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Divorce sucks.

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Whatever else you may think of divorce, or marriage for that matter, we can all agree on that.

In fact, I looked up the word “trauma” in the Oxford American’s Writer’s Thesaurus while writing this article. To my delight: “Trauma, noun, 1. The trauma of divorce.” There you go. Divorce is known as so universally crappy that it’s used as the example for a word whose synonyms include “torture” and “war-weariness.”

Reaching beyond the obvious emotional implications though, a major consequence of divorce is the absolute tornado it rips through your finances.

Few couples realize that no matter how conscious the uncoupling, no matter how determined they are to dissolve their marriage congenially, their finances are likely to be, if not decimated, then at minimum thrown into disarray.

“I really don’t know if there’s a watershed mark when people look at this thing and say ‘I have no money left’,” says Donald Baker, a family law specialist at the Toronto firm Baker and Baker.

“During the divorce what happens normally is that they don’t even think of the financial ramifications because, you have to remember when they go through this process, it’s an incredibly emotional process. Even a so-called simple divorce … they aren’t really thinking that clear.”