Many people stay together because of the children and others also remain as they cannot afford to do otherwise.

The key is to assess whether you can turn your marriage around, or if you are absolutely wasting precious moments of your life.

Often our perception of what we need financially to live on is built up over time. More and more things become indispensable. From private schooling and living in the right neighbourhood, to buying nice food from the local deli whenever we like to not having to think about driving somewhere and the amount of petrol it uses.

It is important to analyse whether in fact many of the problems with your marriage are actually issues with the life that YOU have built around yourself. Your spouse may be just going along for the ride in a lifestyle which has put you on a treadmill that you feel you cannot get off.

By really going through you financial necessities, what you can and cannot change, there is the opportunity to reinvent yourself and get back that carefree feeling you had years ago. It may surprise you, but your partner could breathe a sigh of relief at going back to the basics of what makes you essentially happy.

So, yes, divorce does involve splitting assets and therefore can mean a drop in lifestyle to many. However, to others, who use this as a time to really analyse their lives, it can be used as a positive time of change, potentially bringing along their partners. Then it ends up as “divorcing your cares”, rather than your partner!

By going through the process with a divorce, financial planning specialist, explore these life changes and how you could possibly implement them.