Divorce Support Forums: My house....or our house???

Take the value of the house 3 years ago and the value of it now. Subtract the values of the mortgages at both times. The increase in value is what you share.

Unless you paid for it entirely from separate funds, like an inheritance or trust fund from before the marriage. The fact taht YOU paid it, wrote out the check, worked for the money in the account that the check came from, etc., does not mean that she doesn't deserve half of it.

The judges assume that if you're married to someone, you share everything equally... chores, expenses, work, earning. If you are paying more from your work earnings to live and letting her use hers to play & buy crap, that's considered YOUR choice of how to evenly split the obligations and joys of marriage. The jduge is not going to go behind your decisions and say whether or not you made GOOD choices in making those decisions, whether you SHOULD have never let her spend a day at the spa for $1000 a pop every Saturday... wehther you SHOULD have required her to put some of her earnings towards paying for the house. The judge will also not listen to her talk about how you insisted that she keep herself up, stay the perfect weight or wahtever other accusations she wants to make, adn whatever claims she makes in saying that she did her fair share of work for the marriage.. .

The ONLY things the jduge will look at is whether your source of funding for paying your mortgage was clearly separate... like I said, if there was a trust fund to pay for the house or something...

There are some states where you're allowed ot bring up "fault" and say that you deserve more of a piece of the savings accumulated during hte marriage (savings in terms of equity in the house if that's all there was), but not all states allow that, and doing it really brings up a whole can of worms you probably don't want to deal with.

In your sitaution, the way property values have been in the past 3 years, you probably don't have a whole lot to worry about. The contributions that the marriage made to the value of the house probably only are equal to the value of rent and have not added a whole lot to the total value of the equity in the house.

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