In a very real sense, knowledge and information are power. If your spouse has information that you never discover, he or she can, and all too often will, walk away with more property than the law would award. If the noncustodial spouse does not disclose accurate income information, the custodial spouse may wind up receiving monthly child support that is below the amount specified in the state’s child support guidelines. Similarly, if you have been financially dependent, and you underestimate your spouse’s actual income, your expectations for short- or long-term financial assistance might be lower than they should be.
The first thing you can do—and the first thing you must do as soon as you know that your marriage is ending—is to collect all the financial records and other asset or debt information that you know exist. If you are the designated financial manager in the household, you may already know where all such information is. If you have had little to do with the family finances, use the other articles on divorce and finance to help you figure these things out.
If some financial documents are papers in file folders at your home, make copies and then store the copies in a safe place outside the house, such as a lawyer’s office, an individual safe-deposit box, or the home of a trusted friend or relative. If other records are on your home computer, make copies of all of them. If you don’t know how to use the computer, prevail on a friend to help you. It is not unusual for one spouse to come home one day and discover that the other spouse has removed all written records or computer files and taken them to an undisclosed location. Don’t get caught in such a situation!
Some spouses do not begin to gather and copy the family’s financial records out of fear that the other spouse will catch on to what is happening, causing an already bad situation to get much worse. While this fear is understandable, records to which you have access can usually be copied discreetly, thus minimizing the risk of an explosion with your spouse. More importantly, the risk of new conflict is not usually a good enough reason not to act to safeguard personal financial information.
In the situation of separation and divorce, it is more often a far greater risk to you to not have financial information than to irritate your spouse if he or she happens to learn that you have made copies of relevant family documents. One critical exception to this occurs in the family with domestic violence. If just about anything will make your spouse physically violent and put either you or your children in danger, you need to leave and worry about the documents later.
Many spouses who have had little to do with handling money in the family need considerable encouragement to get energized to collect documents and records. The barrier to obtaining family financial records is sometimes as much psychological as it is logistical, since a spouse who has been kept in the dark about finances sometimes has low self-esteem and paralyzing feelings of powerlessness. If you are feeling fearful or powerless, you need to deal with those feelings immediately so that you can take the action you might be keeping yourself from taking. Strong feelings are feelings that other people can help you deal with and surmount.
Financial and other property records that you know about and can copy might disappear before you take action. All these records are too valuable to ignore. If you don’t make the copies now, you will either spend tons of money later on—employing an attorney to force the documents to be disclosed, all the while knowing that everything may not be disclosed in the end—or find yourself forced to settle on terms potentially more unfavorable than you will ever know. Taking prompt actions now will spare untold later expense and headache in securing access to necessary financial information. Don’t worry about making sense of the documents you collect. Understanding financial documents may require the assistance of a professional with financial skills and sophistication. Such assistance is available; first, you have to have the documents.
Clients who have little knowledge of financial affairs often ask us how to go about gathering such documents. One way is to think whether there is any stretch of time when your spouse will be predictably at work or, even better, out of town, allowing you a longer period to, with reduced anxiety, sort through papers in your house. As you do your hunting, you might want to be careful to put the papers back in the same order and in the same place you found them, thus lessening the chance that a controlling spouse will spot your temporary “borrowing” for purposes of having the documents copied.
If you have not been involved in managing your finances, the amount of information you need to collect to ensure you have a complete picture can be overwhelming. You will want to use file folders, binders, or some other method to organize what you collect. This will help anyone who works with you on your finances to get up to speed quickly, thereby saving you money.
We also remind clients, over and over, that all the background work they do for themselves is that much more money saved in lawyer’s fees, given that most attorneys charge by the hour. So, even if you intend to use an attorney for your separation and divorce, the more information gathering you do on your own, the more you will have streamlined the work a lawyer needs to conduct on your case. You will also be a more knowledgeable, and hence more powerful, ally to yourself—and your attorney—in negotiating a favorable settlement when you have become acquainted with the financial records.
