Getting Your Share

Robert Stein, Lois Brenner

Description

A complete step-by-step guide to steer women through the legal, financial, tactical and emotional minefields of divorce.

Each year more than one million marriages end in divorce. Yet, despite the passage of the no-fault divorce laws over the past two decades, divorce has become more complex and expensive, and can be financially disastrous for wives of every age and economic condition.

Today, divorce can mean a 73 percent drop in the woman’s standard of living while the husband’s rises 42 percent. In Getting Your Share, Lois Brenner, an expert matrimonial lawyer, shows women how to get financial security for themselves and their children under the current divorce laws.

From choosing the right attorney to the final divorce decree and settlement, this book takes you step by step through the legal, tactical, emotional, and financial conflicts of divorce. You will learn about the opening legal moves, how to stop thinking of your husband as your partner, how to get an accurate picture of family assets, how to protect your children financially and psychologically, when to negotiate a settlement rather than go to trial, and much more. Whether you have been married two months or twenty years, have had a full-time career, have devoted yourself to raising children, or have done both, Getting Your Share provides information and understanding to guide you through this complicated crisis.

Sujets

• Droit général
• Droit général
• Droit général
• Law
• Terminology
• Droit et juridique
• Dictionaries

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469712208
• Langue: English

Extrait

GETTING YOUR SHARE
A Woman’s Guide to Successful Divorce Strategies

LOIS BRENNER ROBERT STEIN
Authors Choice Press
San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai
 
This book is not intended as legal advice or as a substitute for the legal advice of attorneys. Readers are encouraged to consult with lawyers for advice and representation in connection with specific problems in their own situations including marriages, separations, and divorces.
Further, while every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information about state laws contained in this book, it is inevitable that changes will occur in one or more states within the near future.
Getting Your Share
A Woman’s Guide to Successful Divorce Strategies
 
All Rights Reserved © 1989, 2000 by Lois Brenner and Robert Stein
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Authors Choice Press an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.
 
For information address:
iUniverse.com, Inc.
5220 S 16th, Ste. 200
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
Originally published by Crown
 
ISBN: 0-595-16280-0
ISBN: 978-1-4697-1220-8 (ebook)
Contents
Introduction: The New Rules of the Game  
1 The Right Lawyer for You  
2 Your Husband Is No Longer Your Partner  
3 The Opening Legal Moves  
4 Old-Fashioned Detective Work and Space-Age Accounting  
5 The “Passages” of Divorce  
6 “Isn’t He Going to Pay for What He Did?”  
7 Negotiating to Get What You Deserve  
8 How to Protect Your Children Psychologically  
9 How to Protect Your Children Financially  
10 Going to Trial  
11 It’s Over—Isn’t It?  
12 What Every Happily Married Woman Must Know About Divorce  
Appendix A: The Legal Steps in Divorce  
Appendix B: State-by-State Laws  
Acknowledgments  
 
To the authors’ parents—Esther and Abraham
Brenner; and
Gertrude and Isidor Stein—for whom marriage
literally meant
until death do us part “ And to our children—
Stephanie Weiss;
and Gregory, Keith, and Clifford Stein—with the wish
that they
find lasting love and fulfillment in their intimate
relationships.
Introduction: The New Rules of the Game 
You are thinking of separation or divorce. The decision may have come suddenly or after weeks, months, perhaps years of anger and sadness. Or you may still be uncertain but want to see a lawyer to learn about your rights. When you do, you could be in for a shock: Much of what you have always heard and read about divorce is no longer true. In just a few years the laws have changed drastically, and through no fault of their own wives have lost much of the protection they once had against being left without a home or enough financial support.
Consider these cases:
In California, Carla’s husband of twenty-five years comes home one evening and tells her that he is in love with a younger woman. Within weeks he gets a divorce—his wife’s consent is not needed—and the court gives Carla 50 percent of the equity in her family home, which makes up most of the couple’s community property. Carla, who has not held a job in more than twenty years, takes courses to renew her secretarial skills. Since the support she gets will not cover her mortgage payments and living expenses, she has to borrow from her grown children while she goes to school. When she finally finds a job, she does not have enough income to hold on to the home she has lived in more than half her life. She is forced to sell the house, give her husband his share of what she gets, pay her debts, and rent an apartment in a less desirable community. Unless she marries again (which is statistically unlikely), Carla will spend her remaining years working at a routine job, far from the neighbors and activities that once nourished her life.
In New York, Phyllis, at the age of twenty-nine, is faced with a wrenching decision. Her husband’s alcoholic rages have been getting worse. Afraid that he may harm their children, Phyllis takes them and moves into her parents’ home. After a long and costly divorce, paid for by her parents, Phyllis gets custody of the children. Since her husband is a self-employed consultant, Phyllis’s lawyer has difficulty establishing the value of his business, which will provide most of his wife’s share of marital property under New York’s Equitable Distribution Law. Phyllis is finally awarded $8,000 in property division (all of this will go to repay her parents for legal fees), $75 a week in child support, and two years of “rehabilitative maintenance” amounting to $250 a month. Luckily, Phyllis’s skills in hospital administration enable her to find a job at $17,000 a year. But for years, she will be struggling to meet the expenses of her household and the care of her children while she works. And she will face the recurring nightmare of legal action to collect child support when her unstable former husband “forgets” to send checks for months at a time.
In one way, Carla and Phyllis are lucky. Both could fall back on some past working experience. But for them, and millions of other women, the no-fault divorce laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s have made divorce a dangerous and damaging experience. As a result of these laws, most former wives are worse off than ever before.
Much worse.
Like many another road to hell, this one was paved with good intentions: The no-fault laws were passed to reduce the bitterness and conflict during a divorce and to treat women as the legal equals of men rather than as helpless dependents.
These are fine ideas in principle, but divorced women and their children cannot eat principle.
The reality is that women have lost the protection they had when they were considered second-class citizens, but they are not getting their fair share of the fruits of the “economic partnership” that marriage is now supposed to be.
The reality is that women are still far from equal in American life—in job training, opportunities, and earning power.
The reality is that, while the laws have changed, they are being interpreted by judges, most of whom are older men far removed from the day-to-day lives of women on their own and who use their discretion with little understanding of or sympathy for what such women face in the real world.
The result: Study after study shows divorced wives and their children being uprooted from comfortable middle-class lives and left in relative poverty while their former husbands live as well as before and often better.
How can this happen?
• The new laws say that wives are entitled to an “equal” or “equitable” share of everything earned, saved, and bought during a marriage. But they often get less than half of marital property, sometimes much less. And in order to get this smaller share, a wife and her lawyer must find and put a value on all property, which in most marriages is controlled by the husband, especially when the major assets are a husband’s business or professional license.
•   The legal Catch-22 assumes that, because they are getting their share of property, women can support themselves after a few years of the “rehabilitative maintenance” that has replaced long-term alimony. But many wives are not getting enough property, and their earning power is severely limited. In particular, mothers of young children and older women who have been full-time homemakers find themselves in desperate need if judges do not recognize their true situation.
•   Child custody was once routinely given to mothers. The new laws afford fathers a better chance of winning custody. Women, faced with the possible loss of their children, can be pressured into sacrificing some of their financial rights to avoid a custody fight.
•   Even when mothers have custody, child support has been much too low and much too uncertain. New guidelines and enforcement laws are theoretically in place, but it is difficult for a woman to take full advantage of them.
Legislators are working to make the laws fairer, and higher courts are handing down decisions to make trial judges more sensitive to the needs of women. But if your separation agreement and divorce are being settled now ; their efforts may come too late. To get your due, you should have the best possible lawyer. You should know how to work with that lawyer in the time-consuming and complicated struggle to get the property division, child-custody arrangements, and financial support you deserve. You should understand the kinds of psychological warfare that go on during a divorce. You should make use of every available strategy to overcome the disadvantages that the divorce process holds for a woman.
This book is devoted to helping you do just that.
As coauthors, we bring an unusual combination of backgrounds to this undertaking: a woman who, as a lawyer, represents both wives and husbands in the predominantly male world of judges and attorneys collaborating with a man who for years was the editor of magazines read by millions of women. We have used these perspectives to go beyond the question-and-answer format of most books on divorce in an attempt to help you understand and surmount the legal, financial, practical, and psychological difficulties—from the moment you decide to see a lawyer until the final papers are signed and even beyond. (Some of the most important answers you will need are to questions that may not be obvious to you at the time.)
To make sure that the information in this book applies to women in every part of the United States, we have