Some experts estimate that it can take more than a million dollars in investment and lost wages to raise a single child to adulthood. Families that invest in private school, extracurricular activities and other forms of enrichment may spend well more than that.
It is natural to worry about what your upcoming divorce will mean for the standard of living for you and the rest of your family enjoy. Your children might struggle to adjust to a different lifestyle following a divorce, and the ideal would be for you and the other parent to cooperate to the best of your ability to keep their lives as stable as possible.
How can you ensure that you will be able to afford all of the school fees and extracurricular costs for your children during and after a divorce?
Agree to attend divorce mediation
There are several reasons why parents worried about financial circumstances and their children’s experiences will want to attend mediation sessions together instead of litigating a divorce.
Perhaps the most important is that the two of you can reach an agreement where you have the same priorities regarding your children’s education and enrichment activities. Additionally, you can potentially set your own terms for how much each parent will contribute to the children and how you will participate in their education and extracurricular activities.
Mediation can take a lot of the stress and conflict out of divorce, and it can also help you save money. Although that seems counterintuitive because you have to bring in another professional, it is frequently true. Couples that successfully mediate will need to pay for the services of the mediator and their lawyer’s time during their mediation sessions.
However, those early efforts will drastically reduce how much time the couple will spend in family court. The less time you spend in court, the lower your total cost for the divorce will likely be. You can then invest those saved resources in your children’s education. There are other ways in which mediation can help protect you financially, including minimizing how much time you miss work to go to court and eliminating some of the reputational damage that divorce litigation can sometimes cause.
Employing a less contentious approach when preparing for divorce can benefit the parents and the children in your family.
