Maggie Nielsen: Building the Financial Side of Your Divorce Team

Separating a marriage is separating a business, Maggie Nielsen says, and anyone with dollars in it needs someone whose job is the dollars. Attorneys are good at the law. That is a different discipline from tax treatment, mortgage qualification, and what an asset is worth a decade from now.

Maggie Nielsen is a partner at Purse Strings, an organization built around helping women be financially fearless. It publishes free tools and resources and maintains a vetted directory of professionals who focus on serving women: Certified Divorce Financial Analysts, money coaches, mediators, attorneys, and mortgage professionals. Purse Strings also produces a podcast about money that Lisa was booked to appear on shortly after this recording.

Maggie lays out the team and the order to build it in. She starts people with a CDFA rather than an attorney, adds a Certified Divorce Lending Professional when a mortgage is involved, because qualifying on support income has rules of its own, and treats a divorce coach and a therapist as part of the roster rather than extras. Her cost reasoning is the counterintuitive part: doing the financial work with someone billing less protects you from paying the attorney's rate to do the same work slower.

The conversation then turns to what happens when your ex has been the financial authority for years and is now telling you not to waste money on professionals. Lisa disagrees with Maggie on one point, and it is a useful disagreement: Lisa's position is that mediation can work in a high-conflict case, and that what makes it work is leverage, which is precisely what a good financial analysis gives you. She describes a mediator in her own case telling her ex that his position on child support would not fly, and how differently he received it coming from an authority.

The rest is practical. Maggie's checklist of what to gather before you say the word divorce out loud, and her reminder that your name on an account entitles you to the records whatever the password now is. When a forensic accountant is the right call, and the DIY route for people who cannot afford one. And the point she and Lisa land on together, which is that people settle early to end the conflict and then spend years trying to reopen something that was signed in an afternoon.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Who belongs on the financial side of a divorce team, and in what order to hire them
• What a CDFA does, and why starting there costs less than starting with an attorney
• Why a Certified Divorce Lending Professional matters when a mortgage is in play
• What to do when your ex is still the authority on money in your own head
• How a financial analysis creates the leverage that makes mediation work
• The checklist to gather before you say the word divorce out loud
• Why your name on an account entitles you to the records, whoever changed the password
• When a forensic accountant is worth the cost, and the DIY route when it is not

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Who needs a financial professional in a divorce
3:00 Maggie, Purse Strings, and the vetted list
5:00 Why the team costs less than the attorney doing all of it
7:00 When your ex is still the authority on money
9:00 Leverage in mediation, and knowing what is actually yours
11:00 The checklist to gather before you say the word divorce
13:00 When to bring in a forensic accountant
15:00 Conflict avoidance, and the cost of settling early
17:00 Do not sign what you do not understand

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Purse Strings: https://pursestrings.co/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.