After a marriage breaks up, about the last thing most people want to do is sit down with one more attorney. But no matter how old you are or whether you have kids, it’s important to consult both financial and legal experts to make sure you have an updated estate and financial plan for your new life once the divorce decree is final.

It’s also best to blend estate planning with financial planning post-divorce. If you weren’t working with a financial or estate planner during the divorce process, it’s time to do so now. The immediate months after a divorce can be disorienting – even if you don’t move, you are literally starting a new household that you will have to direct yourself, and that means new money issues to face.

This is why that the weeks immediately after a divorce are a good time to revisit short- and long-term spending and planning goals. Here’s a general road map to that process:

Start with a financial planner: Whether you plan to stay single, remarry or move in with a new partner, it’s good to get a baseline look at your finances as early as possible after the divorce is final.  Expenses for the newly single can pile up quickly and unexpectedly, and a financial planning professional can help you review your new current spending and savings needs, compare strategies to achieve long-term goals like college and retirement and give you critical tools to protect your assets and loved ones if you die suddenly. Even if you have a good relationship with an ex-spouse and you addressed key issues for your children as part of the divorce proceedings, you need to revisit all these issues as a single individual before you move on to the next stage.

Talk with a trained estate planning attorney about wills and other critical documents: True, there are software programs and other kit solutions available to write basic wills, powers of attorney and certain simple trust agreements. But it makes sense to coordinate the activities of a financial planner with an estate planning attorney who can tailor an overall estate plan specific to your needs no matter how basic they might be right now. Even if you are very young with few assets, it makes sense to get some solid advice in this area so you’ll be able to manage such planning as you age and your finances get more complex. Particularly if you have kids, such planning is important if you plan to remarry and if you want to guarantee that specific assets are guaranteed for them when you die.  In some cases where a spouse dies unmarried with minor children, an ex-spouse might automatically gain control of assets that were supposed to be earmarked for the kids. If you don’t want that to happen, you need to plan for that legally.

Make a guardianship game plan for your kids: It’s not enough to plan how money and assets will go to your children if you or your ex-spouse die suddenly or are incapacitated.  If your children are minors, it’s particularly important to make sure you and your ex-spouse have a guardianship plan for their upbringing as well as any assets they may inherit. You might completely trust your ex-spouse’s new husband, wife or partner to raise your kids if your ex-spouse dies before you, but there may be others better-equipped to do so – spell that out now.  Also, if there are any trust or wealth issues that will become effective for your children once they reach adulthood, it’s also important to establish an efficient legal structure for distributing those assets as well as appointing a trustee in a will to train and guide your kids through that financial transition.

Plan for special needs kids: If one of your children is disabled and is expected to need lifetime assistance of some type, then you should consult a qualified attorney to help you create a special needs trust. It will help protect your child from having to give up any public or social financial assistance as well as access to special doctors, medical help, special prescriptions or treatments that could be taken away if they were to personally inherit assets that would disqualify them for these programs. When such assets are held in trust, they are not counted as the child’s assets. The advantage is that those inherited assets may still be used to support their housing or other personal living needs.

Get solid protection in place: Most people focus on what may happen to their health insurance if they get divorced, but insurance issues like life, property/casualty and disability insurance are sometimes put on the back burner.  If you’re newly single, you definitely need the best health coverage you can afford for yourself and your kids, but life, property, liability and disability insurance becomes doubly important, particularly if you failed to address those needs during the divorce.  Even if your ex-spouse is cooperative with financial support, it’s wise to insure yourself as if they weren’t. A financial planner should be able to go through those options in detail.

Review all your investments for primary ownership and beneficiary information: Even if you were advised correctly to change the names on assets you and your spouse were dividing between yourselves, it still makes sense post-divorce to review that the names are indeed correct on those assets, and most important, to make sure all beneficiary information is correct.

June 2009 — This column is produced by the Financial Planning Association, the membership organization for the financial planning community, and is provided by Martin V Higgins,CFP,CLU,AEP, a local member of FPA.

By May 1, as the whole world donned surgical masks, a relatively new strain of swine flu virus, H1N1, had become the focus of the 24/7 global media machine. The official alert level had been raised by the World Health Organization to a Phase 5 outbreak, just one bracket shy of the peak, which signifies the most deadly sort of global pandemic. Condign warnings of mass death and economic disaster dominated the airwaves and the Internet. That next week, swine flu was, to all intents and purposes, the only story.

Yet on May 6, Mexico City—in which this new black plague had staged its breakout—lifted a weeklong ban on restaurants seating customers. The next day, the national government allowed universities, high schools, churches and museums to re-open; grammar schools opened five days later. Face masks disappeared. And around the world over the following week, this new disease—which has quickly proved little more contagious than ordinary influenza, and quite effectively treatable with antiviral drugs—faded away, but for wildly overpublicized reports of the occasional—and isolated—death.

Through May 18, the World Health Organization reported a grand total of 8,829 confirmed cases in 40 countries, resulting in 74 deaths, six of them in the United States. For perspective, in the United States alone, each and every year the garden-variety seasonal flu infects between 15 and 60 million people, hospitalizing 200,000 and killing 36,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

What had happened, as reported by The Economist among other rational observers of the story, was that the first known case was a little boy in the Mexican state of Veracruz, who was diagnosed on April 2. The first confirmed death—of a 39-year-old woman in Oaxaca—occurred on April 13. But the Mexican health authorities hadn’t the technology to perform genomic analysis, the process by which new viruses may be quite quickly identified, and they did not send samples abroad until April 22. By the time the strain was isolated—as the not terribly aggressive and eminently treatable bug that it is—the whole world was in full-on panic mode.

In effect, the pandemic was over before it began. This did not forestall any number of global outbreaks of idiocy, among them the slaughter of 400,000 pigs in Egypt (never mind that the disease is mainly transmitted human to human), and a characteristically odd statement from the Vice President of the United States, who averred that he wouldn’t let his family take Amtrak.

Yet every single news story, during the brief shelf life of this incipient pandemic, referred in gruesome detail to the Spanish Flu of 1918–19, which killed 675,000 Americans and some 22 million people worldwide. Never mind that this was long before antibiotics, let alone genomic analysis, and that the recommended precautions included mustard baths, gargling salt water, and Bovril. This pandemic is always ritually cited by the media as they do their best to whip up a firestorm of alarmism over the latest health-related tempest in a teapot.

The great swine flu outbreak of 2009 thus joins a long, ignominious line of equally overhyped nonevents.

A 1976 swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, NJ set off a similar hysteria, during which America’s top health official estimated it would kill one million Americans. One person died.

In the 1990s, a “mad cow” panic enveloped the earth. In a 1997 book, the normally rational Richard Rhodes warned that the human variant of mad cow (called vCJD) might kill half a million people per year in Britain alone. To date, confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, total about 150.

In the post-September 11 panic of 2001, an isolated instance of someone mailing small doses of anthrax to a handful of political and media personalities was spun into a nationwide terrorist germ-warfare threat. Six people died, including a 93-year-old Connecticut woman.

Then there was the SARS panic of 2002-2003 (worldwide deaths to date per the WHO: 774), followed in 2005 by the massive global avian flu panic (257 deaths at last report).

With each and every outbreak, the media have erupted in full hysterical frenzy, fearmongering in inverse proportion to the actual threat.

It is always extremely difficult for investors and their advisors alike to gauge the full effect of the media’s bias for catastrophism during relatively real events like the global financial meltdown of 2008. In exactly this regard, it will be importantly useful to remember the extent to which they blow out of all proportion—when they don’t totally invent—some or another putative health crisis.

The single greatest deterrent to rational investor behavior is the 24-hour cable news cycle, now trumpeting to the skies some “new era” technology (e.g. the Internet in 1999), then decrying the end of economic life on the planet as we have known it (e.g. the global economy falling off a cliff in 2008). Journalism’s constant refrain that recent economic events were comparable to the Great Depression—which they were manifestly not—should remind us of nothing so much as the last half-dozen global pandemics that never were.

It is not so much that the media are unhelpful to investors seeking to maintain their perspective. Rather—in every thought, word and deed—the media seem single-mindedly determined to stamp perspective out.

At such times, an experienced advisor with an adult memory, a sense of the economic/market cycle and the conviction that this time isn’t different may be the investor’s only practical refuge. Consider the possibility that the highest and best function of an investment advisor isn’t economic commentary or market prognostication, but simply in saving his clients from the media…and from themselves.

© 2009 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.