You hear Main Street before you see it. By Thursday morning the sound has settled into something constant, engines idling three deep at the light, vendors unrolling canopies, the smell of fried food and exhaust mixing in air that is finally cool enough to enjoy. The 34th annual Biketoberfest runs October 15 through 18 this […]
Two statements sit on the kitchen table. One is the 401(k), thirty-one years of contributions and a balance that took most of a working life to build. The other is the mortgage payoff on a house off Granada with a roof that has four or five good years left in it. Somebody at some point […]
The first missed payment rarely registers as a crisis. The deposit does not land on the day it always lands, and you tell yourself there was a holiday, or a payroll problem, or some other ordinary explanation. The second month is when the feeling changes. You find yourself doing arithmetic in the school pickup line, […]
Every April the beachside condo lots start to empty out, and by the end of the month a good portion of your building has gone north for the season. You make that drive with the mail forwarded and the thermostat set at eighty, back to the house in Michigan or New Jersey or somewhere outside […]
A test you can run across three consultations, using numbers you already have sitting in a drawer. You typed divorce attorney Daytona Beach into your phone somewhere around the third week of not sleeping, and now there are three consultations on the calendar and a legal pad with nothing useful written on it. The first […]
They hand your belt and your wallet back in a manila envelope, along with a sheet of paper that has a case number on it, and somewhere on that sheet is a statute cite and a letter. F for felony. M for misdemeanor. You read it once in the parking lot and then you read […]
What to look for when the thing on the table is your kids, and why the word you searched for is already the wrong one. You type child custody attorney into your phone because that’s the phrase everybody uses. Half a dozen firm pages come back, all of them promising to fight for you, and […]
Couples getting married again in their late sixties tend to show up with the same three documents. A brokerage statement or two, the deed to a condo a couple of blocks off A1A, and a will one of them signed during a first marriage that ended in either a funeral or a courthouse. He is […]
Most alimony questions start at a kitchen table with a household budget written out by hand. Mortgage, car, insurance, the pharmacy. Then a line at the bottom with no name on it, because you have not decided what to call the money that used to arrive every other Friday from someone else’s job. Twenty-three years […]
The first appointment usually goes fine. People come in worried about the big things. The house, the kids, whether they have to keep paying for a car their spouse drives. Then we get to the part about the financial paperwork, and I watch the room change. Someone always says some version of the same thing, […]
