Whether you have a career or are a stay-at-home mom, debt complicates a divorce. Nobody wants to be responsible for paying a spouse’s debts, and you want to avoid having any joint obligations on your side. There is a way forward if you are aware of your options.
Keeping the Debt
You have a few credit cards that you share with your spouse. When you look into your spouses’ spending, you discover that they have used credit cards for all kinds of things you don’t: gambling, alcohol, and a few hotel visits that have nothing to do with business trips.
This naturally is frustrating, so you don’t want to take care of the bill. They’re the other spouse’s expenses and they should have to take care of it, but they are not. The bills don’t get paid and time is moving forward and because the credit cards are under your name, whose credit is getting ruined? Yours.
You want to take care of any joint debt like this, so your credit report is clean. You will be compensated for it in the settlement by getting more of the cash, house, 401K, investments, or asset. Until that happens, you must protect yourself and keep paying the credit cards.
Excessive Spending
If your spouse is spending thousands of dollars you did not approve, we call that a “waste claim.” These can be difficult to prove and you will need attorneys to help.
In one case, the husband had bought a BMW and an apartment for his girlfriend. We found proof of that spending through receipts that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars. Our waste claim proved that he was stealing from the estate and he had to compensate the estate. With the help of a financial professional and the lawyer, he paid that claim on the estate spreadsheet and the wife was given more in assets as a result.
Digging for Information
If you know your spouse has spent a lot of money, but you do not know exactly how much or where there are ways to find this data. For our clients, we do a lot of digging, starting with the accounts we know about and looking for fishy transactions, such as massage parlors, prostitutes, or rent in New York when you don’t own property in New York. We look for anomalous patterns, flag them and ask for more information. We look at property records, tax records, and all kinds of paper. If the spouse isn’t forthcoming, your attorney can subpoena what we need.
Years ago we had a client with a special need’s child. The husband would not pay for future horseback riding for their child with Down’s Syndrome which had proved to be very helpful for the child in the past. He said they did not have any money. Through five-year-old tax records and pieces of paper that our client had been collecting for month, we discovered two rental homes, a girlfriend, and $200,000 in Certificates of Deposit.
If you think your spouse is stealing or hiding money, collect any kind of information, no matter how old or small, and bring it in for us to look at.
Want to know more about what to do? Please contact Divorce Strategies Group for a complimentary consultation. We’ll talk to you about next steps so you can receive the assets which are rightfully yours!
