I sat down with Amanda Donovan last week. She’s a family lawyer in Auckland, New Zealand, almost thirty years into practice, and one of the first people I connected with on Substack when I started writing about divorce and the marital home. We’d been trading notes back and forth for months, and the conversation kept circling back to the same place. The house. So we hit record.
Amanda sits on one side of this. She drafts the agreement and tells clients what they’re entitled to. I sit on the other. I’m the one who has to tell them whether a bank will actually lend the money to make that agreement real. That gap between what gets signed and what gets financed is where a lot of people get hurt, and it’s the whole reason this conversation exists.
We’re on opposite sides of the world and opposite sides of the process, which meant recording this across a very confusing time difference. But the principle holds no matter where you live. Take what applies to you, then go find your own version of us locally. A lawyer, a lender, someone who’s actually done this before.
What we covered
I told Amanda about my own divorce, eleven years ago now, and the house I kept and then sold. I’d looked at the mortgage payment and decided I could manage it. Then the plumber wanted eight hundred dollars to clear a drain. The lawn needed mowing. The cleaner had to go, and I was cleaning a house that size myself, squeezed between work and my kids. I sold it.
That’s what house poor actually looks like. It’s rarely the mortgage payment itself. It’s everything the mortgage payment doesn’t cover.
From there we walked through the buyout math using easy numbers, what happens when the two of you land a hundred thousand dollars apart on value, staying on a mortgage together after the divorce is final, and negative equity clauses, which are showing up in agreements again for the first time since 2001.
The line I keep coming back to is one I said without planning to. If you were starting a new business tomorrow, would you ask this person to be your business partner? Most people say no, absolutely not. And I tell them, well, that’s exactly the arrangement you’re about to sign up for if you stay on a mortgage together.
About Amanda
Amanda writes The Split, where she covers family law, the psychology of separation, and everything in between with nearly thirty years of legal practice behind her. Her writing is general information drawn from long experience, not legal advice, and she’d be the first to tell you that every situation is different. If you’re in New Zealand and need someone to look at your specific case, she’s who I’d point you to.
If this is where you are right now
This is exactly the kind of question I built the Divorce Home Clarity Bundle to answer. It’s not a general guide. It’s a working session with someone who does this every day, and right now there’s a way to get more of my time built in from the start.