Name: The Ultrarich Use This Divorce Lawyer. Here's How She Calculates Their Life Costs
Uploaded: 2026-04-22T09:20:00Z
Duration: 5 min 14 s
Description: Divorce between wealthy couples can involve a complex web of assets and millions in annual spending. Jacqueline Newman, an attorney with Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein in New York, explains how she approaches these cases.

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Divorce between wealthy couples can involve a complex web of assets and millions in annual spending. Jacqueline Newman, an attorney with Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein in New York, explains how she approaches these cases. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao

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Divorce between wealthy couples can involve a complex web of assets and millions in annual spending. Jacqueline Newman, an attorney with Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein in New York, explains how she approaches these cases.

The Ultrarich Use This Divorce Lawyer. Here's How She Calculates Their Life Costs

Divorce can be messy, but even more so if you're wealthy. Sometimes when you're doing budgets, you may have a client that says, "These might not have been my expenses during the marriage, but now that I'm gonna be single, I may have new expenses." I once had a client recently who had come in, and they wanted to put a plastic surgery budget as a line item on their statement of net worth. Suffice it to say, the spouse was not agreeing. I'm Jacqueline Newman, and I specialize in high net worth divorce in New York. When I think about what a case would be high net worth, especially in New York City, I'm usually looking at cases that are usually above $20 million in assets. We're dealing with people that are hedge fund managers. We're dealing with people that are business owners, CEOs in major corporations, a lot of entertainers. The divorces I work on can be extremely complex. Let me show you how I would work on a new case. First step we're gonna do is an initial consultation. We'll go through all your very high-level, your assets, your liabilities, the concerns you have, your custody concerns. But when you leave my office, you'll be leaving with a form called a statement of net worth. A statement of net worth is a form that you will receive when you leave an attorney's office, in which you'll be listing your assets, your liabilities, your expenses, and will be annexing an income tax return to be able to reflect your income. And that is an incredibly important document. To fill that out, you're gonna be referencing bank statements, you're gonna be referencing credit card statements. You're really gonna try to capture, as best as you can, the lifestyle that you lived. Then I take all that information and I put it into one of my settlement Excel charts, and then I go through it, and I try to figure out what could be a proper settlement for you and your spouse. So once you've filled out the statement of net worth, then I do an analysis as to how assets are gonna get divided, and I put a lot of focus on the lifestyle analysis. I will go through what your expenses are, what your spouse claims his or her expenses are. We'll look at what the expenses are for the children, and we'll kind of break down how we can do the best we can to maintain your lifestyle with now a different set of income numbers. Here's an example of what a typical client of mine's lifestyle may cost. So housing expenses. This is looking at the Hampton house, as well as the New York City apartment, usually is around $27,000 a month, which is $324,000 a year. Clothing expenses can be around $42,000 a year. Food, usually around $96,000 a year. Insurance and medical expenses, around $108,000 a year. Household help, $36,000 a year. Car expenses, 30,000 a year. Educational expenses, with two children in private school, which is usually around 240 a year. And recreational expenses, which will include vacations, which will include all sorts of summer camps, things like that, is about $420,000 a year. And then you'll have your miscellaneous expenses, which I estimate to be around $114,000 a year. And that's gonna include your beauty expenses, which can be $50,000 a year, pet expenses, which can be $12,000 a year, et cetera. So when you add all this together, it's about $1.4 million of after-tax expenses. So you need to be making $2.8 million in order to be able to afford a New York City lifestyle for the high net worth. And sometimes when you're doing budgets, you may have a client that says, "These might not have been my expenses during the marriage, but now that I'm gonna be single, I might have new expenses. I might need to go to the gym more. I might need a trainer. I might need more plastic surgery and nicer clothes." And so very often you'll have people come in, and not only are they going to say, "I need a budget of what my lifestyle was, I'm gonna need extra expenses for what my lifestyle will be." At the next step after that, as you start looking at what everybody's income levels are, you look at what assets they're gonna be receiving that would have a rate of return of income on them, you're gonna impute that income to each spouse. And from there, the hope is that there's gonna be enough money to go around. So once we've gone through this whole analysis, we'll put together a settlement proposal that we will send to the other side, with the hopes that we will settle. In the event that we cannot settle, we will either try to work things out in mediation or collaborative law, and in the event that we cannot do that, then we can always go to the courts. And that's ultimately how you try to settle a high net worth divorce. Very often, as you can imagine, divorce cases are very, very hard, and they're emotionally hard. And so I often joke to my clients that I'm the most expensive therapist that they have. They want revenge. They're angry. They think that the judge is gonna be completely furious that somebody had an affair or somebody's hiding money or just lying in general. And so they believe that if you go to court, a judge is going to school that spouse and basically give you all the assets. But let me tell you, that is not going to happen. There's anger, there's relief, there's sadness, there's loss, there's identity loss. There's many different things that go on, and I recognize all of that. However, to bring all of that into your attorney's office and to bring all that into the courtroom and to allow that to dictate the way you move forward in your divorce, I think is a huge, huge mistake. It is so important to do everything you can to put your emotions in one box and then your business hat on in the second box, and be able to really move forward in this divorce in such a way that emotions do have their place, but not in the same place as the rest of the divorce.