But That Was My Father's First Million...

Keeping track of your birthright can be tricky post-split, but today's WSJ has some some helpful guidance in the Journal Reports:  How to Keep Your Inheritance in a Divorce:  Strategies Include Saving Documentation and Maintaining Separate Accounts.  

"For the happily wed, marriage is often about sharing everything—including generous gifts bestowed by parents or grandparents.

But when a relationship ends in divorce, that perspective can change dramatically. At that point, however, it may be too late to keep inherited assets such as vacation homes, rare collections and other gifts away from a former partner, even if those assets were never intended to go to that person."

Can we really predict divorce?

It's a topic no one ever gets tired of raising.  Inevitably, after a couple of beers, standing around the BBQ, someone asks: "You've been a divorce attorney for 30 years now.  Surely you can tell if a couple should get married or not."  

Someone must have chatted up a reporter at The Times recently as well.  The July 11th article Our Love Affair with Predicting Divorce brings up a very good point at the end, the "idea that true love can be sustained by being nice."  A simple enough point, true, but probably the hardest one to achieve after a day at the office, a commute home, getting dinner on the table, cleaning it up, and if children are in the picture, then homework, bedtime, etc.  Stressors build until civility flies out the window, never mind kindness or romance.

In my opinion, many divorces could be prevented with a little pre-marital counseling to weed out couples that shouldn't be married or to give people a better understanding of what it takes to make a good marriage.  Marriage is like any other undertaking in life; it requires acquiring skill and commitment.

What I love to toast at weddings is a quote from one of my favorite law professors:  "Don't sweat the small stuff... and it's all small stuff."  The big picture and ultimate goal is keep your marriage as happy and light as possible -- your kids will thank you for it.

It's the Story of a Man Named Brady

Idealized fantasies of merged families meet cold, hard realities in this recent New York Times article: 

We are no sitcom. We are a man and a woman with five children who live with us the majority of the time, two children who don’t, and three exes with whom we must share them. Carol and Mike never had to share the children. There was an episode about a cursed tiki and a tarantula but never about an exchange on a street corner by the oleanders. The children never found themselves shuttled out of the midcentury marvel that Mike had designed to their other house, where they ate different food; watched different shows; identified with different races; had different friends, different clothes, different relatives, different religions; and were expected to be full citizens of both.

Managing divergent individual needs in the modern post-divorce-remarried-nuclear family can present a virtual minefield of relationship stressors.  I should know; my own experiences (starting off with one sister and winding up with an ultra-blended familial bouillabasse that added two halfs and eight step-siblings to my life) speak directly to this issue.  It's left me needing to steer my clients toward parenting plans and child support strategies with children's needs at the forefront.  Using that guiding principle lays the foundation for healthy relationships for years to come.

Divorce After 50? What to Consider

Divorce After 50 Grows More Common, reads the headline from this recent New York Times article.  Certainly we've seen the same trend in our practice over the last 10 years.  

While divorce rates over all have stabilized and even inched downward, the divorce rate among people 50 and older has doubled since 1990, according to an analysis of census data by professors at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. That’s especially significant because half the married population is older than 50. 

In short, there are often many more assets to consider, increasing the complexity of sorting out a settlement that both parties will find agreeable.  The marital home usually has a lot of equity built, if not the mortgage entirely paid off.  Healthy retirement and brokerage accounts are more common.  Sometimes businesses owned jointly need to be evaluated and divided.

So what has that taught us about our clients' needs in the older age bracket versus couples who separate at an earlier point in their lives?  While it is less common to negotiate parenting plans and child support in middle age, greater time and resources must be paid to crafting financial settlement.  Hiring skilled negotiators in this realm is crucial.

I Made It to January...

Across the U.S., January typically sees the most new divorce filings of the calendar year, earning it the nickname, "Divorce Month." There is an intuitive reason for this, of course, as January is traditionally a time of new beginnings. When the New Year rolls around, many people commit to turning over a new leaf and making resolutions, and this often means taking action on matters they have been pushed to the sidelines.

There's lots of reasons why the divorce rate spikes each January.  And in this recent piece from The Huffington Post, author Bari Zell Weinberger does a great job of explaining them... and if you plan to divorce, why the timing is actually strategic.

Canine Custody Clash

You have no kids and no assets to speak of.  Think your divorce will be easy?  It probably will be -- unless you both own a pet neither of you is willing to share.  Check out this interesting news item from The New York Post.  

Next time, put the pup in the pre-nup.

A pair of divorcing women are about to fight it out in court over a miniature dachshund named Joey in what will be New York’s first matrimonial pet-custody case.

“People who love their dogs almost always love them forever,” Manhattan Justice Matthew Cooper opines in his ruling granting the women oral arguments. “But with divorce rates at record highs, the same cannot always be said for those who marry.”