Attorneys: A History of Helpfulness

If you and your spouse have already gone through counseling and a separation, and know that a divorce is the next step that you two need to take in your relationship, here are three quick trips that will help you save money and reduce the financial burden that going through a divorce with your partner can put on your family.

#1 Spend Time Getting Organized

Don't waste your lawyer's time with disorganization. Before you and your spouse find an attorney to facilitate your divorce, spend some time getting everything organized. This works best if you work together.

Create a binder that has all of your financial documents. You are going to want to make sure that you have different sections for:

• Vehicles
• Real estate
• Retirement accounts
• Stock accounts
• Investment properties
• Bank accounts
• Saving accounts
• Personal belongings
• Business details
• Child expenses
• Debt

Work together with your spouse to gather and put as much information as possible into each of those tabs. Having all of your information together, and presenting both of your attorneys with the same information, will save you both money and time down the line.

#2 Go Through Mediation

Many divorcing couples wrongly believe that they have to go through a court process that pits them against one another. However, if you are both dedicated in your decision together, you don't have to face off against one another in court. You can have a collaborative divorce and work through mediation in order to determine a fair split of your financial assets, personal belongings and custody. This can greatly cut down on the legal cost of your divorce.

#3 Work With Your Spouse

Before you even go through the mediation process, sit down with your spouse and figure out what you can split up together. See if you can come up with solutions for all of your belongings that work for both of you. The more mutual consensuses you come to ahead of time, the less time in mediation and with lawyers needs to be spent fighting over items and racking up a larger bill, and more time can be dedicated to nailing out the legal side of the mutual decisions that you came to together. 

Divorces get expensive when both parties cannot agree on how to split all their various assets and things they have accumulated while together. You can limit your divorce expenses working together towards a common goal one last time and using a family law attorney to handle the legal side of your divorce while you and your spouse decide together how to split everything up.