Here it is, your pathway to a cheap divorce, in easy to follow steps -

First we both decided that lawyers would not be called until a mutually agreed time, or if things got a little out of hand, and we couldn't remain civil while we went through our plan.

Next we both went round our home, and made a list of everything we had in there as well as everything that WE each wanted. So if I felt the TV was/should be mine, then I made a note of that. My wife did the same.

We chose to go round the house at separate times of the day, as we weren't getting on at the time (hence the divorce I guess), and we compared notes the following day. At our meeting we both went through each others lists, and shouted and complained if someone had named something as theirs, that the other party felt shouldn't be, and we went on like this for most of the day. It's a fairly painful process, but it needed doing in order to save cash, but this could just as easily have been done via email if things had gotten nasty.

The day after that, after many phone calls back and forth, we came to an agreement on who gets what.

Next was the money side of things; again this took a few days, and we each shouted a lot, and finally sorted the accounts, the property, and the debts.

Lastly, we wrote all this up and made two copies, which we each signed, and had independently witnessed.

It was then, and only then, that we called our lawyers. We each handed our lawyers the signed papers, and said to them, "make this legal", and that was it; a week or two later we had our legal document for the divorce, and all went ahead smoothly, as we had sorted everything out prior to meeting and instigating the proceedings.

Can you see how much time and especially money, this could save you?

It's painful, horrible, bitter and and can be stressful, but aren't all divorces? Isn't it better to come out of this process, stressed, and a bank account fairly split, and still intact?

It made sense, and worked wonders for us. We worked out that we saved, about $5000 in legal wrangling and arguing through lawyers. You should do this too.