Top Eight Things to Do When You’re Served with Divorce Papers

You are likely to experience a range of emotions if you are ever served with divorce papers from your spouse. Anger, grief, sadness, surprise, outrage. We strongly suggest you consider the steps below as an appropriate course of action.

1. Contact your attorney or an attorney who does a lot of family law. That attorney will give you good advice.

2. Get copies of important financial documents together, such as several years of income tax returns, several years of statements for retirement accounts and other accounts, and even the last year’s worth of credit card statements and similar documents.

3. If you have children, you will want to analyze or re-analyze the child custody situation. Is there a schedule in place? Is it working? If not, when will one have to be put in place?

4. If you have a business or substantial assets, contact your CPA and/or tax attorney as there will be tax ramifications to the divorce.

5. Fundamentally, before any of the above, you probably should be thinking about your long term goals. The first long term goal should be whether or not you want to try to make a success of your marriage or whether you believe the marriage is over.

6. Similarly, where do you want to be living a year from now or five years from now? What career do you want to be in a year from now or five years from now? These are excellent big picture considerations to be thinking about and discussing with your friends and counselors.

7. Make a budget. Better yet, make a budget for now and a budget for a year or two from now.

8. Is this divorce going to result in one spouse paying the other spouse temporary alimony and/or alimony after the divorce? How much do I make and how much does my spouse make per year? Is that likely to continue or go up or go down in the near future?

That is more than eight things to consider but the above considerations should be a great help and a good starting point.

If you have a question regarding divorce, contact one of the experienced family law attorneys at Trinity Law today. Our attorneys routinely handle divorce and custody matters for Pennsylvania residents in York, Lancaster and surrounding counties. Contact Trinity Law at www.YourLawFirmForLife.com or at 1-886-464-5297.