In paragraph eight, we’re referring to the personal property that may be in your house. And so what that means would be furniture, personal effects, clothes, any kind of household personal items in the house.
This paragraph would be for you to determine who gets what. How that process is going to take place. Is one person going to take those things when they leave the house? Is it going to happen later?
And are you going to make any decisions about the personal property later? Keep in mind this paragraph can be revised and done many different ways. But one way would be that on the time and the separation that the person who’s leaving the house takes all the personal property that they want out of the house. This does not include any financial issues.
These are just items of household furniture, artwork, jewelry, clothes. Those types of items would be included in paragraph eight.
Moving on talking about paragraph nine, Automobiles. How to deal with vehicles. One of the main things to think about when you’re transferring a vehicle, or deciding who’s keeping which vehicle. You want to make sure that you understand how are the cars, motorcycles, boats, how are they currently named?
So you want to go back, look, figure out who’s on what title. And if you’re receiving the vehicle, you want to make sure that there’s a process set up for how to transfer that title to you. Now title transfer cannot take place when there is a loan against a vehicle because the person who owns the loan will be holding that title until the loan is paid. So for instance, if you have a car that has a loan on it to Bank of America, Bank of America is holding that title until the loan is paid off.
Well what if that’s going to happen two or three years in the future and you’ve decided that you want to go ahead and sign over this car to your spouse now? One way would be to use a power of attorney just related to the car. And you can go onto the North Carolina DMV website and they have vehicle power of attorney form that you can use and you transfer to your spouse the authority to do anything necessary related to the car in the future. But it’s only for that vehicle.
You want to make sure though that in this paragraph you’re thinking about who’s going to pay car insurance for that car, who’s going to be responsible and liable for that car. So those are the things that need to be included in paragraph nine.
Now paragraph ten is a kind of a catch all provision. You don’t have to have this included. You might instead list out all the intangible personal property. But when referring to intangible personal property, what we mean is checking accounts, savings accounts, financial accounts, stocks, bonds, retirement funds.
Sometimes people will just have a blanket waiver to this one and it will say you’re each just going to keep the accounts that are in your own name and we’re done. So that might be a way to use paragraph ten, the intangible personal property. However, what if an account is joint? What if there is an account where there is a beneficiary designation on that account?
So those are some other things to be thinking about. And as we move through the separation agreement, we’ll talk about how you want to address those as well. So paragraph ten be very careful when you keep this paragraph in here. You need to decide is this the way that we’ve decided to address our finances or do we want to specifically spell out each account and state who’s receiving it?
Or in order to balance the accounts to fifty-fifty, do we want to transfer an account from one spouse to another? You’re not required to do it this way, but this would be one way that you could each keep your own accounts.
Lisa is a leading figure in North Carolina’s family law field, dedicated to guiding clients through challenging times with compassion and expertise. As the President and Owner of Rosen Law Firm, P.A., Lisa has built a successful practice specializing in divorce, child custody, child support, alimony, equitable distribution, and domestic violence. She has been a North Carolina Board-Certified Specialist in Family Law since 1998.
