Divorce is hard on everyone, both emotionally and financially, and it’s important that you get a fair settlement in your divorce to minimize disruption and difficulty to your life going forward. Getting a fair settlement will make all the difference to your future and the future of your children, and searching “divorce lawyer near me” will turn up someone with local experience in the family courts and extensive understanding of state family law who can protect your rights and ensure you get the best start possible to your new life.
Divorce Lawyer Near Me: Getting a Fair Settlement With Experienced Legal Help
Understand the Stakes
The first step to getting a fair settlement is to properly understand all the issues that are involved and what it could mean for you. If you’ve never divorced before, it’s likely that you don’t have any way of knowing this, but an experience lawyer has helped many people through this very process and will be able to explain to you everything that needs to be taken into consideration, what the law demands, and then how to start planning a strategy for getting the best settlement possible.
Your Marital Settlement Agreement is a binding contract, so it’s important to do this carefully. This contract will determine property division, spousal support (if there is any), what happens to your retirement accounts, child support and child custody, and much more. If you’re able to come to an amicable resolution with your spouse, it’s going to make the whole process go more smoothly with less stress and lower costs. It’ll also likely make things easier for your children. But it is very important that you fully understand the long-term consequences and implications of all the decisions you make in these serious matters, and you can’t afford to just “go along to get along” when your future is at stake.
The Benefits of Agreement
To get a fair settlement, you need motivation. At times, it can seem hard and dismaying to come to a compromise with your soon-to-be ex-spouse, and it’s easy to just wish that the whole thing were over with and assume things would be a lot easier if you just let the courts decide. This is almost never actually the case. For one thing, if you and your spouse can come to a settlement agreement, you will likely both save enormous amounts of money. Litigation is costly and also time-consuming. It’s also one of the most stressful things you can ever go through, and you’ll greatly minimize the stress by coming to an agreement.
Perhaps more importantly, if you and your spouse can agree, you will exercise control over your own divorce and future. While it might seem less stressful to allow a court to make the decisions for you, that’s only an immediate relief of the stress. It won’t be long before you realize that you’re living a life that someone else has dictated. You and your spouse can keep control over your family’s future by coming to an agreement. Finally, if you and your spouse are able to come to an agreement, it’s much more likely that you’re going to have a better relationship after the divorce. The well-being of your children going forward will depend a great deal on how well their mother and father can get along, even after a divorce
If you can keep all these benefits in mind, it will help you stay motivated and focused as you come to an agreement. You will have to compromise, but your divorce lawyer will be there at every step to make sure that every compromise is not only fair to you in the immediate sense but also takes into consideration your long-term needs.
Think Through the Marital Property
For the most part, all the issues that you need to decide in your agreement will either be related to your children or related to your finances. Property division is a huge point of contention in a divorce, and it’s important to think through all the property that you and your spouse have so that you can make a plan for a fair distribution. This will include not only the money that you have in bank accounts, but also any real estate that you own, stocks and bonds, retirement accounts, vehicles, and much more. Things can become especially difficult if there is a family business, valuable personal property like jewelry or artwork, or if one partner has substantial personal property – i.e. something they owned before the marriage or something they inherited during the marriage – and the other does not. You’ll also need to consider your debt and the type of debt.
Complicating all this is the need to consider your separate financial positions, current jobs and income, and potential for earning income into the future. Sometimes there’s an enormous disparity here, especially if one spouse has sacrificed their own career and job skills training opportunities to support the other spouse, who is thus in a much better position to support themselves. This kind of disparity can sometimes be worked out with spousal support, but it can also be addressed through dividing up the marital assets in different ways.
If you can come to an agreement here, one of the benefits is that you can use creative solutions that the courts may not bother with. For example, if there’s a joint-owned family business, but only one spouse is interested in working that business for the future, the court may just order the business to be sold and the proceeds divided. Working together, you may come up with a buyout offer that works for you or make an exchange of some other assets that the first spouse values more highly than the business. The key here is that you must know what you have, what you’ll need, and have a lawyer assist you in figuring out how to work all this out for the future.
Think Through Your Parenting Plan
The other major point of contention to think through is your parenting plan. You’ll have to think about whom the children will live with, how much time each parent will have with them, who will make decisions about the children’s well-being and development, what kind of child support might be offered, and more. California law prioritizes the best interest of the child in these matters, so whatever agreement you come up with here must not only be fair to both of you but also acceptable to the court.
To do all this, there are numerous things you’ll need to think about. Your lawyer will help you keep your children’s best interests top of mind throughout this part of the discussion. You’ll need to set up visitation schedules and agreements for how you’ll discuss major issues in your children’s lives. You’ll also want to talk through what to do on holidays and what to do about their religious upbringing, if any. Then there are questions of child support.
