Posted on October 05, 2017 in Divorce

Your emotions can be one of your greatest adversaries during a divorce. It is common to feel anger and resentment towards your spouse when deciding to divorce, but those emotions are counterproductive when trying to reach a settlement. Though divorce is personal, you should try to keep your divorce negotiations impersonal. Here are five ways your emotions can work against you during a divorce:

1. Refusing to Negotiate: Sometimes our anger leads us to avoid the people we are mad at. After a contentious breakup, you may dread the thought of having to negotiate your divorce settlement with your spouse. However, refusing to negotiate takes away your power to decide how to divide your marital properties and allocate your parental responsibilities. Instead, a judge will make those important decisions for you, without the intimate knowledge of your best interests.

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 Posted on October 02, 2017 in Children and Divorce

For parents who are considering divorce, there are practical benefits to waiting until their children are adults before ending their marriage. Without legal dependents, the divorcing couple will not need to establish child support payments or the allocation of parental responsibilities. As adults, the children are thought to be more mature and capable of accepting their parents' divorce. However, people of all ages can struggle with the news that their parents are divorcing. Adult children of divorce may feel emotionally and financially vulnerable. Yet, their feelings may be treated with less care because they are supposed to be more mature and independent.

Emotional Impact

Parents who are getting divorced should not assume that their adult children will accept their decision with calmness and understanding. Part of the difficulty of telling younger children about divorce is explaining the concept and what it means for them. Adult children know what divorce means, but that knowledge may not ease their emotions. Many negative thoughts can plague them, such as:

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 Posted on September 27, 2017 in Domestic Violence

Domestic violence between spouses can lead to or result from divorce. A person may choose to end his or her marriage because his or her spouse is abusive. In other cases, asking for a divorce may trigger a spouse’s threatening behavior. Either way, domestic violence changes how a divorce is settled. The divorce court will likely favor the victim in matters of allocation of parental responsibilities and division of property.

Order of Protection

With any case of domestic violence, the victim’s first responsibility is to protect him or herself, as well as other victims. A victim spouse should immediately seek an order of protection against the abusive spouse. The order includes several benefits for the victim spouse, such as:

• Forcing the abuser to leave the marital home;
• Prohibiting physical or electronic contact with the victims; and

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 Posted on September 25, 2017 in Prenuptial & Postnuptial Agreements

Creating a premarital agreement is negotiating aspects of your divorce before you get married. If you have been through a divorce before, you remember how complex those negotiations were. If this is your first marriage, the process may seem overwhelming and intimidating. When thinking about your premarital agreement, it helps to remember its purpose. You and your future spouse are determining how your properties would be divided in a theoretical divorce without the animosity of the divorce clouding your judgment. When making a premarital agreement, you should anticipate financial decisions that would need to be made during a divorce.

Premarital Properties

If you divorce, your properties would be classified as either marital or nonmarital. Your marital properties would be divided equitably between the two of you, while you would keep all of your nonmarital property. Distinguishing between marital and nonmarital property becomes more difficult when spouses have been married for several years. The clearest distinction is which properties were purchased before the marriage. Your premarital agreement can identify and protect your nonmarital assets, such as:

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 Posted on September 22, 2017 in Divorce

Despite its general acceptance in society, some couples view divorce as an unacceptable choice during their marriage. To them, divorce means quitting on their relationship and admitting that their marriage has failed. They believe it shows more strength to try to work through their differences or tolerate the parts of their marriage that make them unhappy. Other couples are bound to their marriages because of a moral conviction that divorce is a sin. However, staying together at all costs does not make a marriage a success. Couples need divorce to be an option during unhappy marriages.

Stable but Unhealthy

During their wedding vows, couples often promise to be faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. Thus, they may believe that staying together is the best indicator of a successful marriage. With such a standard, a marriage is guaranteed to be successful if the spouses refuse to ever consider divorce. However, it is debatable whether a marriage is a success if the relationship is marred by:

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 Posted on September 20, 2017 in Divorce

Parties negotiating a divorce settlement must walk a fine line between protecting their interests and cooperating with the other side. A person who acquiesces too often may end up with an unfavorable settlement. However, being uncompromising can prevent the sides from reaching an agreement. When spouses are unable to settle their divorce on their own, a court is forced to make important decisions for them. The resulting divorce settlement may leave both parties unsatisfied. If you plan to divorce, it is in your best interest to reach an agreement with your spouse on a settlement. You can improve your chances of a healthy negotiation by planning your approach to the process:

1. Identify Your Priorities: Arguing every aspect of your divorce will slow down negotiations and create a combative atmosphere. Before negotiations start, you should determine which aspects of the settlement are most important to you. Save your arguments for those aspects, and be more willing to compromise on other aspects.

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 Posted on September 18, 2017 in Divorce

A popular myth about marriage in the U.S. is that half of all first marriages end in divorce. Data says that the divorce rate peaked at 40 percent in 1980 and has been declining since. Thus, it is false to assume that a marriage is just as likely to fail as succeed because it is a first marriage. However, there is a demographic that is more likely to divorce from their first marriage. They are people who:

• Marry when they are younger than 25;
• Do not have a college education; and
• Are in a lower income class.

These characteristics identify people who are getting married when they are still immature.

Marriage Is Work

Young people are excited when they fall in love for the first time. They feel a mixture of physical attraction, pure adoration and enjoyment in having fun together. A young couple may believe that these feelings are enough to support a long-lasting marriage. However, people with this immature view of marriage do not understand how it works. People in a marriage must:

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 Posted on September 15, 2017 in Divorce and Finances

Spouses share their debts during a marriage. When they decide to divorce, those debts are split between the two sides, with each spouse taking responsibility for paying a portion of the debt. However, creditors hold divorced spouses equally liable for their marital debts, regardless of the terms of the divorce settlement. If one divorced spouse fails to pay his or her share of the debt, the creditor will go after both spouses. A couple facing overwhelming debt can file for bankruptcy to either discharge the debt or create a repayment plan. Bankruptcy may allow a divorcing couple to reduce or eliminate the shared debt that will tie them together after their marriage has ended. Couples should consider filing for bankruptcy before they divorce.

Types of Bankruptcy

People most commonly file for either chapter 7 or chapter 13 bankruptcy. The differences between the two may determine which type a divorcing couple prefers and when they want to file:

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 Posted on September 06, 2017 in Divorce

When you are starting your divorce, you may take comfort in the belief that you can rely upon your friends to provide emotional support during the process. Unfortunately, your divorce can change your relationship with your friends. Some may try to distance themselves from you by:

• Treating you coldly;
• Declining social invitations; or
• Not inviting you to social events.

You may feel betrayed because these friends have abandoned you when you need them. Before completely writing these people off, you should understand how divorce can affect people’s friendships.

Staying Impartial

Spouses often share friends during their marriage. When someone is the friend of both people in a divorce, he or she is put in an awkward situation:

• If the friend sides with one spouse, he or she may lose the friendship with the other spouse; or
• If the friend tries to maintain a relationship with both spouses, he or she may become a conduit for the spouses’ continuing arguments.

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 Posted on September 04, 2017 in Child Support

In July, Illinois enacted a long-anticipated overhaul of its child support payment law. Whereas the previous system always placed the financial burden on the party with less parenting time, the income shares model more equitably splits the parenting cost between the parties. The court combines the parents’ net monthly incomes and calculates the percentage of the combined incomes that each parent’s individual income accounts for. The court consults a chart that quantifies the expected monthly child-related expenses, based on the number of children and combined incomes. Each parent is responsible for paying for a percentage of the child-related expenses that equals the percentage that his or her income makes up of the combined incomes.

In most cases, the parent who is allocated a majority of the parenting time will still receive child support payments from the other parent. However, the amount will vary more than it did under the previous system, depending on:

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