Can I afford to leave?

The question underneath most of the others, and the one people are most ashamed to ask out loud. Not whether you want to go. Whether you can. This works it out from your own numbers, in your own browser, and then tells you what to do with the answer either way.

Read this first if you are not safe

If the reason you are asking is that you are frightened, the money question is not the first question and the sequence is completely different. There are emergency routes, orders that can give you exclusive use of the home, and organizations that do this every day. Start here instead.

What this tool is, and is not

It is arithmetic on numbers you type, and nothing more. It is not advice, it is not a prediction, and it does not know your state, your judge or your facts. No court is bound by anything it shows. Use it to see the shape of your situation and to work out which questions to take to somebody who can actually answer them.

Nothing you enter leaves your browser. There is no account, no server, and nothing is saved — close the tab and it is gone. That is deliberate: this is how the whole site works.

Your situation
Amount
Your own take-home pay, per monthAfter tax. Yours alone, not the household.
Support you expect to receive, per monthChild support or alimony. Zero if you will be paying rather than receiving, and put that in the next line.
Support you expect to pay, per monthZero if none.
Housing, per monthRent or mortgage on where you would actually live, not where you live now.
Everything else, per monthUtilities, food, transport, insurance, childcare, phone, debt payments.
Money you can actually reachSavings you could use without a penalty. Not the retirement account.
One-off cost to moveDeposit, first and last month, moving, furnishing.
What you expect the divorce itself to costA guess is fine. If you have no idea, our costs page has real figures by state.
Coming inYour pay plus any support you expect to receive
Going outHousing, everything else, and any support you pay
Each month
Left after the one-off costsYour reachable savings, minus moving and legal costs

If the answer is not yet: what to do with the time

This is the part that is actually useful, and none of it is a betrayal of anybody. Every item is something an adult should have anyway, useful if nothing ever changes and very hard to arrange quickly if it does.

  • Credit in your own name. A card, used and paid off, in your name alone. If you are an authorized user rather than a joint holder you may have less credit history than you think. How to check.
  • An account in your own name, at a different bank, with a statement address you control.
  • Know what the household owns and owes, from documents rather than memory. The list, and what each document reveals.
  • Your own income, or the first step back towards one. This is the slowest item and the one that changes the answer most. Going back to work.
  • Find out whether your spouse can be made to pay your legal fees. In a divorce the court can order the better-off spouse to fund the other side, and it can often be asked for early. How fee awards work.
  • Check the fee waiver for the filing fee, and what your state calls it. Also here.
  • Sort out health cover before anything is filed, because losing coverage as a divorced spouse has deadlines that are easy to miss. COBRA and the alternatives.
  • Do the digital work carefully, and in the right order. Why the order matters.
The thing this calculator cannot tell you

That the first year is the worst one and it is not the shape of the rest of it. The numbers above are a snapshot of a moment that is designed to be temporary: support gets ordered, the property gets divided, incomes change, and the one-off costs happen once. A shortfall in month one is a problem to plan around, not a verdict.

Built 31 August 2026. Arithmetic only, on numbers you supply, in your browser. Tell us if something here is misleading.

Keep reading

Sources last checked2 September 2026
Page published2 September 2026
What this means. This is when the sources on this page were last read against their originals — statutes, court rules, official schedules — taken from the date this page was built from its sources. It is not the date the page was last edited. Adding a link or fixing a typo does not move it; re-reading the statute does. Law changes without notice, so treat anything time-sensitive as needing a fresh check. Where we get something wrong we publish it at thecusp.app/corrections with the date, what changed, and how long the error was live.