you guys think this is fair? And if not, explain to me why.” That’s part of the conversation.

I think it is difficult for people to be neutral. Make no mistake, we’re all human beings. We all have our own biases. At the end of the day, somebody like me works really hard to say, “Look, just because perhaps that person’s not my cup of tea, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a fair outcome.” Everyone deserves to live their life. It’s not my settlement. I don’t have a horse in the race.

Mediation is a skill unto itself. Being neutral is a skill unto itself.

Host: You’ve seen firsthand how courtroom battles can leave both parties worse off emotionally and financially. How does a mediation approach, especially when it’s child-focused, help couples reach better long-term outcomes?

Joe: I think the first thing is the financial aspect. We say you can mediate your entire divorce for the cost of one attorney retainer. When you think about that and you say, “Do I want to put my kids through college or do I want to put the attorney’s kids through college?” The Wall Street Journal says a friendly attorney-driven divorce is between $25,000 and $50,000. If it goes sideways, you’re probably looking at closer to $200,000. That’s probably about the cost of a four-year public university right about now – could be a little higher.

You look at that financial toll and say, “Listen, you guys could save a lot of financial resources for you, your family, and your kids.”

The other thing is child-focused – “Look, I get that you’re not going to be spouses anymore, but you’re still mom and dad.” That’s what happened personally for me – my dad wasn’t at my high school graduation because he was so mad at my mom. He wasn’t at my wedding. You remind people, and having that neutral third party in that forum with both of them present allows you to kind of parent them and say, “Listen, you two, your kids don’t care that you don’t want to be married anymore. When there’s a soccer game or dance recital, they want to see both your faces in the audience next to each other.”

We use that to say not only do you have a financial cost, you have an emotional toll, and you don’t want to go through this long, arduous process. You can mediate a divorce in two to three months. My parents took close to three years for everything to be final. That’s a long time to not be focused on your kids, especially during teenage years. Kids can get in a lot of trouble if left unsupervised. I was an only child and relatively good, but do you really want to give up those precious years with your kids to spend them in a courtroom?

We try to use all the aspects – financial, emotional, legal, technical – and hopefully one of them resonates to help them move forward.

Host: You said maybe 98% of the time mediation works. In the 2% where mediation doesn’t work, are there commonalities or just different random things that make it not possible to conclude mediation?

Joe: Our case resolution rate is 98%. The average is about 70% for mediation in general. There are different styles of mediators. My style tends to be what we call directive, the opposite being facilitative.

I’ve taught mediation at Northwestern University in Chicago where I lived for five years. There it was a lot of attorneys and therapists, mental health professionals. Marriage counselors see a lot of couples breaking up and think, “Hey, I’ll be a divorce mediator.” Their style tends to be more like, “Well, how does this make you feel? How does the conflict make you feel?” That’s fine, but that doesn’t necessarily, in my experience, move you closer to resolution.

Being more directive doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to do. I think my style combined with our process is really important. One thing that gets divorces off track is that one day you’re arguing about this, then you’re over here, then you’re over there. It’s like when we take our dogs for walks – if you don’t have a real tight hold on those leashes, those dogs will chase that bird and you find yourself face down on the pavement.

If you don’t act as the strong guiding hand, keeping people on track, keeping them focused on the issues, keeping them talking about the things they need to talk about in the order they need to talk about them, that’s when things go awry.

Our experience shows that if you follow our proprietary process – all our own forms, worksheets, experience – if you follow us and stay on our track, you’ve got an excellent shot. The 2% are folks who either know better or don’t want to follow the process. As we know from our professions, I can’t help you until you provide me information. You as a financial advisor go, “Great. What are you currently invested in? What are your goals? What’s your savings rate?” And if people say, “I’m not telling you that,” you’re like, “Well, how am I supposed to help you?”

The worst thing you can say to me is, “Why do you need a copy of that?” That’s an immediate red flag. I kind of need to know how much you make if we’re going to talk about child support. The commonality is unwillingness to fully embrace and engage in the process.

Host: Those people need to be litigated against.

Joe: Unfortunately, which stinks because at the end of the day, people don’t get it. You can either tell me or you can have a judge compel you to give this item. It’s coming out. You’re not that clever. Judges are smart people. They got to that place because they’ve shown time and time again the ability to be fair, thorough, and intelligent. Good luck to you. I’m going to sleep at night. I wish you well.

It’s funny – you think of people like that who think they’re going to be smarter than the mediator or judge. They’re not the one millionth guy to think that.

Host: My favorite story – I’m having a negotiation over child support with a client couple in New Jersey. This gentleman without missing a beat leans back in the chair, big old grin, arms crossed. I remember to this day he had a Philadelphia Phillies hat on. Clear as a bell he’s like, “I don’t have to pay child support.” I’m like, “Really?” He goes, “I’m going to walk into the courtroom and the judge is going to love me, and I’m just going to say, ‘Your honor, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to pay child support,’ and the judge is going to agree with me.”

I looked at him and said, “Do you look good in orange? Because you’re probably going to be in a jumpsuit somewhere in a county jail.” These people are so deluded. I’m like, “How do you think your kids are going to eat or have a roof over their head?” I don’t know what planet he lived on, but this was in Somerset County in New Jersey.

We did get him to an agreement, but then it becomes a function of enforceability. I shared with the wife that she may want to look into the New Jersey Payment Support Center and have this deducted from paychecks because this is going to be a battle royale. Their kid was like 12 or 13 at the time. You don’t want to spend the next five or six years trying to chase this guy down for a weekly or monthly check.

Host: Can you walk us through what a typical mediation process looks like with you and your team?

Joe: We first always want to meet together – me with the potential client couple – to make sure we’re a good fit. Part of it is I’m engaging with them to see if they’re willing to actively engage, if there are any red flags. For the most part, people tend to be self-selective when they want to mediate. If you get one person who says yes and one who says no, they’re not going to become clients.

We kick them off with what we call a strategy session. We say, “We’re going to meet for an hour. We’re not going to negotiate anything. We’re going to put all the issues on the table.” I want to know what we’re up against. What are your hot buttons? What are the things you really want to make sure you resolve? Besides all the obvious – parenting plan, child support, alimony, property division – it’s all the little landmines that crop up in the middle of a negotiation that can throw you off.

From there, we also educate them on our process, our discovery process, our forms, worksheets, data collection. I have a saying I say to clients: “Don’t do the deciding before the discovery.” A lot of folks will come in and say, “You know what, Joe? We got it all figured out. We talked about it X, Y, and Z.” I’m like, “This is going to be one of the worst cases.” As soon as they say it’s the easiest, it’s one of the most difficult.

What winds up happening is they’ve made decisions in a vacuum without information. If I said to you, “Hey, where do you want to go to eat today?” what’s the first question you’d probably ask me? “What’s around here? What’s good?” Say you were visiting me in California and you’d never been there before. You’d be like, “Well, where do you go? What’s good around here?” If I said, “Come on, tell me where you want to go to dinner,” you’d be like, “Joe, I don’t know what the choices are. How am I supposed to pick this?”

By going through that information gathering process and putting that all out on the table, we now know what we have to work with. That sets our foundation. From there, we get into negotiation. We’re doing exercises, filling out forms, completing worksheets, drawing in different data that you guys have collected and using that in our process.

If you guys said you want to put your house on the market right away because school’s coming, we’ll start with property division. In other words, I’ve got buy-in from the client that we’re going to do things in the order they want to do them. I get to call them out if they don’t follow their own choices. “Help me understand here. You told me you need to get your house for sale quick, and we’re arguing about what color we’re going to paint the spare bedroom. Is that going to help us get this house on the market by August 15th?”

I think of mediation like a funnel. You start at the top – it’s real wide. Eventually, you get down to the bottom where we only have a few issues to resolve. It gets narrower and narrower. That’s where we can usually get people to say, “Look, you can see the finish line. Even if there’s conflict, guys, we just have this one last thing to resolve. Come on, we can do it.” I’m kind of part cheerleader.

Once we get them there, I go away, draft their agreement, they can review it. Once they’ve got everything agreed to, filing is administrative – it’s just the court, the paperwork, the waiting period.

What we try to do is do a lot of the heavy lifting up front so we all have the data, information, sharing everything in a transparent way. We use Box as our file sharing, and we have this whole sharing system where everybody can see everything. By doing that, that’s what really helps people understand he’s neutral, he’s transparent. I understand why we’re making these decisions. I see the information in front of me. As much as I might not be happy about this outcome, I understand it to be reasonable or fair because you’re telling me your budget needs $5,000 a month and you only earn $2,000 a month. Yeah, you’re going to need some help.

We’re reinforcing those messages and making progress incrementally so people can actually see – and this is a big issue in divorce because these folks have not been getting along for years most likely. You show them, “Hey, guess what? Look at you two. You never thought you could do this. You’ve made all these great decisions. You’ve agreed on parenting, child support, when you’re going to sell your house. Great work.”

I think they get that momentum, that energy from somebody like me, and that really helps them move forward. They start seeing the progress, stay on track, and before they know it, they’re done. Usually the last thing people say to me is, “Really, is it over?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “Oh, that wasn’t that bad. That was a lot better than I thought it would be.” That’s what we want.

Host: Does it seem to get easier for the soon-to-be ex-couples when they get towards the end? They see all the progress they’ve made and they’re like, “Wow, we really did this.”

Joe: Yeah, most of them it does. The ones where it doesn’t, it actually also helps because there’s usually one person in a negotiation that if you’re reaching an impasse, there’s usually one person throwing all kinds of offers on the table and the other person is just saying no. It’s like trying to get a five-year-old to do something – they cross their arms: “No, no, no. I’m not doing that.”

One party who’s trying to give and give and give is like, “Well, they’re being unreasonable. I’ve offered X, Y, Z.” Usually the benefit of time – eventually that other person, when the person who’s doing all the giving says, “You know what? I give up. I’m going to get a lawyer” – that’s usually what gets their attention. That’s the moment where it’s like, “Fine, okay. We’ll put the house up for sale August 15th.” Meanwhile, that’s what they had told me they wanted to do the whole time.

Sometimes as a mediator, you also have to know when to wait people out. A good negotiator also knows to use silence as a tool. Not on our podcast here because that would be awkward for the listeners, but part of being on a Zoom with people and just staring at them makes people uncomfortable, which is kind of the point. Somebody finally just speaks up, and that’s when we can get things moving along again.

More often than not, people are like, “You know what? I got this. You were really generous giving me some of your 401k. You know what? You can stay in the house an extra year. We’ll put it up for sale next spring. Don’t worry about it.” Those are the moments as a mediator you live for.

Host: Can you share an example of a financial mistake you’ve seen couples make during divorce negotiations that had long-term consequences?

Joe: Forgetting about the tax implications on negotiated agreements. Literally yesterday I had a client who said, “Well, I’ll just give my wife $40,000. She needs it. She wants to put it down on a condo, so I’ll just give her money out of my 401k.” You’re like, “Okay, you realize those are pre-tax dollars, right?” If you do that, you’re probably going to get whacked with 40% roughly because Uncle Sam and the governors of various states love to take the big lump and make you wait until April 15th to get it back.

Or when they look at the settlement and say, “Well, we bought this house 25 years ago for $200,000 and now we can sell it for a million dollars. If I take it over and I have a $250,000 capital gains exemption on the sale and I’m counting on this to be my bank, my retirement, and suddenly I’m going to start owing taxes because I never kept any receipts of any capital improvements. All of a sudden that profit that I thought I was going to be pocketing $800,000 because I let you keep $800,000 of your 401k. I’m not walking away with $800,000.”

As someone with an MBA in finance, I’m acutely aware of that. I’m not a tax advisor or CPA, but that’s the stuff that really hangs people up. All dollars are not created equal.

I had a client – he was in love with Apple. He was a fanboy. He had an Apple t-shirt every time he came to mediation, his iPhone, his earbuds. He traded basically everything for all the Apple stock. At that time, the stock had really gone up. I said, “Bob, you realize the gains you have on these stocks and the risk? The house isn’t going to drop 43% overnight hopefully. That stock might do that.”

It’s those kinds of financial mistakes that people make, and you can hopefully talk them off the ledge. “I know you love Apple. I see your t-shirt. That’s awesome. But this is probably not the greatest approach, but I can’t tell you what to do. Perhaps you want to speak to your financial advisor about this and see if they think this is a good idea.”

That’s what’s nice about having folks like you – to be able to say, “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but do me a favor before we meet again. Go see Mike and ask him what he thinks. Here’s a copy of what you think you want to settle on. Ask him what he thinks about exchanging a savings account for this much in stock that probably has somewhere close to $500,000 of capital gains in it.”

Host: I was thinking about the people who are dying to keep their family home, so they’ll take the home and the value included and give up the 401k. The home isn’t going to provide money every month for you to eat with. You need financial resources too. You might have this beautiful house, but you might have to work till you’re 80 to have money to stay in that house.

Joe: Exactly. It’s the value of something you can’t liquidate easily or piecemeal. Your 401k, you can sell $5,000 or $10,000 a month for your living expenses. It’s complicated, and I think mediation could be a really big advantage compared to litigating with attorneys because the mediator is going to try to draft something that’s fair and palatable to both sides and keep that in mind.

Houses are a great example because anybody who owns a house can tell you – when does the hot water heater explode and leak all over your basement? Does it do it 2 in the afternoon on a Saturday? No. It does it 4 in the morning on a Tuesday where you wake up to a flood, you can’t take a shower, you can’t go to work the next day, and you’ve got a mess to clean up.

Those are the things you ask people when you get an asset – is it an asset or is it a liability? Houses are kind of both.

Host: People put much more money into their house than generations did before. My grandparents built their house in the 40s and that’s basically what it was until they were old. Now people put a lot of money in their houses every year. It is both an asset and a liability. It’s a use item more than anything.

Joe: When I explain this to clients, I say, “Have you ever been to a restaurant or a salad bar? If you walked up to a salad bar and you saw lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and this whole long line of stuff, I don’t just go up and put tomatoes on my plate and go back to my booth. It’s just a plate of tomatoes. I’m going down the line and taking a little of this, a little of this, a little of that.”

Divorce settlements, I try to get people to think of it the same way. You don’t want to be asset rich and cash poor, or you don’t want to have all tomatoes. You want to have a portfolio that – just like if you had a 401k and were saving for retirement, would you base your entire retirement on one company? No. Unless you did, I would have a real talking to you.

That’s the same with settlements. You try to get people to understand that. Even if they don’t have a little of everything, at least if you’ve got a house, make sure you have enough liquid cash on hand if something goes wrong. You don’t want to be unable to repair that roof if it leaks.

That’s where I come at it from that financial aspect to say, “Let’s think this through. I know that’s where your kids took their first steps and it is a gorgeous house, but let’s make sure you can also enjoy your life moving forward.” Sometimes that’s a difficult question to pose because they know it in their heart, but they’re really just not willing to say, “Yeah, you’re right. We need to sell this house.” Sometimes they need time to think about it, and sometimes they don’t, and that’s perfectly fine as well.

Host: You talk about turning complexity into clarity. What tools or frameworks do you use to help couples navigate complex financial or emotional decisions?

Joe: Discovery process. We have this eight-page checklist of all these items we ask people to gather because a lot of times in a relationship, there’s what I’ll call a household financial manager. Typically, there’s one person who does the budgeting or pays the bills, and the other person has no idea what’s going on. As situations get more complex, people don’t really fully know what they own and what they owe.

The first step is that full discovery and we review all those items. We then have people do a budgeting exercise, which they really kick and scream on. We actually make them do three budgets, which is probably cruel and unusual, but it is part of the process.

The first budget we have them do is a joint budget of what their marital spending looked like for the previous 12 months. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t realize how much they spend on common things. We were just talking about streaming services – we just went through this, my wife and I, because little by little it crept up with Spotify, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max. All of a sudden, why are we spending $183 on streaming? I could get cable at this point. We went through it, but because all that stuff just hits your credit card.

When you do that, you show people what you’re spending. Is that attainable? Is it tenable? Are you living at, below, or above your means? Then we make them do budgets of what their life’s going to look like separate moving forward. They start realizing just how much it costs to live on your own.

That first process helps us set up conversations around child support and alimony because they realize how much I earned – I’ve got all your tax returns and pay stubs – and how much it’s going to cost to live apart.

We then have them do another piece which is a balance sheet. We have this balance sheet where they list out all their assets, all their liabilities, and we show them everything in one spot. I’m sure Mike, you probably do a similar exercise. Everybody goes, “Hey, my house is worth a million dollars.” Yeah, but you owe $750,000 on it. You always forget the mortgage. “I have this new car worth X.” Yeah, but it’s actually worth less than you owe based on the loan.

In their brains, they don’t understand because they don’t look at it all in one place. When you do it that way and put all the financial reality out on the table, it helps people suddenly get a grasp on reality – “Wow, we really need to talk about these things, and okay, Joe, we’re going to listen and engage and go through your process because we’re going to trust in you based on your track record.”

By doing that, we tackle those issues. We show them the numbers. For example, we’ll run – every state, the federal government requires every state to have a repeatable way to determine child support called a guideline. I bring out software, run the guideline, and let’s say it comes up to $500 a month. Then I look at a person’s budget and say, “Well, you have three teenage boys. You spend at least $500 a month on groceries for the kids, just groceries, let alone streaming, $20 to Starbucks, entertainment, clothes.” Let’s talk about this.

We sort of reality check and always go up against that discovery, those worksheets, budgets, balance sheets. When you keep doing that and you’re chipping off an issue one at a time, it helps keep people focused because when it’s really complex, they can get distracted. It also helps them understand, “Wow, this is a lot more challenging. Yes, we are spending more than we probably should. Yes, we do need to cut back.” Those are arguments they’ve probably had for years.

But now when somebody like me comes along and says, “Well, guys, I’m never going to tell you what to do, but credit card interest rates are probably in the 25 to 29% range right now. If you execute this budget as you presented it to me, you’re about $3,000 a month short, which is probably going on a credit card. At that rate, $36,000 a year, you’ll be bankrupt in about two to three years.” I mean, if you want to do that, that’s fine, but maybe we could talk about this.

That’s where you get them back in and get them talking. All of that reality checking really helps – showing them I’m not trying to be difficult or obtuse. Their spouse isn’t trying to be difficult. This is the reality of the situation, and that’s what’s going to help us move this thing forward and come to agreement.

Host: For someone listening who might be headed for a divorce, what’s the first step they should take emotionally or financially?

Joe: That’s a really interesting question because if you do a search online for how to prepare for divorce, you’re going to find hundreds of checklists. It’s always go get tax returns and pay stubs – really tactical stuff. As a professional negotiator, that’s going to come in the process whether you mediate or litigate. Somebody’s going to have some discovery process to do all that.

If you go and do that, sure, that might be fine. But if your spouse is not aware that you want a divorce, that may actually trigger an unintended consequence. “Well, why do you need my pay stubs or tax returns?” “Well, yeah, I didn’t tell you this, but I want a divorce and I need this information.”

For me, I think the first step someone should really sit down and think about is what is it, if they go through this process, what is it that they are willing to give and what are their bright lines that they’re not willing to cross? A lot of times people go into a negotiation and it’s just a shouting match and you’re not really sure what is it you want? What is it that you don’t want? What is it you’re willing to give up?

Really sit down and think about like the house we were just talking about. Why do I want to keep this house? Do I really want to keep this house? Am I being – is it just because I have this emotional tether to it, or do I just love the feeling this house gives me? I have clients, for example, where the house they live in as a married couple was their childhood home.

But then I also have to ask myself, well, if I’m going to keep this asset worth X, what am I willing to give up? And is that okay? Giving up someone’s 401k or pension? I think instead of the tactical stuff, people really need to take a moment and say to themselves, knowing that this is a negotiation and knowing that we’re going to have to give and get, what are my must-haves, my nice-to-haves, and my don’t-really-cares?

I think sitting down and really – even if it’s something as simple as I really want to keep this car, but I don’t care about the other one. Or I really want to make sure that I have at least $100,000 in my retirement account as long as I can also do X, Y, and Z. Those are the kinds of things that I think people really need to spend time thinking about.

That goes to the emotional piece, too, because when you’re in a state like a divorce, the conversations are emotional. When we’re emotional, we don’t make the most rational choices. Sometimes I have had people where just to get out of the pain of the conversation, they’ll be like, “I don’t care. Whatever you want.” I’ll be like, “Hey guys, I can’t tell you what to do, but when you retire 20 years from now, you’re not going to necessarily most likely be happy about saying ‘whatever you want’ and giving up all your retirement, all your pension, the house.”

That’s where I get into this conversation. Being able to send people places – I say, “You know what, I don’t personally require people to retain attorneys throughout mediation, but there are times when I see something that I don’t like the direction it’s going. I will say, ‘Listen, before our next session, I would like you to speak to an attorney. Here are some mediation-friendly colleagues. Have them take a look at this.'”

That’s what I would say – a lot of it people think about as tactical. I would say really take time to do the looking-in work. What is it I really want to have happen at the end of this process? What are my goals? What are my interests? Rather than “Hey, the first thing I should do is get copies of pay stubs and tax returns.”

Host: Where can our listeners learn more about you and Equitable Mediation?

Joe: That’s an easy one. Best place is our website, equitablemediation.com. If you go on there, you can find out all kinds of information about me, my partner Cheryl, who is also my wife – she’s our divorce coach.

Our process is such that we have this team approach. Going to your last question about the tactical, financial, and emotional aspects, we try to help clients with all of that. There’s also a learning center with all sorts of resources, blog posts on a number of topics. We have state-specific guides, including ones for Pennsylvania, New Jersey. We practice in New York, New Jersey, PA. We also practice in other states, but I’m originally from Central New Jersey, and that’s kind of our wheelhouse where Equitable Mediation got started in Bridgewater, New Jersey, 17 years ago.

That’s really a great place to start. There’s a button in the menu that says “talk to us.” When you’re ready, you can schedule a free call with Cheryl just for you, just for one person, to find out if mediation is even an option. If it is, you can certainly schedule an initial meeting with you and your spouse with me.

Always free call with Cheryl, check it out, see if it makes sense. If not, you can go through all the resources, the guides, the videos, the blog posts. We really feel strongly that an educated client is a good client, so we can give them that dose of honesty and that dose of reality.

Our bend has always been, you might not like what we’re sharing, but this is what our experience has shown us. If you come in thinking you’re going to get everything and not have to give anything, you’re going to be disappointed no matter what process you take through the divorce. Read the website, lots of FAQs, lots of questions answered. If you have questions, contact us there, schedule the call, and that’s really the best way for people to get to know more.

Host: This has been great. Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe: Yeah, I think this has been a great conversation. I learned a lot. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to share because mediation’s been around a while, but it’s not necessarily as widely known as you would think it should be. I always appreciate and thank you so much to both of you for allowing me the ability to share that message – that there’s a better way to go about this. Your divorce doesn’t have to be a disaster like my folks. You want people to be able to move on with their lives and get remarried and be good parents to their kids. That’s it. Thank you both. I appreciate your time.

---

Contact Information:

• Website: equitablemediation.com
• States served: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, plus additional states
• Team approach: Joe Dillon (mediator) and Cheryl (divorce coach)
• Free consultation calls available
• Comprehensive learning center with state-specific guides and resources
• Founded in Bridgewater, New Jersey, 17 years ago
• Hosts: Mike Gary and Madison Demora, Yardley Wealth Management (yardlywealth.net)