Posted on April 29, 2019 in Family Law

The more complex a divorce is, the more likely there will be experts utilized to provide information to the case. These professionals are often called in by one side to help sway the court’s decisions on various elements. Attorneys can rely on an expert to help prove their client’s parenting skills, disprove the other’s parenting abilities, reveal hidden bank accounts, or prove through bank statements that the other spouse was spending marital money on an affair. Below we outline a few different types of family law experts that could play a role in your own divorce case.

Child Psychologist or Child Expert

A child expert is a psychologist who meets with parents, children, and other family members and relevant parties in order to make recommendations on a parenting plan and custody.

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 Posted on April 24, 2019 in Child Support

While child support may have been originally decided years ago with your divorce, that does not mean the court order will remain unchanged. Even after a child reaches the age of 18, the parent who pays child support sometimes still has obligations, particularly if they have the financial means to pay for college, and the other parent does not have the ability to do so.

How Does the Court Make a Decision?

Not all children end up going to college, and not all children of divorce go, either. If a child’s parents do not have the ability to pay, they will either have to come up with the money themselves, take out loans, or simply not attend. However, if their parents do have the means to pay, and the child has proven academic success, the court may decide to create an order of support for college expenses that the non-custodial parent is responsible for. To make this decision, the court will consider the following:

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 Posted on April 24, 2019 in Child Custody

Temporary custody is usually decided during divorce, as the child’s parents are likely to split up before the marriage is dissolved, and is subject to change when the divorce is finalized. After all, divorce typically takes many months, as assets and debts need to be accounted for, child support and spousal support are debated, and division of property is negotiated.

However, in some cases not associated with divorce, a parent (or parents) may wish to willfully give temporary guardianship to another party. For example, a mother with full legal custody may wish to grant the child’s father guardianship if she knows she will be leaving the country for an extended multi-month work trip, during which she will be unable to take care of her child. A guardianship attorney can help make this possible.

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 Posted on April 15, 2019 in Asset Division

Marital property includes all assets obtained during a marriage, whereas non-marital property is everything owned before marriage. For middle-age to older adults, aside from real property, savings are the largest aspect of marital property. A survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found the division of retirement plans and pensions was the second-leading cause of contention in divorce.

Do Retirement Plans and Pensions Get Divided During Divorce?

Retirement accounts, pensions, and IRAs are all considered marital property if they were obtained during the course of the marriage, or if they were contributed to during the marriage. For example, if an IRA started out at $10,000 before the marriage, and it was worth $100,000 after 20 years of marriage, the majority of the assets would be considered marital property and should be divided between the two spouses.

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 Posted on April 15, 2019 in Child Custody

You just received an email from your child’s other parent, telling you he or she plans to move out of the city or state with your child. When this happens, it leaves many parents with a sense of irreparable dread and a feeling of helplessness. Now what? How can this be stopped?

Per Illinois 750 ILCS 5/609.2, a parent who has majority parenting time or a parent who has been awarded equal parenting time can petition the court for relocation, which is considered a substantial change in circumstance. The parent wishing to relocate with the child must give written notice to the other parent 60 days in advance, including the date, the address of the residence, and length of time if the relocation is not intended to be permanent. A copy of this written notice must be sent to the circuit court as well. Many parents fail with this simplest of tasks: properly notifying the other parent and the court 60 days before they move. As such, the court may see them unfit to carry out such a relocation.

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 Posted on April 12, 2019 in Child Custody

When parents get divorced or separated, they must decide how to split time with their children. Traditionally, for shared child custody agreements, the children live with one parent part-time and go with the other parent on the weekends, every other week, or however the parenting plan is structured. This requires the children to move from one home to the next, every week, for years, until they are old enough to be out of the house.

Another option for parents who have shared custody has gained in popularity. Birdnesting, or just nesting for short, keeps the child in one home while the parents come and go. This requires the parents to each have their own separate living situation, or to share a separate home together; birdnesting parents do not have to ever sleep under the same roof or spend time with one another, however.

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 Posted on April 12, 2019 in Child Custody

Movies, television, and media reports would have us all believe kidnappers are lurking in bushes and snooping around playgrounds, ready to nab a random child whenever the opportunity presents itself. This could not be farther from the truth. While strangers do abduct children, these types of kidnappings are not the rule, but the exception. In fact, in only 0.1 percent of child kidnapping cases (one out of 1,000) is the abductor a stranger to or a slight acquaintance of the child. Almost all abductors are family members, and in most of these cases, it is one of the parents.

Parental kidnapping occurs when one parent has custody of the child and the other goes against a court order and takes the child unlawfully. Sometimes the parent takes the child back home, which could be in the same town. Other times, desperate parents leave the state or even the country. If your child was abducted by his or her other parent, a family law attorney can:

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 Posted on March 30, 2019 in Asset Division

Building a life together as a married couple inevitably involves the accumulation of personal assets. The time and effort it took to financially afford and personally choose these items cannot be measured in dollars alone. Facing the prospect of dividing years of memories and hard work these items represent due to divorce requires some ability to look at this situation with objective eyes. Neither should expect to get everything they want.

Part of this evaluation is having a realistic sense of what percentage of marital property each spouse should expect to receive, and Illinois is not a community property state that guarantees each spouse 50 percent of all property. Instead, it follows equitable distribution rules that base property division in divorce on what is most fair under the circumstances, which creates a vague standard that is at the discretion of the judge. As a result, spouses should make all efforts to mutually agree on property division, so the outcome is known, but also having an understanding of how courts view this issue and the process judges use to formulate a settlement is important as well.

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 Posted on March 29, 2019 in Divorce

Divorce is a huge decision and step in a person’s life. Once a divorce is granted, a couple’s marriage is over, and it brings significant changes to finances, child custody, and living arrangements. Every relationship faces challenges at some point, and needing a break to assess whether the marriage can work is not uncommon. Some spouses may not be ready to file for divorce, but still need some structure for parenting issues, property rights, and financial support.

One option at this juncture is a legal separation. While it can ultimately lead to divorce, that outcome does not always occur. Couples who enter into legal separation agreements are still legally married and cannot remarry or finalize certain aspects of dissolving the marriage without seeking a divorce. In other words, legal separation is revocable, whereas divorce is not once granted.

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 Posted on March 25, 2019 in Asset Division

The division of marital assets is one of the more complicated aspects of divorce, and retirement accounts present a number of unique issues that can make creating a fair settlement difficult. Since retirement accounts, especially 401(k)s, are accumulated through the individual efforts of one spouse, learning that this asset may be subject to division in a divorce is hard for many to accept. However, any amount in a retirement account classified as a marital asset must be divided, unless the spouses agree otherwise.

Valuing an account and determining how to structure a settlement are complicated matters that do not always have easy answers. Often, a spouse is forced to choose between the pros and cons of short- and long-term options when dividing retirement accounts, and working with an experienced divorce attorney is necessary to receive a complete picture of the implications of any decision. Retirement accounts are often a couple’s most valuable asset, so taking the time to assess how to approach this issue is one of the more critical aspects of a divorce case.

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