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Working With Divorce Without Court in the New Year - Welcome 2022

Posted by Elizabeth Steen | Dec 30, 2021 | 0 Comments

Here are some common questions to cover the Divorce Without Court experience for 2022: 

Q: Most divorce lawyers charge $20,000 and up - why are you so much less expensive?

A: Because we don't do litigation. Following the litigation calendar is pricey because it's so time consuming. The court needs to be updated regularly and every update is a lot of paperwork. We only handle agreed orders for uncontested divorces. This means that you both sign the paperwork, so there's no dispute. It's cheaper because there is considerably less paperwork needed to maintain your case in good shape. 

Q: I've noticed that you're not free? Why are you charging for a divorce when we could get divorced for free?

A: As you know, you can get divorced essentially for free if you go to the Family Law Facilitators linked here for King County/Seattle. The facilitators will help you redo your paperwork and get it signed and filed. We charge a nominal fee for the same service, but mostly our services help you agree and protect yourselves from future hassles. Divorce is a huge financial commitment. The timing of your financial decisions probably won't match up with the court's paperwork. You might want to keep your house until your oldest graduates middle school, then sell it and split the money. You might want one person to stay in the house and only share the equity if the house is sold. You might want to repay family loans made while you were married. Or maybe you were never married, but have children together, and need to navigate a financial split with fewer guidelines. There are also a lot of decisions that seem easy at first, "Oh we'll just share our time with the kids equally..." and then the logistics become a little sticky when one partner has a job that requires a certain schedule, or the kids have activities that need to be coordinated together, or one of you remarries. Child support is often much more complicated than the state formula, too. And the state formula is never enough for anyone to live on (support on the state schedule tops out at about $1400 a month per child), so you will need to split the children's expenses in a reasonable way. It's much easier to decide a split ahead of time, rather than find out the last week of November that the ballet teacher needs an $800 deposit and both parents expected the other parent to pay it. Finally a lot of people want to find a way to settle their disputes without court, but they aren't so amicable that they can just casually file court paperwork together without some help. That's where we come in. You can get divorced for free if you'd like. Or you can work with us to move forward in a positive way, if that is a better fit with your needs. 

Q: What is the timing of the court for a divorce? How soon can we get divorced?

A: You can separate legally tomorrow, if you're both able to agree. Once you're separated legally with a Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A, there is nothing in your court paperwork that changes with a divorce in Washington. All the paperwork for the court just backs up your Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A. For the court paperwork, you can file a petition as soon as you don't need to keep your credit clear for your home sale. And then you can send the rest of your paperwork to the court no sooner than 90 days after you file your petition. The court will be 

Q: How do we decide what is fair? 

A: What's fair tends to be about the future, rather than the past - if only because there's no way to change the past. What's fair is often a lot more complicated than the legal rules, too. Most people agree that a house you purchased together is a joint asset, for example, and that you should both benefit. But if one parent has a gambling problem or other active addiction, then the decision around the house can feel quite a bit more fraught than the legal default of "sell it and split the money." There's often not enough equity in the house for both parents to have enough money to buy another house, for example. So is it fair for one parent to rent for years while the other buys a house? These questions can really feel very limiting. To help you move forward, we've found over the years that focusing on the future, rather than who's at fault, will help both people feel like the situation is manageable. For example, if one of you endangered the house with a gambling or substance abuse addiction, then the other partner might want some compensation. Legally there's no way to give the non-addicted spouse credit for hurtful actions during the marriage - divorce in Washington is no-fault - but ethically you both might agree to safeguards and decisions in the future that will protect assets for the children and otherwise help you both move on. For example, you can use a contract to put the house in one parent's name, and then have the buyout for the parent who is fighting an active addiction be paid out over several years, with additional protections for any damaged credit or accounts that might come up in the future. It's still each parent getting a 50-50 share of the house. But the division is handled in a way so that one parent can afford to live in the house with the children, and the other parent will get their money in a way that will still be comfortable and manageable as their life moves forward. This is a long way of saying that "what's fair" is going to be a little more complicated than the legal rules. "What's fair" is really a combination of what feels fair to both of you and what works logistically for you and your children (if any). You have whatever money and assets you have. Hypothetical scenarios about how things "could" or "should" work just won't change anything. If you can focus on what you have, and how you can work with, you will both feel a lot more centered and in control. 

Q: How do the court divorce forms work? Can you just explain it quickly so I know what to expect? 

A: There are two key things to know about court paperwork. 1) Court paperwork is completely redundant. Your court forms will say the same thing over and over and over in six or seven different ways. And 2) Your divorce court forms are only there to create a record for the State of Washington. People who work with symbolic logic, like computer languages, find this really frustrating. Most tech employees are used to phrases or symbols that mean something very specific. When you explain something like, "Well yes we can use your court paperwork to designate one parent as the custodian on Form 140, and it's usually the parent who has more time unless you have a 50-50 plan, except then of course Washington legally doesn't use the word 'custody' so what you're asking for as 'custodian' is really a tax break, and if you what you want as 'custodian,' is to have more time with the kids, then we'd actually have to file a residential schedule as an amendment, or we could rework your section 6 of Form 140 to reflect what you'd like to have as a schedule..." yeah, so... it's a lot and people get confused. The forms don't work at all like a computer language. The forms are only a series of documents that have to be filed in a particular way so the state has a record of your marriage. You can accomplish the same thing in your forms in multiple ways, too, because again, the forms are really redundant. For example, your "legal separation" can be the date you file your Petition for Divorce, the date you begin living separately, the date you sign your Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A, the date your Final Order is signed by a judge and filed in the court records, or just some random date that you both pick because it's when your RSUs vest and it's easier to remember. It doesn't matter in the slightest to the court which separation date you pick for your forms. And you'll record the date multiple times, so you can change the separation date later anyway. You can file one separation date on your Petition, change it to another separation date on your Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A and then adjust for a third separation date on your Final Order - whatever you need to do. The problem, of course, is that you might not know what the separation date means for you, logistically, when you try to file your paperwork. This is where people accidentally cost themselves time and money. You don't know what you don't know. For example, if you pick the date one of you moved out of your home together as your separation date, and that's also the date that's 2 days before your RSUs vest, then you're going to have to pay someone to calculate your community share of the RSUs, and you're going to have to file extra paperwork around the house that you wouldn't have to if you picked a different date. You wouldn't need to pay anyone to calculate the community shares if you change the separation date to the date the RSUs vest, so that everything in the last batch of RSUs is community, and then you can start fresh with a new batch of RSUs as a single person. And you could lower the amount of paperwork around your house if you plan ahead too. It's easiest to think of the forms as record for the court. Nothing more. Most people, particularly tech employees, find that the easiest way to manage is to write everything you want in a Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A, and then just file the court forms that say "Please enforce the Separation Contract..." If you do that, your court forms can't accidentally bite you in the rear later. The court forms will essentially become whatever you want them to be, since you wrote the Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A to reflect exactly what you want, and when you want it. You always know what to expect if you write a Settlement Agreement/Separation Contract/CR2A. The contract becomes your checklist. The court forms just record what you've decided together. 

About the Author

Elizabeth Steen

Elizabeth Steen is licensed in Washington State, After work she enjoys running with her rescue dog and spending time with family.

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