The first week: seven things worth doing, and four that can wait

The first week is the one where people do the most damage to their own case, almost always by accident, and almost always because nobody told them what mattered. So here is the list.

Seven things worth doing

1. Take a picture of the financial picture as it is today

Not because you expect anyone to hide anything. Because six months from now you will be asked what the accounts held on the day you separated, and nobody remembers. Photograph or download the current balance of every account you can see: checking, savings, retirement, credit cards, the mortgage statement, the car loan. Put them in one folder.

2. Write down the ordinary week

Who does the school run. Who takes the sick day. Who does bedtime on a Tuesday. This is the single most useful document in a custody discussion, and it is only useful if it was written before there was an argument about it. Two paragraphs is enough.

3. Change your passwords, quietly and completely

Email first, then banking, then everything that resets through email. Use a different device than the shared one. This is not an act of aggression. It is the same thing you would do if you lost a phone.

4. Find out what you actually earn and actually spend

Almost everyone is wrong about this by a meaningful margin in one direction or the other. Three months of bank statements will tell you the truth in about forty minutes.

5. Tell one person

Not eleven. One person who can be told the same thing twice without getting bored. The isolation is worse than the process.

6. Book a first call with a lawyer, even if you are not sure

Most family lawyers in Portland, ourselves included, do not charge for a first conversation. Knowing what the process would look like is often what makes the decision possible, in either direction, and there is no obligation attached to a phone call.

7. Keep going to work, and keep feeding the dog

The ordinary structure is doing more for you right now than anything on this list.

Four things that can wait

Moving out

This is the big one. Moving out does not forfeit your interest in the house, and anyone who tells you it does is wrong. But the temporary parenting schedule that forms in the three weeks after somebody leaves has a strong tendency to become the permanent one, because courts are reluctant to disrupt an arrangement a child has settled into. Talk to a lawyer for ten minutes before you decide where you sleep next month.

Telling the children

Unless there is a safety issue, there is no rush, and there is a much better way to do it than the one that occurs to you at eleven at night. We have written about this separately.

Dividing anything

Not the accounts, not the furniture, not the photographs. Informal division done in week one gets undone in month five, and the undoing costs money.

Posting anything

Social media is discoverable, screenshots are forever, and the version of you that writes at midnight is not the version you want quoted back to you in a settlement conference.

The thing underneath all of it

Almost every mistake in this list has the same shape: acting fast on a decision that felt urgent but was not. Very little in a divorce is genuinely urgent in week one. Safety is. Everything else has more time in it than it feels like.