As we’ve explored before, it’s now pretty rare for a stay-at-home parent to receive spousal support for life.

A decade or a few years is the best case scenario, now. Family court judges will expect both parties to contribute financially to their children’s upbringing – so how are you going to do this?

If you stopped working to bring up your children, it’s likely that you’ll need to supplement your income beyond that of any spousal support and child maintenance payments arranged in your financial settlement.

You may need to prepare a steady income stream in anticipation of the day when spousal support from your ex will end – so enabling you to become fully financially independent. This is why returning to work may be something you need to do.

But how do you find work that will fit around looking after your children?

Whether you are the resident parent or the non-resident parent, finding and keeping a job that works with your family arrangements can be another tough aspect of divorce.

What are the different types of working patterns available to you?

The amount of hours you may want or need to work will of course depend on your contact and residence arrangements with your ex, the age of your children, and what other childcare options are available to you (for example, nursery and childminders, or family). Your ex may have your children at weekends, or even half of the week, so this may dictate what kind of work pattern that will best suit your situation. Think about some of the hours you could work:

• Freelance

Pros: This can be a great option if you previously worked in industries where there is demand for self-employed workers, such as the creative and technical professions, or if you can provide consultancy in your previous field of expertise. Being freelance often means that you can work at home too, which is ideal if you have small children or need to make the school run. It’s handy for keeping on top of your domestic chores too.

Cons: There are two main difficulties with the freelance market. The first is that it can be difficult to drum up the business from your clients if you have been out of the work network for a while.

The second is that, unless you can agree set freelance contracts, it can be very unpredictable and precarious: both in workload and in income. You may work just a few days a month or be up to your eyes.

This can make any financial planning problematic, especially if an unexpected expense comes up. It also makes holidays – both your own, and the school breaks – difficult, if you suddenly have to pause work with your clients.

• Part time

Pros: Working part-time is probably the Holy Grail for any working parent, divorced or not! You get to have a structure to your week, socialise with colleagues, earn your own money, get a sense of achievement, and time to spend with your kids as well.

A part-time pattern can work well if you split your children’s residence with your ex, since it allows you to work when your children are with them, giving you some time off from childcare and a life of your own outside the kids.

You can also arrange to work every day within school hours, so you’re home when you need to be.

Cons: Part-time positions are thin on the ground in many areas of the country, as competition is high from other working parents.

Sometimes you can feel that you are neither one thing nor the other, and stretched too thinly as both an employee and a parent. Some companies might try to squeeze a full-time workload into your part-time hours, so it could be stressful. You may miss important developments on the days you’re not in the office.

• Full time

Pros: You can fully throw yourself back into a career and demonstrate your commitment to your new employers. Full time work is definitely easier to find than a part-time job. And of course, you earn more money too!

Cons: Going from being a stay-at-home parent to full-time work can be a shock. If you’ve used your stay-at-home time to keep a spotless house and a week’s menu of nutritious food served up on time every night, this is likely to slip.

Working full time can also be difficult if you need to do the school run, so it’s better suited to those with older children or family who can help out.

• Term-time only

Pros: School holidays can be a minefield for divorced parents, with three sets of holiday to co-ordinate: yours, your ex’s and your kids! Working term-time only means that you always have the holidays free to look after your children, no matter whether your ex can take them.

Cons: Term-time work is often unique to the education sector, so you’ll need to have the right transferrable skills. And because you already get set holidays, you can’t really take any other time off: not great if arrangements with your ex suddenly fall through.

Sandra heads Graysons’ family team.  She qualified as a solicitor in April 1994, having obtained her law degree at Sheffield University. She has specialised exclusively in family law ever since.

She is personally recommended in the Legal 500 2015 as being ‘committed, focused and confident’.

Sandra became a Resolution accredited specialist in January 2000 and qualified as a collaborative family lawyer in April 2009.  Her accredited areas are advanced complex financial and property matters and domestic abuse.

Sandra is passionate about helping couples to resolve their disputes in a non-adversarial, respectful manner; focusing on the needs of their children and re-enforcing the importance of conflict avoidance.  She finds collaborative work particularly rewarding in guiding clients through their individual separation journeys so they can look towards a brighter future.

photo credit: Woman and young girl in kitchen with laptop and paperwork smiling via photopin (license)

Ever heard of the saying fail to plan, plan to fail?

People think a written business plan is only necessary if you are seeking funding for your business but actually, a business plan is an important step to ensuring business success.

It creates a framework for you to start and grow your business.

Sure there are successful businesses owners whose plans are embedded in their brain and never create a written plan. But they succeed despite the lack of a formal plan, not because of it.

In its most general sense, business planning is about turning your business idea into reality.

With this in mind, a business plan is therefore a written document that articulates what your business is about and what steps you will take to make it successful.

The main purpose of writing a business plan when you are starting your business is to put your idea, thoughts and strategy on paper so that you can question and test the viability of the business. Writing the plan forces you to research and get the information that you need to turn your idea into a successful venture.

Further, the plan will help you;

• The plan provides an organised way to conduct your investigation

• It helps you think long term, not just starting a business but staying in business

• Gather information of the industry thereby assisting you in making more informed decisions

• It helps you know what will be required of you as an entrepreneur

• The plan raises questions that will help inspire solutions before a crisis occurs

• By identifying strengths and weaknesses, it reveals where you will need assistance

• The plan can be used as a guide to keep you focused

Admittedly, writing a business plan is not the easiest thing to do. As a new entrepreneur, limited resources often mean that you have to do the writing by yourself and in my experience as business planner, I have seen many business ideas end at the planning stage because the owners cannot overcome the planning stage.

Indeed business planning is a big challenge but do not despair, there is help out there. Over the internet, there are many sites that give valuable information including free templates that you can download for your use or you can buy software that can help you create a professional plan in easy to follow steps.

Additionally, there are business advisers through organisations such as business link or private companies that can assist you with you plan.

As a guideline, before you begin writing your business plan, consider the following questions:

• How will your potential customers purchase your product/service?

• What is the business looking to provide and what gap does it fill?

• Who will buy your product/service and why will they choose you?

• How will you finance your business?

So if you have a good idea, do not fail plan get external expertise if you need the assistance to make your business real.

Once you have written a business plan, use it to your benefit. It can be very easy to store it away and never review it again. Remember, it represents your compass, providing a valuable management tool for you to measure your business performance.

Lillian Magero is an experienced business change consultant with project management skills and a track record of delivering change projects across a range of sectors including public sector.

Using best practice from methodologies such as PRINCE2 and ITILv3, able to deliver projects to scope, time and cost. With a track record of success working on end to end projects and in different roles within a project, a proactive leader with excellent stakeholder management skills coupled with the drive and tenacity to achieve business objectives.

If you’re still determined to change your work this year, you’re in good company. It’s estimated that 60-70% of people would rather be doing work they enjoy more.

The good news is that despite the current state of the economy, there have never been so many possibilities available to turn what you love doing into a living. And a growing tribe of people around the world are doing exactly that. If you want to join them, you need to be willing to try a different approach.

Here are three counter-intuitive steps you must take to make this the year you get paid to do something you love.

1. Dare to dream

Have you fallen at the first hurdle – you don’t actually know what work you would enjoy? Perhaps you’ve got into that endless cycle of coming up with ideas for what you could do, then quickly discounting them because they look impossible for you?

If so, you need to suspend your disbelief for just a little while. You see, if you’ve got stuck choosing what work to do, I guarantee you have failed to separate what you want from what you think is possible. You must, at least for a while, allow yourself to dream a little.

Write a long list of anything and everything you might like to do for your work even if you have doubts or it seems completely impractical. Let yourself be unrealistic for a while. After all, being sensible hasn’t got you the answer yet, so it’s got to be worth a shot!

Later, you can get practical. Take each idea and brainstorm ways of getting as close as possible to the work options that appeal to you most. Even if your initial idea looks impossible, with some lateral thinking you can still create a working life that gives you the part of the idea that’s most exciting to you.

2. Stop thinking & researching

Yes, that’s right – stop thinking!

Thinking about what you want to do with your life will only get you so far. After a while, ruminating any more on it is not helpful. In fact, it keeps you stuck. Endlessly researching is similarly problematic. Exploring an area of work you’re interested in is fine, but beware the habit of looking for reasons why it’s not possible for you. If you look for reasons why it won’t work, you’ll find ‘em!

The people with the coolest careers in the world didn’t ask “I wonder if this is possible for me?”, they decided what they wanted and resolved to do everything they possibly could to make it happen.

On the programmes I run for career changers, we make the participants launch a short “Play Project” to throw themselves into trying out the new line of work they want. They learn far more in the doing of it than they ever would by sitting around thinking and researching – and all before they quit their job! You can try this too. Think of how you could experience a taste of what you want to do over the next 3-4 weeks, even if it’s in your spare time.

As you do it, notice what you like about it and don’t like about it. Keep making adjustments and getting closer and closer to something you really love doing.

3. Get paid to play

There’s no doubt that some things you enjoy doing are more marketable than others. I’m not an advocate of quitting your job to do whatever you love and hoping the money magically turns up.

The key is to look at the things that you like doing (and you have some ability for) and find a way to help people while doing them. When you can do this, you can bet there’ll be a way of getting paid for it. This is what I call ‘getting paid to play’ – making a living from things you’d be doing even if you didn’t need the money.

This is particularly important if you dream of escaping the world of jobs altogether and making your own income. The secret is to solve problems for people. Whether that problem is mild (such as being bored on a Friday night, or struggling to find clothes that fit) or severe (such as back pain, the stress of divorce, or financial worries), people with problems are already looking for a solution. If you can provide that solution, you should be able to get paid for it. Providing something people need also happens to feel good!

And as American author Zig Ziglar once said:

“You can get everything in life you want
if you will just help enough other people to get what they want”

Download a free chapter of Screw Work Let’s Play plus worksheets and audio classes at: www.screwworkletsplay.com

 John Williams is the author of best-selling book “Screw Work Let’s Play”