Know the law and know your rights before filing for divorce. Divorce planning needs the same attention to detail that you put into your wedding if you want to avoid getting hosed in the process.



When you are standing at the altar saying "I do" with 300 of your friends and family around you, the very last thing on your mind is the possibility of a divorce in your future. Damn the statistics, it cannot happen to me, you think.

Think again. Recent studies have shown that the divorce rate is almost at the 50% mark for couple being married in the past 5 years. What is the cause of that? Are people being too reckless with their commitments? Do people really think that the love they feel will see them through anything?

The biggest problem leading to divorce is a lack of communication between the partners. It really is a partnership, where each needs to know what the other is doing and thinking on a regular basis, as in daily. You need to make sure that you are both marching to the same drummer with the same goals in sight, both short term goals as well as long term goals, and without that communication, divorce is almost inevitable.

Is this a difficult thing? It should not be, but in today's world where most households have both spouses working, it can prove to be difficult. When both spouses arrive at home after a long hard day at work, both are tired, perhaps irritable, neither feels like fixing dinner, and communication can often be the last thing on either one's mind. Yet if that communications does not happen, it is inevitably that the two of you will take different paths, start creating separate goals, and pretty soon you find that divorce is the only viable answer, since your paths have parted so widely that there is little chance your paths will ever rejoin.

Divorce can be a comparatively simple procedure or it can be long and drawn out. It is in your best interests to get a good divorce lawyer. Really? Yes really. If the communications between you and your spouse have broken down to put you on separate paths, you cannot be sure of what your spouse will require or demand in the divorce process. Make sure you do not get hosed in that process, and without a good divorce attorney, that can easily happen before you are even aware of it.

Things can get messy if children are involved or there is a fair amount of capital holdings that were acquired since the wedding day. But even these items can be negotiated and worked out with good divorce attorneys, plus the desire to "just get it over with peacefully" on the part of both spouses.

If divorce is really the best or only option available to you, plan it with the same attention to detail that you used when you planned your wedding. Preparation and a thorough knowledge of what is involved and what can be negotiated is paramount in making sure that you don't walk away with absolutely nothing. Almost anything is negotiable as far as "who gets what", but be very clear on what are your rights, what are the rights of your spouse, and how to effectively manage the division of assets, including cash, stocks, and bonds.