Fierce compassion, equanimity, integrity #2

[Gerda]

((((Cardinal))))))

You are doing the best you can with the knowledge you have. Do not worry, do not be afraid.

Let's suppose you do everything wrong and you walk away with six dollars. That's okay. You will rebuild your life.

Let's suppose you do everything right and you walk away with 300,000 dollars. That makes some things easier. You will rebuild your life.

Just keep walking through the desert. Don't think you can do anything perfectly. You can't. You can just try to protect yourself from extra suffering. You will have plenty of suffering without the extra.

My experience with lawyers has not been good. If you are smart, you can figure out a lot of this yourself. I don't mean not to have one. If you can get a really good one, it is great to have one! But they will never care as much as you do or do as much research as you are willing to do. You can save some billable hours and equip yourself by finding out some stuff yourself.

Can you call the retirement office at his work to get information in general about how pensions work without talking about him specifically?

Can you call AARP and ask for help?

Can you meet with a certified divorce financial analyst? That's a whole field and they have an organization where you can find one. They will know how to calculate this.

You may not get the exact number. Who cares? You're only using the number as a way to get leverage anyway. The perfect exact number would come out of a trial, determined by a judge. You're just finding a number that gets kinda close to it so you can tell The Alien H, "Hey, I'd get about this much over twenty years, so how about we settle on this much less in a lump sum?"

I think you have to get a little feeling power about this. I recognize your confusion very well because I did the same thing. Fair warning! Now I am a force to be reckoned with. I wrote a review of my H's lawyer on a popular review site recently and I am pretty sure that at the last conference, not only did he look even more like an idiot than usual with his unprofessional spewing, but at one point he was so spitting mad that I am pretty sure he cried a little. Little Gerda who used to be so afraid of him now made him cry.