Divorce Support Forums: File now: pros and cons?

Aw MAN, so many questions:

1. credit card. It does not matter whose name it's in, after the date of filing, you want to get a separate card from her and keep off each other's cards. AFTER that date, everything you spend is on you and everything she spends is on her except if thre's some reason that it's a jointly necessary thing. For you staying in the same house, it would be best to set a budget and put money for spending on that budget together the way roommates would. If she pays for all food & her own needs and you keep paying household expenses, then great, don't put anything new on the credit cards. If it turns out tht the TWO of you need to ... I don't know... need SOMETHING that you can't pay cash for... then if you get an agreement in writing to put it on either card & reimburse each other for half OR put half on each of your cards & keep the finances clean between the two of you.

Everything spent until now is joint and you'll each owe half, though whoever it was that said you'd end up with it all was probably right... what you do is use the extra JOINT debt that you take on as a negative to offset the positives you keep. SO ... you ... oh phooey, let me explain it like this...

PROPERTY DECISIONS:
list everythign you own between the two of you. Cars, houses, valuables, IRAs, bank accounts, hte $15K that she took & says still exists. Give a value to each item (this is where you've gotten all bogged down, in valuing the house).

List every debt that you have between the two of you, credit cards, house mortgages, car debts (the totals, not the monthly payments on them.

on the list, separate out all the stuff that belongs to you separately (heirlooms from parents, high school rings, etc) and everythign that clearly belongs to her separately (her collection of barbie dolls from high school).

What's left is things you've accumulated or paid for during the marriage.

You can argue about how MUCH of it belongs to the marriage. The debt on your credit card that goes to YOUR lawyer will be YOUR debt and the debt on teh credit card that goes to HER lawyer will generally be hers, but it's your joint card so you'll want the more responsible of the two of you to take on the whole thing OR you'll want the other person to re-finance their portion of the debt.

Put the house mortgages next to the house and figure out the equity.

Put the car loans next to the cars and figure out THIER "equity".

Now, draw a line down the right side of the paper, one side for your stuff, one for hers. Put the house on your side with it's equity... and your two cars. Put her car and the $15,000 on her side.

NOW you know how inequitable things are... who has teh more positive number? THere's a lot of stuff left on the list, and you can trade stuff back & forth to see how equal you can make things. Maybe you'll end up with $2,000 positive equity more than she has, after you count your house & two cars against her $15K & one car... SOOOO... from teh rest of the stuff, you just take on $2,000 more worth. OR you split the rest up equally and agree to pay ehr $2,000 to account for her share in the house. Heck, that $2,000 equalizing payment is just a tiny price to pay to get this over with... cheaper than the lawyer, for sure!

Is this making sense?

HOUSE APPRAISAL: You're going to have a problem. Until now (maybe you'll change your mind after going through the above exercise), you have been all focused on getting the lowest appraisal possible for the house so that you could cut her equity down, and realistically, the deterioration of the house becasue she refuses to help take care of it on top of the bad housing market, you might not be so wrong on that. BUT you ALSO want to refinance and ... well, I don't knwo what you're thinking of doing with th eextra money you wnat to take out? If it's to pay her off an equalizing payment for her half of the property, then great, but if you thought that getting rid of equity, turning it into cash and makign it disappear, well, you're really shooting yoursel fin the foot here.

You might not need to do that, it sounds like soem kind of dirty trick that someone (not quite as crazy as JBar) might ave suggested.... pull all the equity out of the house and then hide it. It's kind of obvious and nasty & the judge will probably credit you with havin git unless you can prove... well, I had a friend who lost his job and had to pull a lot of money out of the retirment accounts to pay for their mortgage while the divorce was pending. His ex demanded that he return it all but it was easy to show that this was the ONLY way he could afford to pay the expenses during the separation so ... well, at elast so far, the judge hasn't ordered him to pay her for half of the retirement account he had to liquidate.

And your hope to have the hosue appriased for very little is NOT a good way to get a loan approved. You're either going ot have to have enough equity for the banks to lend you money (these days, with the sub-prime debacle... this is EXACTLY why the banks are in trouble these days).. .OR you're going to get a very low appraisal and the house will not be worth enough to get it re-financed. If you can't refinance and it stays in her name, you migth end up finding that she gets to get half of it LATER< when you CAN refinance... or in another situation I know, the wife was hanging on to the house with her fingernails as the loans on it were more expensive than the value of the house... and the husband was going under by paying for her to be able to stay there, so the judge ordered it sold out from under her. IF you can't get it re-financed within a certain amount of time, the judge very well could order it sold out from under you and the profits split IN HALF.

You do not want this. But artificially reducing the value of the house just to mess with the ex's equity is how thi shappens.

Worse, you do NOT want to go into court with you showing an appraisal and bank loan application showing your income as high and the house value as higher... and your own affidavit about your income being low and a second appraisal paid for that shows the house value at zero. You look like a big fat liar if you do that and you don't want to see what will happen if you try that type of dirty trick... you would end up one of those nice guys who got one stupid piece of advice and tried one stupid little thing and lost it ALL, ended up with a lifetime obligation to pay way too much support, and complaining that the system cheats men.

In almost every situation wehre a guy says he's been cheated, if you REALLY look at what happened, you realize that he shot himself in the foot, didn't file whe he should have, waited too long, didn't assert his rights right out, tried one stupid little dirty trick, got fed up with all the nastiness that the stbx was pulling and pulled his own DOOZIE of nastiness that got the judge really pissed off... forgot to show up or deided it wasn't worth it, told the judge that he thought the court was unfair, ignored the paperwork and tried to pretend it wasn't happening.

Truly, in every case I've looked at where someone says they've been cheated, it's been some bonehead move they made that made it happen.

You do NOT want to be the one who made the VERY CLICHE bonehead move of getting two different house appraisals, a high one to get a loan and a low one to try to cheat her out of half the value of the house.

Instead, so what I suggested about listing all the property. SEE what is FAIR... what the COURT would consider an equial split of stuff. This is your starting point. THis is your goal... to try to do what's fair and hopefully save your house in the process. YOu MIGHT find that you don't have to squiggle around on appraising the house at all.

Your questions about appraising the house have confused me in the past, making me wonder why you've been talking about refnancing at the same time as wanting to follow the appraiser around to point out things that will lower the appraisal. I THINK you may have gotten it into your head that hte only way you can keep the house is if you pay her for half of it... but you forget that you count off her car, the $15,000 that she took, and everything else that is part of the property settlement, and you may end up having enough OTHER stuff to give her (or take on, like the debt), to pay her for her half of the house, WITHOUT having to squiggle around about the value.

Is this helping at all?