Welcome to the Money Mindset Podcast, where you'll find a judgment free zone to help you free yourself from overthinking and the fear of doing things the wrong way. It's time to shed yourself of the mom, guilt, procrastination, and perfectionism so you can start doing the things that you really want to do with your money instead of just working to pay bills. I'm Ashley Patrick,

ex detective turned debt free, CEO of my very own business and stay at home mom of three. Not too long ago, my dreams of staying at home with my kids seemed impossible. I thought I'd have to stay miserable in a high stress and demanding job just so I could retire someday. After gaining the confidence of my own ability to manage my family's finances and a simple step by step plan to make it happen,

I was able to pay off $45,000 in just 17 months, which then allowed me to finally quit my job, stay at home with my kids, and build a debt free business. Now my mission is to help moms like you conquer debt and free themselves from the mental load of handling their family's finances. If you're ready to shed the guilt and shame surrounding your past money mistakes and tackle your debt,

this is the place for you. Let's get started. Today's episode is with Tracy, who is a forensic accountant. So she helps people find the money that they are really owed during divorce proceedings. So even if you are not going through a divorce or see a divorce in your future, the information that she provides today is so important because honestly, you really never know and there are very important steps to take to protect yourself and to protect your future.

And you know, if you feel like maybe your spouse is hiding some money or hiding something from you, she gives you some tips and advice on how to figure out and find if that is the case. But before we get started, I wanna let you know that the money plan of bootcamp is officially open. It is a five step framework too, creating a money plan that you can actually stick to.

We will have live trainings, prizes, and giveaways, and some really special surprises that I'm so excited to share with you. It is free. It is totally free. You can go to budgets made easy.com/bootcamp to sign up and join me there. I hope to see you there. It's gonna be a lot of fun through the month of October. Now here's Tracy.

Hi Tracy. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me, Ashley. I'm happy to be here And I am excited about this interview because, and I don't know if you know this about me, but I used to be a detective and I was for 10 years and toward the end of it I worked domestic violence cases.

So what we're gonna talk about today is something that I'm very passionate about and it really goes back to my whole mission with what I do with this podcast and budget's made easy and that is helping women. And we're gonna talk about finances, divorce, financial infidelity, and ways to protect yourself as you know, if you're having issues with your spouse, significant other,

going through a divorce because money is such a big issue, especially when it comes to domestic violence. And you know, we may not be talking about, you know, physical violence today, but financial abuse is a major issue and it's one that I still saw a lot because you know, financial fraud and just taking all the money out of the accounts and then fleeing and things like that.

So give us a little bit of background about your situation before we kind of dive into the steps on how women can protect themselves better. Well, you were a detective and I'm a money detective, so I'm a forensic accountant and I tell people that very simply, that means I find money. So I do fraud investigations and a lot of that work is on the corporate side where executives are stealing money.

Sometimes it involves white collar crime where people have been accused of embezzlement or tax fraud, complicated money situations. And I'll come in sometimes I'm actually helping to defend the person who's been accused. Sometimes I'm on the side of the victim, but about a third of what I do is in the divorce space. And so I am working with clients there to provide them forensic accounting services to see if there is money that has been hidden or spent inappropriately.

And you know, in the course of that work, I became very passionate about helping women come out of their divorces, getting what they are entitled to get. So if their spouse has hidden money, we wanna find that so they can get their half of it. If their spouse has spent money inappropriately, and I'm talking about things like affairs, drugs,

gambling, even just big wasteful spending that was not a part of the family plan, we wanna account for that. And certainly I work for, you know, my, some of my clients are men, some are women, but primarily I'm working in divorces on the side of women because they are trying to make sure that they're ends up equitably. And I love that you are on that mission and just in my past experience,

I've always wanted to, like I've heard of forensic accountants and like what you do and stuff. And so it was always very interest interesting to me because I love the numbers too, plus the investigation side. So I'm ac I'm like really excited to get to know you today. So what can women specifically, because my audience is women do to protect themselves maybe prior to the money being taken and hidden because you know,

things may be great for a while in the relationship, but when things go south it can go south fast and you may not even be thinking about the assets and the money. You just wanna be done with the situation. And then once you start going through the divorce process, you're like, oh, now I have to find the money. He, they took it all.

Like I see that a lot. So what can we do prior to to kind of protect ourselves, Right? If you are entering into marriage, if you are in a marriage and, and you don't even suspect anything is wrong, the biggest way you protect yourself is by being informed about your financial situation. So what we find is especially if there is a stay at home mom in the marriage,

right, your husband is earning the money, typically he will manage the money in the marriage as well. It's nothing to be ashamed of if that's your setup, that's a lot of people's setup, right? But if you're the spouse who isn't in charge of the money, you still wanna stay informed about what's going on. And so that involves looking at those bank statements every month,

looking at the credit card statements every month, Are you good with numbers? Maybe not. But you can look at your bank statement, your credit card statement, see where the charges are made and you kind of know in your gut whether those are are good or bad. You know, if you look at that bank statement, you see that $2,000 was withdrawn from your account and you have no idea what that was for,

you wanna start asking questions of your spouse and find out what was going on, right? So that is the number one best tip I have about protecting yourself. The next best tip I have is always making sure that you have some money of your own that is set aside. Do you need a secret account? It doesn't necessarily need to be secret. I'm not a fan of secrets and marriages.

If there is an abuse situation then probably it should be secret. But you know, in in marriages where there is good disclosure of information, I say, you know, it's always good to have your own bank account with a little bit of money there that you can spend as you please and that if you know if you need something, if you want something,

you have access to money always. Yeah. So what are some of the signs that you would look for if you're kind of getting a little suspicious, like you said the two, yeah, $2,000 payment, you don't know what is for, but are there any other signs that you've seen in your experience that we can look for? I always look for changes in behavior.

So it might be changes in spending, let's say for example your spouse was never into electronics, you know, didn't have an iPad, didn't have a fancy phone, and now you see that money is being spent at Best Buy or the Apple store. That would be an unusual change in behavior and I would get worried about that. Maybe it's that their behaviors change where they become more secretive about things,

maybe about their whereabouts, maybe about how they're spending money, maybe about their phone. You know, they start playing, playing the game where they're hiding their phone or always making sure you can't see the screen, you can't see the notifications. So those changes in behavior are probably the most common warning sign that I see. But other red flags of potential financial infidelity,

financial fraud might include things like documents going missing. You know, you have a file cabinet drawer that had tax returns and bank statements in it and suddenly those documents aren't there anymore. Or there might be things like, you know, your spouse has started to spend money in a way that violates the agreements that you've had. So maybe you have an agreement that anything over $500 we're just gonna run by each other before we spend it and suddenly there's spending that goes outside of that.

And there are literally hundreds of warning signs that I could tell you, but I like to talk about the ones that are kind of the most common. Yeah, absolutely. So once somebody maybe suspects that something's going on or you know, even after they separate or the finance, like when you're starting to dig into the finances, what is a way that somebody maybe on their own could find some hidden assets?

Like is there a way to like if they've hidden like a 401K or retirement account or you know, just taking some money, is there any kind of way for just the average person to kind of figure out where those assets went? For sure. So I teach the people that I work with, how to look at tax returns, to look for things like that.

Tax returns, as you may know, you look at the forms, there's all sorts of pages that look super complicated. I teach people where to look exactly on those statements. Look at this line, that line will show you if a 401K was cashed out. And that's something that I run into a lot is, you know, people are going to get divorced and you know,

one spouse is thinking, well we've got this retirement account that has all this money in it and I'm gonna get half of that. And all of a sudden at divorce time they find out there's zero in that account because two years earlier their spouse had cashed it out. So I show them where do you look on the tax return to see if that was cashed out?

Where do you look on the tax return to see where we have bank accounts, where we have investment accounts and things like that. I also teach people on the bank statements, some, some easy techniques to look at those bank statements, certain things to compare to see if there is some shenanigans going on. So it doesn't have to be complicated. So I,

I try to teach people some forensic accounting techniques, but they're not even really that fancy. Yeah. Just like, you know, and when you are going through that situation, like your detective skills are like heightened, you know, and so you are, you're more willing to do the digging as opposed to like prior to when everything is good, right?

Like you may miss some of those warning signs. So is there anything that you offer for people to kind of get these resources with, even if they can't necessarily like afford your services? Right. So I had been doing forensic accounting for 25 years. Most people, probably 90% of people who are involved in divorce cannot afford a forensic accountant. They've probably heard about a forensic accountant,

you know, they might have talked to their friends and said, I'm worried that he is hiding money. And someone said you need a forensic accountant. Okay great, everyone knows what a forensic accountant is but it's super expensive. And so what I did was I created the divorce money guide, which is an online handbook for people to kind of do it yourself forensic accounting with my guidance along the way.

So I walk you through, I set out a 10 step process, but people don't have to do all 10 steps. They don't have to do 'em in order. Pick and choose, do what you want, do what you're comfortable with, but it shows you exactly what kind of financial documents you're gonna need. How do you get them, how you organize them and what do you do with them once you have them,

what can you look for? So that's my resource to, I guess make forensic accounting more accessible to people who are going through divorce. Yes. And so I have a link to that in the show notes as well because I know that's needed. Just like you said, most people can't afford it and they need this, these services. So I love that you have that guide together.

Now what would be like your number one tip for somebody that is maybe they know they're getting a divorce, like that process is already started and they wanna go ahead and protect themselves at that point, What, what do you typically think people should do? Number one tip is start gathering information. So any account that you have legal access to because your name is on it,

I want you to go log in online, download all the statements that are available there for you no matter how far back they go. Some banks will let you download a year or two, others will go back as far as 7, 8, 9, 10 years, download everything, save it in a safe place like Dropbox or something like that. Save it on the cloud. So it's,

it's safe there. Get your credit report on yourself, get your tax returns, whatever financial documents you have at home. I would say if you can make copies of them and put those copies in a safe place outside of the home, it's so much easier to go through the process of divorce if you have these documents in hand early versus having to fight over trying to get them and having to send subpoenas to banks.

And that's a, sending subpoenas to banks is common. It happens in most divorces, but if you have access to those bank statements now and you can just save them and have them, it saves time, it saves money with the attorneys and it protects you because you just have that information in hand. Yeah and I love that you mentioned getting a credit report because that just reminded me that a lot of times people will open credit like you know,

spouses, we usually can either know each other's social security numbers or we can get it pretty easily, right. And so right. People will open credit in your name without you knowing it. So I'm glad that you mentioned that cuz I forgot about that. Now what would you want somebody listening to this episode to take away? Like what do you want them to really focus on?

And you've probably already mentioned it But I did, I'm gonna go back. Yeah. So I wanna focus on being informed because that protects you. Whether your marriage is fantastic or not fantastic and heading towards divorce, being informed protects you. And so I know that if someone is in the position of not being actively involved in managing the family's money, it can be really hard to start asking questions and start asking for involvement.

And so I like to give my one tip of a really easy technique to start getting involved and start getting information is to say to your spouse, you know, I was thinking, I am really concerned, what if something happens to you? What if you're in a car accident and you end up in a coma? What if you were to unexpectedly pass away?

I don't even know where our money is. I'd like to start understanding where we have bank accounts, where we have credit card accounts, how much money is in because if you're in the hospital or if you've passed away, the last thing I wanna worry about is trying to figure out how to get into the bank account. How to know whether there's enough money to write the check for the mortgage and things like that.

So it's a non-confrontational way to approach to just say I'm worried and I I'd like to be informed just in case something happens to you. Yes. And saying it in a tactful way instead of right, like aggressive where they're gonna get defensive and things like that. Right. So definitely I love that advice. Now is there anything else that maybe I haven't asked you yet or haven't,

don't even know to ask you that you want people to know? You know, I want people to know that no matter what your financial situation is, to not be ashamed of it because there are so many people who are in the same financial situation understand too that when there is financial infidelity, financial abuse, I know that it is often part of a bigger picture that might involve other forms of control and abuse and I don't wanna discount how difficult those situations are.

And so for me to say, you know, oh asked to be involved, asked to get information, I know that there are a lot of situations where that isn't even gonna fly. Even if you said I just wanna be informed, right? So I wanna be sensitive to that but I want people to know situations to know that there's a lot of other people who are in situations very similar to you.

And so if you can reach out to get help and support from friends, family members, others who've been through it, you know, I would encourage you to do that. Now I'm just curious with the financial accountants, like how long does that process usually take? Like I know each situation is different and of course if there's like tons of assets it'll take longer,

but like on your average case, what, like how long does that even take? So I tell my clients that typically I complete a case in about 60 to 90 days once I have all the documents that I need. And depending on my schedule I can sometimes do 'em even faster. But yeah, I mean that's a, you know, you wanna give yourself enough time in your case to have this done.

You know, I, I feel bad when I get the phone calls as someone who says we have a hearing in three weeks and I need this done by then well unfortunately I've already got projects scheduled and there would just be no way to turn it around that fast. But I think if you would think about 90 days as kind of a reasonable time period for a typical case,

that would be fair. So if somebody was wanting to hire financial accountant, would you recommend like if they're suspecting some but something and they're going, they're getting a divorce, they know it's coming or they've already started the process to do that, like as soon as they can or just kind of wait and see like what is your typical recommendation? I always prefer to get involved a little bit earlier because the sooner I get involved the easier it is for us to get information.

Sometimes, you know, when we're trying to get financial information there's often a delay in getting it. So if we can start asking for it sooner, if that's better, I can help work with the attorney for what to ask and how to ask for it. That's especially important if you have a situation like maybe you and your spouse own a business together and there's certain accounting records that we wanna get and you need to ask for them in certain ways so that the whoever's responding can't wiggle out of giving you what they're supposed to give you.

Right? And so I like to work with the attorneys to say, please ask for this and say it in this way. So earlier is better, but that doesn't mean that you can't hire someone if it gets later in the process. I think that what's important for people is if you're thinking about hiring a forensic accountant, that you wanna be thinking about how much money is on the line.

And I realize that if you knew how much was missing, you wouldn't need a forensic accountant. Right? But I, I'd like you to think about your personal financial situation and what could reasonably be missing based on how much you are making, how much you knew last time was in the bank. And so if you're looking at maybe there's 10 or $20,000 missing,

I would say probably the cost of a forensic accountant and also having your attorney involved in taking their forensic accountant's results and using them in court's probably gonna cost you more than you'd ever get back. But if you have a larger sum of money that is at stake, then it might be worth it. I love that. I love that you like gave numbers to compare to so that people know if they're,

if it's something that they should do or not. Now to find one, is that something that the lawyer usually does or the client usually like I'm assuming that if the lawyer thinks that there's enough money missing, they probably know how to find one. I would say it's most typical for the lawyers to find a forensic accountant, but I'm gonna tell you a dirty little secret,

many of them are using the Google machine just like you and I would. So there are a lot of lawyers who've not worked with forensic accountants before and so they're gonna go consult Google just like you would. Sometimes the attorneys do have clients that they trust and think are pretty sharp and say, Hey, go find, go see if you can find a forensic accountant.

I always say that no matter, no matter who is looking for the forensic accountant, I would like the client to talk to at least two people, talk to two or three people before you choose someone. Because even if you've never dealt with forensic accounting before, you know nothing about this area. By the time you get to that second or third person,

you're gonna understand enough, you're gonna know who you feel comfortable with, who you think knows what they're talking about. Now you can get a pretty good sense of it. So if your attorney says I want to use this person, I would give some pushback and say, can we talk to a couple different people? I think that's always beneficial. Now what kinda question should somebody ask a forensic accountant before they hire 'em?

I think you should ask, you know, of course you've gotta tell them what the issues are and what you think is missing in the case. Ask them, you know, how how they would approach this case, what their work is. And it doesn't matter if you don't understand what they're talking about, just make 'em talk about it. Ask them who's gonna be working on this case?

Is it you? Is it staff? How many staff people who supervisees them, ask them how long it's gonna take? You know it, are they able to give you a firm deadline and ask them how much it's gonna cost? Now most forensic accountants charged by the hour, so they're gonna tell you, I'm gonna give you a budget for your case and I'll charge you by the hour.

I'm not a fan of that procedure because I see these cases they go way over budget. So often I use fixed fees. And so what that means is I look at all the documents that the client has for me to work with and I come up with a case plan for what I'm gonna do and then I come back to the client and I say,

it's gonna cost you exactly this amount of money for me to do this work. And oh that's That. Yeah, I love that. And that's a lot easier for people to manage budgetwise so, Right, I like that. Now as we wrap up, is there anything else you wanna add? I know I kind already asked you that, but as we wrap up here,

I feel like we covered a lot really fast. It like flew by. So is there anything else that you wanna add before we wrap up? So I'll just talk about, you know, this just popped into my head. We were talking about warning signs about whether there's fraud in your marriage or not. So within the Divorce money guide, one of the steps,

step number three is red flags of fraud. And so I talk in the guide, there's videos, there's written materials, there's worksheets. So I talk in the written materials in the videos about a number of the red flags that you might see because I want people to get a better sense of whether what they're seeing in their marriage is a problem or not.

But the coolest thing in the whole guide is the red flag quiz. It's a 25 question quiz that you take and I'm asking about how the money is handled in your marriage. I'm asking about some things, have you seen these types of things happen in your marriage? And it relates to some of those red flags. And at the end I give my assessment,

the result is how likely is it that there is financial fraud in your marriage? And I put that quiz in there because what I was seeing in cases was one spouse was getting suspicious of what was going on with the money would raise some concerns and would be told that they're just making things up. Oh that oh you're, you're just making things up. This couldn't possibly be,

you're paranoid, whatever the case may be. And so I wanted to give people a way to look at it objectively and get my feedback on should they be worried or not. So that's been a really, really well received part of the guide. That's awesome. So I will link to that as well cuz I know people that, that are interested in this topic wanna get that guide.

So I love that you have that resource for people. Can I, Oh, go ahead. Can I give them a coupon for money off the guide? Would that be allowed? Oh yes, Absolutely. Cool. I will give, we'll give you a coupon for a hundred dollars off. Your code will be Ashley in all capital letters. Awesome. Thank you.

Can put it in the show notes. Awesome. Let me write that down so I don't forget. Okay, so we will link to it, give you that coupon, it'll be in the show notes as well. Now are you active on social or is there anywhere people can maybe follow you first, like quick tips and things like that? I do the quick tips on Instagram and they can find me there.

My handle is Divorce Money Guide and the website for the product is divorce money guide.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today. I know this is a very important topic and I just love what you're doing. I am so grateful that you had me. I just wanna create more awareness and give people resources to, you know,

take some control, get more knowledge about their financial situation, feel more comfortable whether or not they're heading into divorce. Absolutely. You are so correct. Thanks. Thank you. Now, if you loved this episode or maybe you know somebody that could really benefit from this episode, please share it with them and I hope to see you soon in the Money Plan Bootcamp.

Go to budgets made easy.com/bootcamp to join me there it is free. So come sign up and follow along for prizes and giveaways and some awesome training as well. Of course, I will see you there.