Disclaimer: This article does not constitute legal advice. If you have any questions about your individual situation it is best to seek the advice of an experienced legal professional.
What is Divorce Planning? Divorce planning is the process of financially and emotionally preparing for a divorce. It usually involves making an inventory of your assets and debts, re-evaluating any legal documents like estate planning documents or life insurance, assessing your income and current lifestyle and trying to build a picture for what your life would look like post-divorce.
Divorce planning can be something you undertake independently when you feel a divorce is on the horizon. Divorce planning is also something you can undertake with your divorcing spouse. Transparently working out the details of your divorce in divorce mediation has significant benefits over adversarial divorce. First of all, it’s much cheaper. Secondly, you can be more strategic about your marital assets by working collaboratively with your divorcing spouse.
Divorce planning is more complex for high net worth couples, and it may take some time to reach a marital settlement agreement. This is all the more reason to be intentional about divorce planning. High profile, high net worth couples like Bill and Melinda Gates, often spend some time working out the details of their marital settlement agreement. This won’t be the case for every couple, but if you have a diverse asset portfolio, your divorce settlement could require more attention. The marital settlement agreement is the ultimate product of careful negotiations and planning. In a complex divorce, negotiations may need to be preceded by planning.
What Are the Elements of Divorce Planning?
Divorce planning can cover many areas of your life, but it typically focuses on finances and drives towards a fair and equitable marital settlement agreement. Divorce planning may include:
- Making an inventory of your assets and liabilities
- Valuing a business and deciding whether to remain in business or sell
- Updating beneficiaries of life insurance, bank accounts and estate plans to remove your ex spouse and add children or other relatives
- Monitoring spending and ensuring you have good credit for any large purchases related to your divorce. This may be complicated if you share credit cards.
- Assessing your lifestyle and making a plan for your post-divorce lifestyle.
- Obtaining an accurate valuation of your assets including real estate, business interests, artwork, vehicles and heirlooms.
- Re-evaluating your regular outgoing payments, such as life insurance, car payments, private school tuition, personal trainer, charity pledges, subscriptions and memberships and renegotiating or canceling any shared financial commitments with your spouse.
- Creating a timeline for filing any necessary paperwork and transferring assets.
- Making a plan for mental and physical wellness. If one spouse is responsible for the family’s diet or exercise regime, you may need to learn new skills to take care of yourself after divorce.
- Evaluating your children’s needs, including the expense of childcare, extracurricular activities, sports, holidays and recreation, school tuition and college expenses. Assessing how to support your child as a divorced parent.
Divorce planning can cover almost every aspect of divorce, but it typically focuses on reaching an optimum marital settlement agreement that provides for your future needs. The more complex your finances, the more planning you will need to do. For example there may be assets like old pension plans and trusts that need to be tracked down. A highly qualified, financially trained divorce mediator can help you to make a checklist of the assets that should be included in your divorce planning.
At Divorce Options San Diego we are financally certified West Coast Divorce Mediators who are adept at handling complex divorce. We assist divorcing spouses to arrive at a marital settlement agreement that makes the most of the common marital assets in the community property. We can help you stagger the process of divorce planning so that you can accurately time the sale and transfer of assets to optimize your marital estate. Marital estate division can be thought of as more than property division. It is also a roadmap for financial success after marriage.
We can also work with you to assess your current lifestyle and to manage the transition to post-divorce independence, which can extend to assistance in finding a new home, or transitioning to a new career. We are a full service divorce firm who handle all the documentation pertaining to your divorce. We also handle appraisals in-house, so you can obtain a unified appraisal for assets like real estate or a business. We work with divorcing spouses nationally, internationally and in California. We can meet with you at our offices in San Diego, CA, Silicon Valley and Berkeley, CA. Many of our clients prefer to avail of remote divorce mediation. Please contact us to learn more about our divorce planning services.
