A few months before their 50th wedding anniversary, she told him, “I don’t want to be in a relationship like this anymore.”
The divorce was amicable. But this relative of Mindy S. Helfrich, CDFA, CLTC, had trusted her husband with the finances and didn’t know that individual retirement accounts were taxed at a higher rate than stocks. Therefore, her getting the former and him getting the latter wasn’t equal.
“She had been using our firm for financial planning, but I saw significant mistakes she made in the divorce settlement offer and the not great legal advice she was given,” said Helfrich, a 10-year MDRT member. “It made me stop and think, If she was getting incorrect legal advice about finances during divorce, and she has a financial advisor as a close family member, who else is this happening to in this community?”
Helfrich realized six years ago that there wasn’t much financial education in the divorce space available locally — she is so middle America that if you put your finger in the center of a map of the U.S., you’d just about hit her hometown. So, she pursued and received her divorce financial analyst certification. She also was the first to bring the national Second Saturday divorce advice workshops to Nebraska. These free sessions occur six to eight times per year to help 12 to 18 people per workshop understand the financial and emotional process of divorce, along with four local law firms adding legal insight.
It completely changed her practice. Divorce clients now compose 25% of the business, and she is still somewhat of a generalist working with more than 900 clients, ranging from young teachers to Fortune 500 executives. Her business partner specializes in business owners and handles more than 3,000 clients with the help of eight full-time and three part-time support staff. Divorce clients aren’t the most profitable, as they’re often in debt and don’t have money to manage. But focusing on this market helps Helfrich give back to the community.
Client impact
Helfrich’s relative exemplifies the increase in “gray divorce,” or older people deciding to split, post-pandemic. She even added an evening workshop to better reach this demographic. Currently, she is helping a 70-year-old woman who divorced her husband two years ago and, Helfrich found, neither person’s attorney realized that he had five times more in his retirement savings plan than he originally claimed. The result: a messy situation involving thousands of pages of documents and funds that are very complicated to sort out.
“In small towns, not every attorney and client in a divorce situation is educated enough to know what needs to be put on paper,” Helfrich said. “I help them understand exactly what they have and help negotiate the settlement with a tax perspective.”
Helfrich also includes a brochure for her workshops in every annual and semiannual review packet, which generates referrals from clients’ neighbors and friends. However, she won’t work with people who financially mistreat their spouse or need credit counseling rather than her services. Sometimes couples come to workshops with a vision that they can split without difficulty. Though complications often occur, Helfrich tells clients in emotional situations that, if possible, it’s best to step aside from emotions and focus on the numbers: how much insurance is needed, how much to pay off the house, etc.
“It’s not that there’s no emotion; let’s talk about how mad or sad you are,” Helfrich said. “But let’s also put that aside and be rational, so you don’t wind up spending a ton of money crying to an attorney.”
Parallel paths
Divorce clients sound like they don’t have anything in common with people who work on railroads. But there are several reasons explaining why Helfrich specializes with that community as well. One is her background: Helfrich’s grandfather spent many 12-hour days shoveling coal into a steam locomotive before working his way up to driving steam and diesel locomotives. Her father-in-law was a manager in the railroad’s bridge and design department. Her husband was a passenger operations senior manager after serving as director of coal operations, and her son soon may be dispatching trains.
It’s also that railroad employees and their families, just like people going through divorce, need the education they aren’t receiving. Railroaders, from the people who drive and fix the trains to those who blow the whistles, don’t receive Social Security benefits from the U.S. government. Rather, they pay into a separate government administration for railroad retirement and contend with two tiers of taxes. With so many nuances about how years of service or how quitting can affect death benefits, there’s a lot of detail that railroaders can misunderstand. So, Helfrich focuses on railroader spouses like herself during meetings to make sure they understand their benefits, income protection options and what to know if their spouse dies.
Helfrich was brought into the profession as a part-timer 25 years ago because her employer expected her railroad connections would turn into clients for his practice. No one knew, she says, that she’d start her own company in 2008 and make those clients another specialty — another 25% of her business — while maintaining her ability to learn more about the railroader benefits that applied to her as well.
The hardest circumstances, she says, are when a railroad spouse didn’t meet with her before their partner passed away. Helfrich knows that a few meetings and tweaking of plans two years earlier would have had an enormous impact on income protection, allaying confusion and preserving a lifestyle. And for situations when railroaders are getting divorced, it’s hard to imagine an advisor more qualified than Helfrich.
“I always tell people that we draw that Venn diagram, and the overlapping circles are the sweet spot. I make a joke about it, but it happens quite often,” she said. “I know the benefits. I know what’s going to cause them concern about how to separate their pension, their stock options, everything. When a stressed-out client can work with someone who specializes in their specific benefits, they gain a trusted advocate.”
The overlap between her niches only goes so far, however: Helfrich has never done a divorce workshop on a train.
“That’s a great question,” she says with a laugh. “That would be cute though.”
