Nolo's Essential Guide to Divorce - Emily Doskow [181]
Financial Planners
A financial planner can help you both during and after your divorce by reviewing your current financial situation, advising you on settlement proposals and their financial and tax consequences, and working on budgeting and financial management so that you feel secure about your finances as you enter your new life as a single person.
Ask your lawyer or accountant for a referral-and if you have friends who are happy with financial planning help they've received, get names from them as well. You can also check the website of the Financial Planning Association at www.fpanet.org. Financial planners are certified by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc., at www.cfp.net. You can find referrals there, too. Free financial planning services are often available through banks and investment firms.
Divorce Financial Planners
A special kind of financial planner, called a divorce financial planner (DFP) or divorce financial analyst, can work with you and your lawyer or your spouse to evaluate various settlement scenarios. The DFP will try to find a win-win division of property, taking into account each spouse's needs, goals, and tax situation.
A DFP can also help you plan investments, advise you about withdrawing money from your retirement plan to fund current needs, and help you with retirement plan rollovers. You can work with a DFP on your own to get advice on settlement proposals and options, or together with your spouse to brainstorm solutions to your property division dilemmas.
The Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts offers certification to planners. It can help you find one through its website at www .institutedfa.com, which also answers FAQs and provides information. Another organization, the Association of Divorce Financial Planners, offers referrals and also has links to useful publications and divorce information on its website at www.divorceandfinance.com.
Document Preparation Services
If you don't want to handle everything in your divorce yourself, but don't think you need to hire a mediator or lawyer either, consider a middle path: hiring a nonlawyer to help you just with the paperwork. You won't he getting help with the negotiation, as you would in mediation, or legal advice, as you would if you used a lawyer. But you will get welcome, experienced help with preparing the court paperwork. Some document preparation services also take care of filing papers with the court or give you instructions on court filing procedures.
You can use these services only when you and your spouse have completed your negotiations and know exactly how you want to settle your divorce. You'll have to know how much support will be paid and what you're going to do with your property and debts. If you haven't yet worked out these questions, you aren't ready for the document preparation phase of your divorce.
Some document preparation services operate small offices; others work entirely online.
Legal Document Preparers
In some places, there are businesses that prepare the paperwork for uncontested divorces. These folks used to be called paralegals but are now most commonly referred to as legal document preparers, or LDPs.
Legal document preparers aren't allowed to give you individualized legal advice. (Only licensed lawyers can do that.) All they do is prepare forms, using the information you supply, and file them with the court. So when you visit a document preparation business, you'll get a questionnaire that asks you for the information the preparer needs to fill out court forms for your county. The LDP will transfer the information onto the forms, and then either you or the LDP can file them with the court.
The fee for doing the paperwork for an uncontested divorce varies from about $175 to $700, depending on where you live, whether you have children, and whether you need a separate settlement agreement (which depends on how your state's forms are structured).
To find a legal document preparer, first ask your divorced friends and acquaintances whether they used one, and what the experience