Divorce and Money
Kent Thompson is not a marriage counselor, nor does he aspire to be one. However, as a financial program manager with Army Community Service, he sees how money leads to relationship problems – and that these issues can lead to divorce.

While posted to Camp Ederle, U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, Italy, Thompson offered Military + Divorce, a comprehensive, six-hour course created by the Association of Financial Counseling, Planning & Education (AFCPE). The course addresses how soldiers and spouses should try to settle their finances as part of an impending divorce. The class was not meant to help couples work out their differences and back away from divorce.

"It's designed to be: ´If you're going to get divorced, here's the black-and-white, practical money side. Here are things you have to consider,´" says Thompson whose classes ranged from one to five couples at a time.

"Every one of them walked in the door saying, ´We're going to get a divorce and we just want to know how to do this money part of it.´"

To supplement the standard AFCPE curriculum, Thompson used Money Habitudes as an initial class activity with the couples.

Military Divorce in Context
As with the civilian population, divorce is a big issue in the military. The Associated Press reported that between 2008-2009 there were more than 27,000 divorces among about 765,000 married members of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps; that equates to an annual military divorce rate of 3.6 percent. Earlier research reported that 20 percent of marriages fall apart within two years of when one spouse goes to war. Researchers from RAND Corporation and UCLA concluded that "the military provides incentives to marry, (for men and women) and remain married (for men), but that once the servicemembers return to civilian life and these incentives are absent, they suffer higher rates of marital dissolution than comparable civilians."

Of course, military couples endure a special set of stresses including prolonged deployments and an ever-present risk of mortal danger. But military couples also have to deal with the same stresses found in civilian marriages. One of the biggest factors in divorce is money.

Divorce Predictors
In fact, Jeffrey Dew, a professor at Utah State University, found that money disputes were the best indicators of divorce. As reported in the New York Times: "For wives, disagreements over finances and sex were good predictors of divorce, but finance disputes were much stronger predictors. For husbands, financial disagreements were the only type of common disagreement that predicted whether they would get a divorce." Dew found that couples who reported disagreeing about finance once a week were over 30 percent more likely to get divorced than couples who reported disagreeing about finances a few times a month.

Getting Off to a Good Start
Thompson knew many of those walking through the door didn't want to be there. After all, money and divorce are two notoriously uncomfortable topics to discuss in private, let alone in a class situation. So, based on his previous experience with Money Habitudes, he decided to use the cards as the first activity, hoping that they would create a non-threatening and nonjudgmental environment that would encourage attendees to let down their guard, open up and talk more freely.

Addressing the Real Issue
Although the Military + Divorce course was supposed to just tackle the facts, Thompson noticed that when the facts were raised, they sparked the same disagreements, anger and anxiety that led the couples to seek a divorce in the first place. It turned out the cards were helpful to understand how money was really being handled in the relationship.

"I used them [Money Habitudes] in that class just because the first part of the Money + Divorce class is talking about budgeting: ´Now that you've decided to get a divorce, what are you going to do and who's going to do what with the money?´ From a financial counselor aspect, the first issue that always comes up, is, ´Well, my partner doesn't know how to handle money anyway!´ And so I thought, ´If every partner is saying that about their partner, then let's find out who really does control the money and how well do they do it and what are their attitudes about money?´ And so the cards fit in perfectly with that scheme."

New Perspectives
Working as couples, the cards did indeed help break down the barriers of resentment and misunderstanding, helping the divorcing couples see their partner's perspective.

"The cards were a nice augmentation to the [AFCPE] class. A lot of times, it really did open their eyes. When you've got a husband and wife sitting there and neither one of them can understand why the other one has the money attitude that they have, or why they do what they do with their money, to them, they think it's just a point of anger or a point of contention," he says.

Finding common ground
Reaching a common understanding of their money problems provided the couples with a foundation to look at their larger relationship. It helped too that six hours of intensive education on the financials of divorce tend to underscore how difficult life can become when going through divorce, leading some to think harder about making the marriage work.

"The cool thing about the cards is: Here are things that might be challenges for you and here's how you can overcome them. And those couples looked at that and actually started working at it, saying, ´The cards are right – [even] if perhaps my spouse is not – and I can probably work on that.´ So I used the cards for every one of those Money + Divorce sessions I had and, of all the classes I taught, I only had two couples say that they were still going to get a divorce anyway. All the other couples decided they didn't need to get a divorce. The money issue was the biggest issue and it was the biggest reason for the divorce for all of those other couples and they decided, ´You know what? This is overcome-able stuff. We don't have to get a divorce because we're not comfortable with the money situation!"

Transition to Other Offerings
For so many couples, money is the issue that leads to divorce. Once Thompson found that couples could work with each other on the topic, he could then offer them suggestions to strengthen their finances – and, in turn, their marriage.

Couples had a variety of issues related to money, but Thompson saw some commonalities in his classes. One was that the divorcing soldier had often recently returned from a deployment.

"You get any soldier and their spouse, if the soldier is the one who normally handles the money and then they get deployed and then they have to give up control of the money issues to the spouse who's not deployed, that can create a huge bunch of issues," says Thompson. "If you could do this with couples, particularly if they're having money issues before they deploy, and just say, ´Let's just see what each of your attitudes is,´ then, before they deploy, we can address these things."

With the cards and the larger class, couples discovered individual challenges with money as well as weak spots between them. Using those cues, Thompson could then lay out the list of other classes offered, relate how and why they'd be relevant to one or both of the couple, based on their self-identified strengths and challenges, and get them to buy in to the process.

"At the sessions where we did the Money Habitudes cards, it opened the door to those other classes."