By Victor Greto
GREENVILLE — In her office wearing a black suit that’s all trim lines pointing toward dangerously sharp black shoes, Carol Arnott is a picture-perfect image of high-powered businesswoman.
For a person who doesn’t want to be defined by what she does for a living, looks can be deceiving.
Looking just past her mousse-curled auburn hair, one can see a sign — “A man is not a financial plan” — leaning against a wall atop her spacious desk, cluttered with stacks of files and a collection of snow globes.
The sign is a careful wink at the majority of clients who help fertilize her blossoming career as a divorce financial planner — those who on average have been married for more than two decades and who don’t want to be left in the financial lurch.
“Almost all of my clients are women,” Arnott, 47, says, of her year-old financial planning business that, at $125 an hour, helps people figure out how to intelligently divide their money during a divorce. “But I don’t actively market myself toward them.”
No need.
The people who come to her, often through attorney referrals, are those who don’t fully grasp the complexity of stock options, pension plans and deferred compensation plans.
These are the women who are sadly listening to the faint echo of what’s left of the feminine mystique.
We’re usually not talking about couples from the handful-of-years marriages, whose relatively simple money issues reflect the fact that they married in their later teens or early twenties and who divorced sometime in their late twenties or early thirties.
Just like Arnott did a couple of decades ago.
Although those marriages often involve children, that’s a different issue, something else Arnott can tell you about.
Some of the older women who have invested in long-term marriages as housewives find they have no marketable skills, and must go back to school in their forties or fifties and make their way in the world, she says. And they find the complexity of 401Ks, IRAs and health benefits daunting.
“The seven-year itch has become the 20-year ditch,” Arnott says of those couples. “Never give anything away.”
Arnott is good at that — perpetrating playfully pungent phrases.
Referred to as the “divorce lady” at a recent social function, she said she preferred being known as the “divorce diva.”
Those glib turns of phrase may hark back to her more tongue-in-cheek, rebellious teenage years, which abruptly ended with a disastrous marriage.
But during the struggle of raising two children on her own, Arnott gained a new career and renewed seriousness in her life.
And like some of the women whom she helps now, she hasn’t looked back.
From Geneva to Hockessin
Born in Long Island, N.Y., Arnott and her three siblings moved to Hockessin when her father, Thomas, a DuPont engineer, was transferred.
But it was her five years spent in Geneva, Switzerland — from the age of 11 through 16 — to where her father again was transferred, that changed her life and shaped who she became.
“Our time abroad was rebellious,” says Arnott’s sister, Susan, one year younger than Carol. Left to “our own devices,” she says they explored the city with an international group of friends.
“In Geneva, there’s no drinking age and you could get anything you wanted,” says Susan, now a web designer and editor in Cambridge, Mass.
They shoplifted, drank, did drugs — not a lot, but all for fun.
“I don’t think it was meaningful in daily life,” Susan says. “Her rebelliousness didn’t take a form of drug use. It was more she set herself apart and had more of an internal life.”
That internal life suffered when the family returned to Hockessin in 1974, where the tight-knit DuPont community of families was very conservative, says Carol’s childhood friend, Tricia Fitzharris, two years younger than Carol.
In that mix, Arnott stuck out.
“She dressed more radically than I,” Fitzharris says. “Very hip, big hair, loud clothes, fun parties. She was not afraid of anything.”
“I had a bad time,” Arnott says. “I was a bad teen.”
Moral judgments aside, Arnott felt alienated from her classmates at A.I. DuPont High School, Susan says.
“In Geneva, it was an interesting world with things to do,” she says, where interethnic and interracial life was common. “It was an engaging life there; but high school life here was not engaging for her.”
She didn’t want to go to college, but her father sat her down at the dining room table and told her she was going to go. He didn’t care where or what she studied. He would pay for it. She “agreed.”
Only a year into attending a two-year school in Massachusetts, it struck her friends and family as strange when Arnott met and decided to marry a man older than herself whom she had met in a bar during a school break.
Arnott says that even on her wedding day she knew the marriage felt like a slow train wreck about to happen.
Susan sees this as Arnott’s way of finally “acquiescing to conventional life. She was just finishing college. We were puzzled as to why, and she said later that someone should have told her not to do it.”
But she did it. At 21. Her marriage was the only time, Susan says, her sister “lost her sense of self.”
Equitable split
Losing one’s sense of self is part of the price of a bad marriage and divorce, some say.
“People who go through divorce need a team,” says Wilmington attorney Suzanne Seubert, who has referred many of her divorcing clients to Arnott. The team should include a lawyer, a financial expert and a psychologist, she says.
“Carol’s good at knowing that a lot of mothers want to keep houses for the kids, but financially they’re expensive to maintain, so she explains in terms that most people can understand why they may or may not want to keep portions of the marital estate,” she says.
Those sorts of discussions are necessary when, say, the husband makes twice as much as the wife, says attorney Jeanne M. Hanson, who has referred at least one client to Arnott.
“The rule of thumb is if the husband makes twice as much as the wife, the wife will get 60 percent of marital estate, and vice-versa,” she says. “He feels like he’s getting ripped off because he’s only getting 40 percent. Everyone feels like they’ve lost. It can’t be, but they do feel that.”
One former client of Arnott’s who was getting a divorce after 33 years of marriage and raising three children, looked to Arnott to figure out what she should do about his healthy pension and 401K, their home and her own job.
“Carol put everything into financial perspective,” says the woman who refused to give her name for this article. “You know round numbers of where you are and the ramifications of your actions.”
Although both Arnott and her lawyer told the woman to go to court, she decided not to because of the children. She chose not to claim his pension, but took 75 percent of his 401K, which helped pay for much of the home.
“I feel more sure of myself, more self-confident regarding financial matters,” the woman says now, less than two years after the divorce was finalized. “This was a very big decision for me, and there really is no one else to help.”
Two decades ago, Arnott struggled on her own in a marriage that lasted barely five years. If that wasn’t bad enough, her father died before she was about to graduate from what is now Philadelphia University.
Like his father before him, Arnott’s father died of a heart attack at 48. He had just returned from a bicycle trip through Vermont.
As her marriage unspooled, Arnott spend a lot of time fighting for custody of the two children she had, Ryan and Erin, and for child support.
After initially using a lawyer, she argued her case at family court on her own. “Wilmington Family Courts judges knew Carol by name,” Fitzharris says. “She was quite outspoken in trying to protect her kids and their rights.”
Her first job out of the gate was as a sales manager at Bamberger’s and, later, Macy’s, Arnott says.
That was fine, as far as it went, but money remained tight.
After her divorce, Susan recalls Carol always being “financially on the edge.”
But her future as a financial planner already stirred.
“One of her kids asked for something she couldn’t afford,” Susan recalls. “She sat down with them and showed them on paper what the financial situation was and that it wasn’t possible.”
Arnott also knew she had to make a career change.
One night two weeks before her thirtieth birthday, she walked into a dressing room at the end of a long day and found herself knee-deep in discarded clothes.
“I just looked around and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she says.
Digging out
Arnott is the only financial planner in Delaware dealing exclusively with divorce.
There are a handful of others, however, that do it, but as a sideline, including Devon Daniels and Lisa LaMarche.
“Divorce planning is a relatively new niche in financial planning,” says Daniels, who has been handling the financials of divorces for about 10 years. “That came as a result of a lot of marriages creating significant wealth: stock options, deferred compensation plans (for executives), family businesses — what is something really worth?”
Although it hardly ever seems like it to those involved, “Ultimately, the goal is to arrive at an equitable division of assets, both short-term and long-term,” says LaMarche, who has been in financial planning since 1998. Her clients, however, are mostly men, she says.
“Men are more likely to feel they’re exposed,” she says. “Typically, the breadwinner is the one who is going to have to divide the assets that they felt they built, so they say they want to make sure we know what the assets are and that they’re fairly treated.”
Another client of Arnott’s, who also asked that her name not be used, recently attended Arnott’s class on “Surviving the Financial Pitfalls of Divorce,” which Arnott teaches monthly for the Delaware Money School, at different libraries in the region.
Her divorce was finalized last October, but she and her ex-husband are still working on dividing up assets. Although an accountant herself, she says she is unsure of how to do divide their assets properly for both the present and the future.
“I don’t have a clue about how pensions are calculated,” she says. “Or what a fair settlement is. I can crunch the numbers, but she can extrapolate them into the future, and I can’t really do that.”
Arnott’s proclivity toward attracting women to her practice may have to do with her own personality and experience.
“I’ve seen a lot of situations where the man manages all the finances in the house, and the woman doesn’t know how to do it,” says Wesley Stafford, 44, who was Carol’s manager when she went to work for Prudential Insurance Company as an insurance salesperson, shortly after she quit retail in the late 1980s.
Stafford says he leans on Arnott at times to help him understand the “nuances” of the opposite sex.
“It’s no secret that, psychologically, men and women approach things from different places,” says Stafford, who has never married. “They’re emotional, we’re logical; we’re direct, they’re subtle. In being so direct and logical, I miss some of the subtleties in a situation, and she’s good at saying, Did you think about this? Or, Did this cross your mind?”
At Prudential for five years, and then as a budding financial counselor — working with bank clients to offer investment products, such as mutual funds — for Dreyfus Investment Services Corp. for nearly two more years, Arnott built up a strong and steady income, as well as her confidence.
When she began work at the Wilmington Brokerage Services Co., as a financial planner, she began branching out, doing more volunteering, bicycling, and meeting many more people. She even survived a couple of long-term but ultimately unsuccessful relationships.
Nothing really clicked until her job was eliminated in 2004.
She had saved enough to take off several months to rethink where she wanted to be, she says. Although the brokerage company offered her a management position, she didn’t want it.
“I didn’t want management responsibility,” she says. “I wanted to spend eight months on Carol, and woke up every day with a blank slate.”
She decided to concentrate on divorce financial planning, a growing marketing niche.
“I was trying to find a career path that I could feel good about what I was doing and make a difference,” she says.
But she also knew that focusing on divorce would make her stand out in a crowd. It was more about her friends’ experiences with their recent divorces that helped inspire her choice than her long-ago divorce.
It also was during these eight months that she met Tucker Robbins, 51, a realtor, on a bicycle ride. They’ve been dating ever since.
“We’re both relatively athletic, stay busy, active in the community, and we both have a tendency to be type-A workaholics,” Robbins says. “We like to work hard and play hard.”
Marriage is a possibility, Arnott says, although Robbins says bluntly, “Everything is going wonderfully right now. I never thought I’d be so happy.”
Arnott, too.
“I would have given jaded responses about love and soulmates before Tucker,” she says. “But now….”
Now she’s got inch-thick files of numerals to plow through.