Conventional wisdom says the hardest part of divorce is the emotional toll. After spending an afternoon with Tommy Bianchi at a diner off Interstate 10 in Phoenix, I’d argue the financial wreckage runs a close second — and for many people, it lasts far longer.
Tommy is 46, an HVAC technician who has worked the same Phoenix routes for eleven years. He earns a steady living. By most measures, he should be comfortable by now. Instead, he’s renting a two-bedroom apartment he describes as “fine but not home,” watching his bank balance reset to near zero every month, and wondering if he will ever own property again.
How the Divorce Debt Stacked Up
Tommy’s marriage ended in 2022 after fourteen years. He doesn’t dwell on the reasons — “that’s not the part that matters for money,” he told me — but the financial architecture of the settlement has shaped every dollar he has earned since. The family home went to his ex-wife as part of the agreement. The legal fees, roughly $22,000 by the time both sides reached a final decree, went onto his credit cards.
“I didn’t have $22,000 sitting around,” he said, stirring his coffee without looking up. “Nobody does. You just sign the card and deal with it later. And then later keeps coming.”
At an average credit card interest rate that has hovered above 20% for much of the past two years, according to Federal Reserve consumer credit data, carrying that balance is expensive on its own. Tommy estimates he has paid somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 in interest charges since 2022 — money that has produced nothing except a lower principal that still hasn’t reached zero.
The Child Support Calculation Nobody Warned Him About
Child support in Arizona is calculated using an income shares model, meaning both parents’ earnings are factored into the obligation. For Tommy, the court-ordered $1,600 per month accounts for approximately 25% of his gross monthly income — a number that is not tax-deductible for him under current federal tax law.
This is a detail that surprises many people. Per IRS Topic No. 452, child support payments are neither deductible by the paying parent nor taxable income for the recipient. Alimony arrangements finalized after December 31, 2018 follow the same rule under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Tommy pays his $1,600 from after-tax dollars, meaning the real pre-tax cost of that obligation is higher than it appears on the court order.
“I knew I’d have to pay,” Tommy told me. “I want to pay. Those are my kids. But nobody sat down with me and said, here’s what your actual paycheck looks like after taxes, after support, after rent. I had to figure that out myself, one month at a time.”
Every Other Weekend and the Spending That Goes With It
Tommy sees his two children — a daughter, 13, and a son, 10 — every other weekend. That arrangement is written into the custody agreement, and by his own account, it is the part of his post-divorce life he is most reluctant to examine honestly.
Because he has limited time with them, he wants the time to count. That means movies, go-kart tracks, dinners out, the occasional overnight trip to Sedona. He knows the math doesn’t work. He does it anyway.
Tommy estimates he spends between $400 and $600 on those weekends, roughly twice what he’d spend if he weren’t trying to compensate for absence. Over twelve months, that pattern adds up to somewhere between $9,600 and $14,400 in what he half-jokingly calls “guilt money.” He doesn’t use that phrase lightly.
Psychologists who study post-divorce behavior have a name for this pattern: compensatory spending. It is common among non-custodial parents, particularly fathers, who interpret financial generosity as a substitute for daily presence. Tommy didn’t need a clinical label to recognize himself in it. “I’m aware of what I’m doing,” he said. “Awareness doesn’t make it stop.”
The Down Payment That Never Grows
Before the divorce, Tommy and his ex-wife owned a three-bedroom house in Chandler. He had equity in that property. When the settlement was finalized, that equity stayed with the house — and the house stayed with his ex-wife. He left with his tools, his truck, and a debt load that has followed him into every budget conversation since.
Median home prices in the Phoenix metropolitan area were approximately $420,000 as of early 2026, according to regional real estate tracking. A conventional 5% down payment on a home at that price would require $21,000 — almost exactly what Tommy originally charged in legal fees. A 20% down payment, which would eliminate private mortgage insurance, would require $84,000.
“That number used to feel temporary,” he told me. “Like, I’ll get through the credit cards and then I’ll start saving. But the credit cards aren’t going away fast. And rent isn’t going down. And the weekends keep coming.”
Health Coverage After the Split — A Detail He Didn’t Anticipate
One expense Tommy mentioned that I hadn’t expected was health insurance. Under his divorce agreement, he is required to maintain health coverage for both children through his employer’s plan. That obligation shows up as a payroll deduction before he ever sees his net pay — an additional monthly cost he estimated at approximately $280 per month for the kids’ portion of his employer-sponsored plan.
Under the National Medical Support Notice framework, employers are required to enroll children in a parent’s health plan when a court order mandates it. For Tommy, that enrollment happened automatically. The premium deduction, however, added another fixed cost to a budget that was already stretched thin.
That $280 monthly premium, combined with the $1,600 in child support, puts Tommy’s total court-mandated child-related obligations at roughly $1,880 per month — before rent, before food, before the credit card minimums.
Three Years In, Where Things Stand
When I asked Tommy what he wishes he had known before the divorce process began, he paused long enough that I stopped writing and just waited. “I wish someone had shown me a spreadsheet,” he finally said. “Not a lawyer, not a therapist. Just someone who could run the numbers and say: here is what your life costs after this, month by month.”
He’s made some progress. The credit card balance, which peaked near $22,000 in mid-2022, is now closer to $14,000 — a real reduction, though slower than he’d like. His credit score has recovered from the chaos of the divorce year. He recently started putting $200 a month into a savings account he doesn’t touch, which he describes as “more symbolic than useful” at this point.
What hasn’t changed is the every-other-weekend calculus. His daughter is starting high school next year. His son wants to play travel baseball. Tommy is already thinking about the registration fees, the gear, the hotel rooms for away tournaments. He knows what that does to his budget. He’s going to do it anyway.
“They didn’t ask for any of this,” he said, meaning the divorce, the custody schedule, the rented apartment that isn’t their house. “The least I can do is show up and make it good.”
Driving away from that diner, I kept thinking about the gap between what Tommy knows intellectually and what he allows himself to do emotionally. He is not uninformed. He understands exactly where his money goes and why it stays gone. The problem isn’t knowledge — it’s the particular kind of love that makes a person choose the go-kart track over the savings account, every time, without hesitation, even when they can see the cost clearly.
That’s not a spreadsheet problem. And I don’t think a spreadsheet is going to solve it.
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