Now That “It’s” Over and Done

42 Things You Can Do in a Single Hour to Avoid the Most Costly $$$ Blunders that People Make When a Relationship Ends!


Dear Friend:

It happens to everyone at some point. A relationship that you thought would be permanent comes to an unexpected and perhaps messy end.

Maybe it ended like you wanted it to, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was planned, maybe a surprise. Whatever the case, I am a messenger, banging on your door with good news!

You are alive and you get to start over, have fun and maybe eventually fall in love once again. Enjoy those feelings, and enjoy meeting someone special and wondering what will happen….what it will be like, and that wonderful rush when you suddenly realize that you have found the “one.” 

So unless you have already met that person, you have a few fun things to do:

  • Get out there and join some special interest clubs so that you can meet some new people.  This is a numbers game so don’t plan on meeting anyone special for a while. It will happen when it happens, but the more people you meet, the sooner and more likely it is to happen
  • Start working out, so you can get into those tight jeans again.
  • Make some new acquaintance that might one day become friends.
  • Take some trips by yourself (a sure way to meet new people).  Visit some museums, participate in cultural or religious organizations, go to Club Med, go on a singles cruise, take a regular cruise with a friend and have a contest to see how many names you can gather of people you meet and remember to try whatever will get you involved with a group of people!
  •  Don’t be out there “alone” or “single,” be out there having fun and completely ignoring the fact that last night you slept alone. After all, if you slept alone, YOU got a good night’s sleep, without the negative stuff that happens when you’re sharing the bed with someone else.
  • Make a promise to yourself to talk to 3 strangers a day and make them laugh. Wear slightly outrageous clothes and a smile; people are more willing to talk to someone who is obviously a character, right?
  • If you have a business or are a professional or especially if you aren’t, join Toastmasters International and start making speeches. You will end up making more money and the confidence gains will be tremendous. People like being around other people who are confident, alive and are charging ahead in life.
  • Write a book about something, or nothing; remember Seinfeld?
  • Always have at least 2, and try for 4, trips planned in advance, with the tickets booked and paid for. You don’t have time to stay home! You are busy.
  • Whatever it is that you do, wherever you go, make sure it has the following two things going for it:
  • It is fun and as much adventure as you can handle.

  • It is always, just a little tiny bit more, out of your comfort zone

In no time you will be a different person and opportunities will open up for you. Maybe one day you will find yourself as I did, on a bar in Jamaica, surrounded by your best friends and meeting someone special. Note that I said “on” a bar, not “at” a bar. It’s a great story, but not one I am telling now. I will say this:  when I talk about being out of “your comfort zone,” I do know-from experience- what I am talking about!

You will get used to being a little more out of your comfort zone and being happy all the time. You really don’t have time not to, do you?

Got kids?  Super! It’s time to put them to work. Make them do their share of the work around the house and write a book about that experience, or get really involved in their lives.  Maybe you have a son who wants to be a professional jet ski racer, or whatever; you will set up the organization, or be president of the local chapter if it already exists, for professional jet ski racers, or chess players or Barbie doll collectors. And maybe you’ll even find a way to make some money doing it.

But in between all the phone calls and meetings it’s going to take to get you going down that path (it sounds like fun, doesn’t it?) I want to get your attention on one item that you probably need to do now, before you get busy living your new life. More good news- it will only take tiny bit of time, but will likely save you a bundle of money.

In spite of my ramblings about the fun and growth opportunities of the adult single life, my expertise is one that revolves around finance.

Hi, I am Charlie Stoll, a divorced parent of two teenage boys. I am a CPA and financial planner, so I see a lot of stuff. I see some people prepared and some of them not so prepared. Most people are lousy at dealing with the details that are so important in financial planning in today’s complicated world.

Don’t worry; I am NOT trying to get you to hire me as your financial planner; quite the contrary, as I have plenty of business and clients.

I do however want to share with you my knowledge and wisdom, gained after 30 years in this business AND having been through a divorce, not to mention the dozens of my clients who have gone through a divorce process and still others who lost their life partners due to death. This is the place you are probably at right now, I have been there myself, and I have been there vicariously dozens of times with my friends and clients.

I have seen the costly blunders and mistakes that people make when they go through what you have been through.  I made some of them, and I’ve watched others make more.

To help people like us, I have written about these blunders and the solutions to them in a new guide called The Guide for the Newly Single.

I got the title from the movie Beetle Juice, starring Michael Keaton. In the movie, a couple dies and goes to the place where dead souls are processed. There they are given a book called Guide for the Newly Dead.  (I like movies!)

My guide is a lot different; it doesn’t teach you how to be dead but instead it teaches you how to be alive and deal with the details that you are now facing, such as how to handle the next relationship.  That is something you want to have an idea about before it starts, right? We learn from experience, or least we should.

Remember the old television show, The Six Million Dollar Man?  “We can rebuild him, we can make him better, stronger, faster.  We have the technology…” The Guide for the Newly Single is the technology you need to make your next life even better than the last.

I am not a psychologist and this is not about feeling good or grieving or dating; there are lots of books on those subjects. Buy them, study them, but I like my advice at the beginning of this letter the best.

This guide, The Guide for the Newly Single, is for you to use quickly to make sure that your paperwork, wills, estate plan, beneficiary designations, credit card accounts and a host of other things that people say, “I never thought of that” when I mention it to them, are in order. You need them to be in order and respect your new single status.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

These are all easy things to do.  That is, if you do them up front and before a problem happens.  It’s like buying software to keep viruses out of you computer- easy and cheap to do up front but if you don’t do it and a virus gets in, you end up with disaster results.

There is a famous case, where a guy gets a divorce and then remarries. He forgets to do all the simple quick stuff that’s laid out simply in the Guide for the Newly Single.

His IRA beneficiary was still to his FIRST wife. The rub of this story is the size of the IRA; it was 2.4 million dollars. He’s dead and that’s good because, his second wife would kill him, if he wasn’t already dead, as she had to watch the $2.4 million go to his first wife. She is not a happy camper.

The cost, by the way, to change the beneficiary designation of an IRA:

ZERO, NADA, ZIP.

It’s a form, a signature and a fax.
But there is more to the story.  Since the IRA was left to his first wife, not his current wife, there is no estate deduction for it.  The result:  the first wife will lose up to 50% of the account to estate taxes.  But that’s just pouring salt in the wound.

Point is: There are details that need to be checked and most people don’t check them; they assume that the law and the lawyers will figure everything out.

WRONG!

Maybe you don’t have an IRA, so you’re thinking you’re okay.  How about your employer-provided life insurance, your 401(k) or your pension?

I have compiled a chart of more than 42 things that need to be addressed at a time like this. Not just the obvious ones like life insurance and 401(k) plans, although frankly, most people forget even those.  This list goes way beyond those things.

It includes all kinds of things people don’t think about.  And who can blame them?  This is pretty boring stuff.  Boring anyway, unless or until “something happens” and you have family or children who need taking care of.  After all, you never know when you might find yourself on a bar in Jamaica, and they can get slippery you know. (Ok, maybe I shouldn’t let my sense of humor interject at a time like this!)

All I am saying is that I have seen a lot of smart people ignore or screw up these things, so I built this guide to help everyone avoid these common and avoidable potholes in the road to a good life, but that’s just the beginning.

What about the next relationship- how will you structure that? I have included for you to think about now, hopefully before you meet that person, a flowchart that will allow you to see what kind of planning you might need.

Some things to think about IN ADVANCE!

  • Money, who has it, and what’s going to happen to it?

  • Kids, who has them, and how are they to be protected?  How so?

  • Kids you have together, how will they be treated?

  • Parents to be cared for financially- how is that to be done?

  • Minor children, what happens?

  • Charities you want to benefit- is that intention to be respected or ignored?

  • Have more stuff that’s special to you?  Make notes.

 

Why, you might ask yourself, do I give a darn about all this now? Why would I want to go and get out of my comfort zone, wear a funny hat and make a few strangers laugh each day?

Here is why, and I have to be blunt here so please forgive me:

Meeting someone new can happen quickly. It’s like selling your house that’s been on the market for a year and then suddenly one weekend it’s sold!

You had better have a plan about where you are going to move, right?

Likewise with the next relationship; when it happens there is likely to be a lot of excitement, travel, and rehearsing for that all important honeymoon.

It will be difficult (read: impossible) for you to then get your head around what you should be doing. You need to have the workings of a plan ready ahead of time, before the whirlwind starts, just like selling that house.

Maybe I think this way because I am a “planner.”  That’s good for you because I HAVE thought about this and I have it ready for you to look at, review, consider with a calm head and heart, and store away so it will be there when it’s needed.

If Noah had waited until the rain started before building his ark it would have been too late. And you know what? Getting into a serious deep romantic relationship is a lot like the rain; it can start suddenly and there is no stopping it, is there?

Anyway, enough talking about trying to get you to think logically, plan ahead and save for a rainy day (get the pun?).  This stuff is serious, but the good news is that at this stage it is also painless.

Here’s the deal:

This guide is only $29.95 and it includes:

 

 
• A guide containing the things that you need to check on. Most of them take just a few minutes. Finding that piece of paper that will cost you or the people you love a lot of money is much easier if you know to look for it.   Also included are more things to make sure that your identity is not stolen, at this time, nor your credit rating, nor your money.

• A tool that will help you design your next relationship and how it will be structured from an estate planning point of view.  Will they have kids?  Do you?  What about the money? What do you do about that? This tool answers all of those questions and puts you on the path to make it work in the future.

 

• Time-saving forms and blank letters for you to fill out and use to make changes that are necessary. This will save you bunches of time but more, because it is so easy, YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO DO IT! (That’s the real benefit, I promise.)
This guide is no good to you if it sits on a shelf; you need to rip out pages and send them off in the mail for the right paperwork and to inquire of people where things are now. I make it easy, fast and cheap!
 

• Sample beneficiary designations and a description of problems that having the wrong ones can cause, as in the case of minor children or grandchildren- how do you provide for them without giving them the money?

• A list of things that will require that you call an attorney; it’s comforting to know when that is absolutely required.

• A process for keeping track of your changes to these things so that if something does happen to you and some insurance agent didn’t change a beneficiary (as he was supposed to) a record exists of your asking. This only takes seconds to fill out but might prove invaluable!

Am I speaking to the right person?  Does this make any sense to you?

Limited Time Special Offer

As a special offer, just for the first 100 who invest in The Guide for the Newly Single, I will do even more:

You can have this at $10 off the normal price, that’s a 1/3 savings and more, I will toss in my personal Letter to Trustees.  This is a letter I have written to the people who will be the trustees of my estate when I kick the bucket.  It normally goes for $99 all by itself, but as you have been down a tough road lately, I will toss it in FREE and reduce the price of the Guide for the Newly Single. Why?

It has taken me 30 years to learn this stuff and it’s useless and silly for it to sit on my shelf and not be used.  If this doesn’t get out there then I have wasted my time.

I know this is a valuable tool in the hands of the people who have, like me, been through a divorce or major life-changing event.

It has been tested in the fires of experience and reality. Maybe it will save you or your family a bunch of money or a major hassle, maybe the trustee letter that comes with it as a special bonus (only for the first 100) will get you to think about things at a higher level.  Whatever the value you find in this, I know it will be worth many, many hundreds of dollars even if it’s only the confidence you get when you know you have gotten it arranged.

Or, maybe when you hear your next love bring up the concepts in it, you will respond in a more, well, “informed” way.  It’s OK to read between the lines here. Knowledge is power.

You will not be sorry you invested in this.  If you are for any reason, return the guide and I will refund your money, no questions asked.  You can keep the bonus Letter to Trustees (if you are among the first 100 to order) as my gift to you.

Please, remember to do all those things I suggested at the top of this letter, and I hope you have as much fun as I have with that simple list, but don’t forget to do take care of the important stuff, too. It’s all good!

Thanks,

Charles S. Stoll

PS: It wasn’t that long ago, that I was a teenager, always getting pulled over by traffic cops.  Nowadays I feel like I am a traffic cop telling you and others to “put on your safety belt” because it costs nothing to wear it and it might save your life. Boring yes, but important. The Guide for the Newly Single will not save your life (but do pay attention to my comment about how slippery those Jamaican bar tops can get!)  But some good advice is always in order, especially at such an important juncture in your life.