Nolo's Essential Guide to Divorce - Emily Doskow [154]
Bank and Other Accounts
By the time you're preparing your MSA, you should have already closed most of your joint accounts and established checking and savings accounts of your own. If you have investment accounts, however, you might have left them in both names while you decided how to divide them. Your MSA sets out what you decide. The agreement should say what's going to happen with your accounts and how-including who will do the paperwork and when. Include realistic deadlines for getting things done.
Cynthia and Howard had joint checking and savings accounts, but when they separated they each set up separate checking accounts and split the money from the joint accounts in half. They closed the joint accounts immediately. They also each had individual retirement accounts with roughly equal balances. They agreed that they each would keep their own IRA.
Cynthia had a separate brokerage account in which she held some stock that she had inherited from her grandfather about six years before. She had never liquidated any of the stock, had never placed Howard's name on the account, and had never deposited any money into that account, so there was no question that it was her separate property. The agreement reflected that and confirmed the account to Cynthia.
Cynthia and Howard also had a joint brokerage account that held stocks and mutual funds that they had invested in over the years. The account had originally belonged to Howard. When they began living together, the assets in it were worth about $12,000. By the time they got married, they had deposited funds together and the holdings had grown to a value of $19,000-and by the time they separated, growth and additional investment had increased the value of the account to nearly $60,000.
This brokerage account generated some spirited discussion in their counseling session. Howard wanted back the money that was in the account at the time he put Cynthia's name on it. Cynthia knew from her research that because Howard had put her name on the account and they placed marital funds into it, the entire account was legally marital property. Howard didn't disagree with her about the law-he just felt that the rule wasn't fair in these circumstances.
The counselor challenged Cynthia to take some time to consider what she felt was fair, apart from what she knew about the legal rules. He didn't give her advice or ask her to come to any particular conclusion, but he did ask her to consider the overall picture of the decisions they were making, and what would work for them both.
Miscellaneous Assets
Chapter 10 identifies some assets that are easy to forget about but that need to be considered in dividing your property and included in your MSA. You might put them in the section on personal belongings, or in a separate paragraph, as in the sample agreement. Identify each item clearly and describe its value and how it's being disposed of.
Howard was a baseball fan and for many years had season tickets for the local minor league team. These were paid for with marital funds and clearly were a marital asset but, just as clearly, Cynthia did not want them. They were worth about $1,600, and Cynthia and Howard agreed that he would pay Cynthia for her share of the tickets. They also discussed the value of Howard's frequent flyer miles, which were significant, given the amount of travel he did. While they were married, they used his frequent flyer miles for most of their family vacations, and he still had a large balance. Neither of them knew how to value the miles in monetary terms, but Cynthia didn't want to just abandon her interest