Nolo's Essential Guide to Divorce - Emily Doskow [14]
Even if you and your spouse are never going to see eye to eye about money matters, you should try very hard to come to an agreement about child custody. A custody fight will harm your children more than any other kind of dispute that might come up in the divorce process. Do everything you can to avoid it.
At the beginning of your divorce process, you'll need to come up with a temporary agreement about how you will share time with your kids. You should do that as quickly as you can, to ease your children's insecurity. Whatever you decide, write it down and make sure you note that the arrangement is temporary, so that it's clear you're not agreeing to something for the long haul. It may take a while to figure out what long-term arrangement works best.
See Chapters 6 and 7 for more about custody, including how courts decide custody questions and how to prepare a time-sharing plan.
Spousal and Child Support
If you and your spouse have children, chances are that one of you will pay child support to the other. When the children spend more time with one parent than the other, or if one parent earns a lot more money, the court will award child support to make sure that the kids are always taken care of.
In some divorces, courts award spousal support, also called alimony or maintenance, to one party. A support award is especially likely after a long marriage or if one spouse gave up career plans to support the other spouse or care for kids. Chapter 8 addresses child support issues, and Chapter 11 has more about spousal support. Chapter 12 addresses child and spousal support for military spouses.
Getting Help From Experts
As you can see, there are a lot of decisions to make in a divorce. You and your spouse have the first opportunity to make these decisions yourselves, rather than having a judge make them for you-and you should make every effort to do so. At such a painful time it's difficult to just sit down with your spouse and figure out how you are going to remake your family structure, finances, and living situations. But that doesn't mean you have to lose control of the decisions and slide into an expensive, acrimonious, and ugly divorce. You can get help. Chapter 15 has a lot more about how to go about getting the information and expert help you will need to complete your divorce.
Breaking the News ........................................................................................................................26
Your Spouse ..................................................................................................................................26
Your Children ...............................................................................................................................28
Where Will Everyone Live? .....................................................................................................28
Who Gets to Stay in the House? .......................................................................................28
Staying Together for a While .............................................................................................. 30
Gathering Financial Information ........................................................................................31
Managing Your Family's Money ...........................................................................................35
Make a Budget .............................................................................................................................35
Start Keeping Your Income Separate ..............................................................................37
Dealing With Joint Assets ......................................................................................................38
Decide How to File Your Tax Returns ............................................................................ 40
Protect Your Valuable Separate Property ....................................................................42
Close Joint