Posted on January 08, 2015 in Child Custody

Divorce is a time of great change in people's lives. This sort of change can often be disruptive to the normal routine. They can encourage people to start moving money around, or to try to move children out of reach of the other parent. This sort of gamesmanship can make divorces take longer and turn more acrimonious.

Consequently, the law provides a way of preventing these sorts of maneuvers, a dissolution action stay, named for the formal title of a divorce proceeding, a dissolution action. Dissolution action stays are a form of temporary restraining order that forbid certain behaviors by either member of the couple. These prohibitions go into effect either when the spouse who did not file for divorce receives formal notice of the divorce, or when he or she first appears in court, whichever occurs first.

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 Posted on January 06, 2015 in Divorce

People say money is the root of all evil, and it turns out that that sentiment may extend to the marital arena. A study from Kansas State University found that couples fighting about money turned out to be a strong predictor of their marriage's strength. Interestingly, the strength of this predictor has nothing to do with the couple's well-being. Regardless of whether the couple is carrying loads of credit card debt or living in a mansion, couples who fight over money see an increase in their divorce risk as compared to couples who do not.

The Study In Question

The study's authors conducted their research using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. That survey is managed by the University of Wisconsin, and collected sociological data for thousands of families over a nearly 20-year span. The Kansas State researchers examined the data from that study for over 4,500 couples to see if they reported fighting over money issues. The researchers then compared the couples who fought over money with those who did not, making sure to only compare couples with similar yearly incomes, debt loads, and net worth. The results showed a significant increase in divorce risk for people who had monetary fights. Interestingly, the effect was limited to fights over money. Couples who fought over children or sex or other issues did not show the same level of increased risk.

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 Posted on December 29, 2014 in Divorce

One of the most difficult parts of divorce for many couples is broaching the subject in the first place. Sometimes it is a mutual decision, but often one spouse will decide it is time before the other realizes it. Revealing these feelings can often shock the other spouse, and it can make a divorce more emotionally charged. Now, there is a new type of marriage counseling that may make bringing up divorce easier, and it may help couples avoid it altogether. This new type of counseling is known as discernment counseling.

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 Posted on December 22, 2014 in Divorce

Marital relationships are uniquely personal, but there are still trends and commonalities that run between all of them. Many people going through or considering a divorce begin to get curious about this sort of common ground. It is not unusual to wonder whether there are other couples whose divorce was predicated on the same sort of problem.

Over the years, numerous studies have been conducted to examine what sorts of things were the most commonly reported causes of divorce. Naturally, the lists differ from study to study. However, psychologists at the University of Iowa conducted a review of multiple studies in an attempt to bring all their research together. They succeeded in creating a list of the most commonly reported reasons for divorce, and also broke the complaints down along gender lines.

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 Posted on December 17, 2014 in Divorce

“Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.” That statistic is a piece of common knowledge. It appears on TV, on the internet, and in conversations with friends. However, like most commonly known statistics, it seems to be wrong, or at the very least out of date by a few decades. The New York Times recently examined data on marriage and divorce rates and discovered some surprising trends. In a nutshell, the rate of both marriages and divorces are dropping, resulting in fewer, longer-lasting marriages. The analysis presents a variety of surprising findings that may cause people to reexamine the way that they look at divorce in the modern age.

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 Posted on December 15, 2014 in Divorce

Property division is one of the most important aspects of any divorce process, and probably the most important in marriages without children. Consequently, it leads to a lot of people wondering about how things get divided. All too often, people ask that question of how courts divide property before they ask a more fundamental question: “What does the court divide?” At a high level, the answer to that is simple. Marital property gets divided, and spouses get to keep their non-marital property for themselves. Answering the question of which property is marital and which property is not can become a bit more complicated.

What Is and Is Not Marital Property

The easiest place to start when discussing marital versus non-marital property is with a definition of marital property. Illinois law defines marital property as “all property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage.” This means that things the spouses bring into the marriage are non-marital property and things they get afterward are marital property.

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 Posted on December 10, 2014 in Divorce

A divorce can have ripple effects that last after it ends, especially in the realm of retirement. Married couples engage in long-term financial planning together, so a split can often push those plans off track, unless people take care to keep them intact during the divorce. One particular way that divorce can impact retirement is through the division of pensions. Now the Illinois Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about how pension division interacts with Social Security, which has its own special rules for divorcing couples.

Social Security in Divorce

Social Security is different from the majority of pensions and retirement plans. Most of these plans qualify as marital property that the court will deal with during the property division. Conversely, Illinois courts do not divide Social Security. This difference stems from the fact that Social Security is a special plan regulated by the government. This means that it already has contingencies in place to deal with divorce, so courts do not need to divide it.

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 Posted on December 08, 2014 in Child Custody

Proving paternity can be a complex thing to do, and a difficult one to discuss with your spouse. However, it can also be important for your child's future. Before people had access to things like DNA testing, there were a variety of laws in place that created presumptions about who was a child's father. Many of these laws are still around, though they have been modified in recent years to account for the changing technology available to actually make determinations about paternity. The key question for paternity laws asks whether the parents of the child are married.

Married Parents

Married parents ordinarily present the simplest case for establishing paternity. If two people are married when the child is conceived or born, then the Illinois Parentage Act of 1984 creates a presumption that the husband is the child's father. However, the father can dispute this presumption.

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 Posted on December 03, 2014 in Divorce

Some people can be tempted to start focusing on the short-term issues during a divorce. This is an understandable impulse since a divorce causes many immediate changes in a person's life. However, it is also important to keep one eye on the long view throughout the process. One of these issues is retirement planning.

Spouses plan to spend their lives together, and those plans can often start well in advance. This means that retirement plans are an important part of the divorce conversation. This is especially true now that gray divorce, divorces among people over 50, is becoming more of a trend. Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies people can use to help make sure that their divorce does not derail their golden years.

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 Posted on December 01, 2014 in Divorce

The prevalence of substance abuse in America is an unfortunate reality. In fact, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration's research, tens of millions of Americans experience problems with alcoholism or drug abuse. Naturally, these problems can place a strain on a marriage, and many people report that substance abuse was one of the main causes of their separation. Many people who are divorcing a spouse with substance abuse issues wonder about the special considerations that those issues need. As it happens, substance abuse can have both legal and practical effects on the divorce process.

Legal Effects of Substance Abuse

The two main legal effects of substance abuse on divorce are as grounds for divorce and during the child custody proceedings. Substance abuse can be grounds for divorce in Illinois, meaning it forms the actual reason for the divorce, but this is less important than it once was. Illinois has a “no-fault” divorce law now, so spouses can get divorced based on irreconcilable differences. However, having grounds for the divorce may be able to speed the process up since there is a required six-month separation period in no-fault divorces.

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