Divorcing? Here’s what you need to know about property valuation + MORE Sep 18th

I’ve written before about what happens when financial expertise becomes a blind spot, and about taking ownership of your financial life instead of handing decisions over to someone else. This isn’t another version of either of those.

This is about something that happened between me and a professional I was working with on a significant financial decision. I’m going to conceal most of the details: what kind of decision, what their expertise is, the actual numbers. Not because any of it is sensitive, but because the person deserves to stay anonymous—and because the details aren’t really the point.

This story matters to two different readers, and I want to state that upfront. If you hire experts, financial or otherwise, this is about what you owe the relationship beyond paying for it. If you are the expert, this is about what you gain when you let a client push back instead of managing them past it.

We were roughly a fifth apart

I had a number in my head; they had a very different one…

Here’s a round-up of news for Canadian investors this week.

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Reitmans

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Banks are looking to ramp up artificial intelligence use for millions of customers, but executives say hurdles abound and checks need to be built in. At the Canada Fintech Forum on Tuesday, banking and tech leaders said financial institutions have yet to weave AI through a majority of their systems, such as apps and data storage, even as the industry blazes a trail in machine learning adoption.

Michael Pelosi, the country manager for Canada at Toronto-based AI company Cohere, called it a “misconception” that an AI model smoothly doling out financial advice in a controlled test environment can do likewise for millions of clients. “The hard truth that a lot of banks are seeing now is, doing things in small batches … is very, very different—as a lot of the folks on the panel today can attest—than going into production,” Pelosi told several hundred conference attendees, pointing to cost as a particular challenge.

He offered the analogy of staying in an oversized vacation property—fine for a short stint, but not at length or scale…

When a couple separates, the family home is often one of their largest assets. It can also become one of the biggest sources of disagreement. One spouse may think the home is worth $1.2 million; the other may believe it’s closer to $1 million. One might point to what a neighbor’s house recently sold for, while the other relies on an online estimate.

But in a divorce or separation, there is another question that can be just as important as how much the property is worth: what date are we valuing it as of?

That’s something I regularly deal with when completing appraisals for matrimonial matters. In many cases, I’m not being asked what the home would sell for today. I’m being asked to determine what it was worth on a specific date in the past. And when real estate markets have moved significantly, the difference can be substantial.

Today’s value may not be the value you need

Consider a couple who separated three years ago but are only now dealing with the financial aspects of their separation…