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A common question that I get when people come in is, okay, I’m getting divorced, what do I need to know? And it obviously can be very overwhelming. And I think what you probably first need to know is that there is life after divorce. I mean, you will be okay. But as far as the divorce itself, I think it’s always helpful to sort of unpack all of the information and just kind of get a high level view of what we’re talking about. And I often just put it into buckets, right? So you have generally three buckets, depending on the family circumstances they have minor children. You’re talking about custody issues, which generally breaks down into two main areas.
Physical custody, where we decide how much time the children are going to spend with each parent, and then legal custody, where we decide, well, who gets to make decisions about where they go to school, what doctors they see, what religion they practice, what activities they participate in. Those are the kinds of issues that the parties are going to have to agree on before they can get divorced. And if they can’t agree on that, then the judge will decide. That’s why they’re there. And then the other two buckets really are on the financial side, you’ve got one dealing with issues of support. One issue is dealing with issues of property division. In terms of property division, you know, that’s what are my assets, what are my debts, and how are they going to be divided.
On the support side, potentially, even if there has been an income disparity during the marriage, perhaps one spouse didn’t work during the marriage and has become dependent upon the other spouse, it might be an alimony case. So now you’ve got to talk about what is an appropriate amount of alimony and for how long. And then you have the child support issues, which in virtually every state we have statutory guidelines that will determine what is the appropriate amount of support that each parent should be responsible for as it relates to their children in the event of divorce.
