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There are two parts to divorce paperwork. The first is the divorce agreement, which is what the two spouses create (and/or the court creates if the spouses cannot come to terms). The second is the judgment of divorce a.k.a. the divorce decree that a judge signs that actually ends a marriage and puts the court’s authority behind the divorce agreement. ...

Earlier this year, a number of measures passed that make divorce proceedings much easier on abuse victims, and we realized we hadn’t made a post about them, and that seemed like an oversight on our part. So we’re here to rectify the situation by summarizing the measures and their impacts today! The Measures, Summarized HB4476: Prevents the court from forcing ...

Check back with Part I if you’re not sure what we’re on about; we’re going to dive right in here. Let Them Lead As a parent, it’s easy to slip into the role of leader — after all, that’s pretty literally been your job for 90% of their life to this point. But when it comes to connecting with a ...

Divorce is an all-consuming, emotionally-exhausting process. It’s incredibly hard to even function at times, much less take the wants and needs of another individual into account. No, we’re not talking about empathizing with your spouse (that’s a goal for the most highly-evolved human beings to shoot for and still miss) — we’re talking about connecting with your child. Making a ...

When it comes to custody of a child after divorce, the default — for good reason! — is joint custody. That good reason is that in general, children are better off the more loving adults are in their life. Of course, science and law have both advanced significantly since this doctrine was first put forth in the 80s. Today, we ...

Here’s an interesting statistic: the richest X Americans have as much wealth between them as the bottom 40%. It’s true! And yes, it’s true no matter what number X is. How? Because when you calculate wealth in terms of ‘assets minus liabilities’ (which is the typical way of making that calculation), it turns out that the bottom 40% of Americans ...

We did a post a couple of weeks ago about the long-term effects that divorce and its associated separation of property can have on family finances. We got some unique questions in response, and we thought we’d do a short article on some examples of genuinely unconventional assets that can — and should — be taken into account during the separation ...

There’s a lot of material written about the divorce rate these days. It’s possible to find articles from as recently as a week ago that bemoan the rise of the divorce rate to 52.5%, and other articles from the same day celebrating the reduction of the divorce rate to 38%. What’s the truth? What is the divorce rate? And does ...

Since about the Industrial Revolution (though, oddly, not much before that!), it’s been a standard in the Western world that men are the breadwinners and women are the homemakers. Even in marriages where both spouses work, it’s still a ‘safe’ assumption that the husband brings in more than the wife. In Michigan family court, the software used to calculate spousal ...

People think that the separation of assets that occurs during a divorce is a one-time event — that once it happens, it’s done, and the effects are over. That’s just not the case; oftentimes the financial effects of divorce linger until — or even beyond — the end of your life.  While most couples name either the cost of divorce ...