Dirty Divorce Tricks Spouses Play | How to Avoid Them During Your Divorce

there are few events in life that are more emotional in the very beginning of a divorce process emotions such as anger and distrust that have built up over months or sometimes even years can boil out and cause even the most rational and good and sane people to act irrationally and treat their other spouse in the way they never would we're gonna go over 11 of the common dirty tricks that we see in our practice that we see spouses do to other spouses dirty trick number one hiding assets in anticipation of a divorce it is common for one of the spouses a husband or a wife to have certain accounts that will be titled solely these can be 401ks or investment accounts or IRAs it's not uncommon for one of the spouses to not know about these accounts usually there is one spouse that has made the mental decision that they're going to file for a divorce so that they have time to plan if they so choose to move assets around one of the most common things that we see is a spouse who has decided that they're going to take some assets whether it's an investment account asset or cash and try to hide it weeks or months or even years prior to filing for a divorce now while that's a dirty trick the good news is this that in our divorce process your lawyer or your legal team is able to go back in time and look forensic ly at different bank accounts and checking accounts and different investment accounts to find if money's been moved around and if needed you can enlist the help of an expert accountant to trace different funds to make sure that any money that's been hidden from you is found so that there can be a fair distribution of your assets in a divorce dirty trick number two starving a spouse financially so it's not uncommon for in traditional American families for one spouse to be a breadwinner and for the other spouse to maybe stay home or to make less money and unfortunately it's not uncommon at the beginning of the divorce process for the spouse who's a breadwinner to try to use the money that he has try to leverage a better deal against this vows how do they do this when spouse can try to financially starve the other spouse so for example a breadwinner who normally deposits his entire check into a joint operating account decides that he's going to have his check deposited into another account and only deposit just enough money or maybe a little bit less money into a spouse's account that that spouse needs to survive this can be problematic and this happens way too much so what can you do about it well the reality is the court system can help but it takes time in our court system to get to court so you should anticipate that if this is a possibility that it's going to happen that you need to have some additional source of funds to at least carry you over for a month or two or three until the court system and your attorney can catch up this can be a line of credit or this can be making sure that you have access to a credit card or if there are assets that are jointly titled before it's too late moving a portion of those assets into another account that the needy spouse will only have access to dirty trick number three that we see in a divorce process we see dirty trick number three with small business owners now small business owners control their pay to a great extent and we know they will pay themselves either through dividends or through a salary and what we see small business owners do in anticipation of a divorce unfortunately is they'll artificially suppress their income so it looks like to the outside world that they don't make as much money as they really do how do they do this well one way of doing this is to not generate dividends they might otherwise keeping the money in the business another way of doing this is especially if it's been premeditated and planned over time to bring the salary down of the spouse so it looks like they're making less money than they really are so that as soon as the divorce process is over they can go ahead and dial it up and ratchet it up and then generate more income for themselves another thing that we've seen recently a couple times is a spouse who will then during the divorce process who owns a business who will hire a new employee but in reality that employee will be a family member or a mother in another country and what the spouse will do is put that family member on the books and start paying them out and then at the end of the day that family member will then go ahead and funnel the money back to the spouse so what can you do about this well simply when we have small businesses and we look at the numbers and we look at the bank statements and we look at the accounting and the QuickBooks and things don't seem to add up well and willness the help of accountant or professional to come in and take a look at the books someone who understands the business to help us get to the bottom of it we can go ahead and impute wages on the spouse so that we can get the income to the right level to make sure that the results that we see in the divorce are fair and divorce dirty trick number four is one spouse spending money wildly so sometimes a person going through divorce it's so angry that they think they would rather see their money and get spent and be gone they'd rather do scorched earth they'd rather see it all gone so that the other spouse doesn't get that and so the thought process is that the angry spouse will go ahead and just liquidate assets and liquidate funds go gambling you got going on some very expensive trip and then just see it all disappear this is a real concern and so what can you do about it well if you have access to those funds a great first step is to make sure especially if they're liquid funds like cash or money that's an investment account to go ahead and pull some of that aside maybe half of the funds talk to your lawyer about it but pull some of those funds aside so that the spouse who's angry and might be acting irrationally can't access it in liquidate it another possibility is to go in front of a judge and say judge listen I have legitimate concerns that my spouse is acting irrationally and is blowing through our funds I need you to issue an injunction I need you to tell the bank account where these funds are at that they're not allowed to have the funds spent or withdrawn by anyone now the reality is that if a spouse does something wrong legally speaking the court can make sure at the end of the day that they address that in their final judgment so at the end of the day the spouse who didn't do anything wrong still gets a fair shake out of it but as a practical matter when money spent it can be very difficult to get it back so the best thing that you can do is to take actions now to make sure that those funds are not spent divorce dirty trick number five creating fake emails and fake social media profiles so that one spouse can create fake evidence from the other spouse for example in a recent child custody case we had we represented dad who was having a very very difficult very high conflict custody case against mom and we got some evidence we got some text messages turned over by the other side that were supposedly written by dad that supposedly had dad saying some very very very nasty things about mom evidence that would have been very damning in court and so we asked dad our client what's going on why would you write these horrible things I know this is a high conflict custody case but this is the mother of your child this is gonna look horrible in court and dad said I didn't do that I didn't write those emails after a link to discovery process it turned out that the mom had actually created fake social media profiles and fake text messaging accounts so that mom was able to pretend to be dad and then turn around and the mom pretending to be dad wrote these really really mean emails and text messages back to her we were able to prove it in court but it took some evidence it was a dirty trick by mom ultimately it hurt mom big time at the end of the case but it's something to keep an eye out for dirty divorce trick number six extortion imagine the example where there is a husband and a wife and the husband's in the military and they're getting ready to go through a divorce and the husband he's done something he shouldn't have done perhaps he's cheated on the wife or maybe he Gamble's or does something that's in the eyes of the military is not going to be very good and in the eyes of the military might cost the husband his rank or further attempts to to do better in the military to get promoted and the parties are getting ready to go through a divorce and the wife says to the husband listen I know that you did something that the military is not gonna like I know that you had an affair or I know that you went gambling when you weren't supposed to go gambling and I will tell the military and I will bring you down unless you sign this custody agreement that I want you to sign unless you agree to give me mom all custody of the kids now what's the husband to do he's in a difficult spot isn't he this sort of stuff happens a lot now while it may seem like mom's just using her bargaining power to her advantage in the eyes of Florida courts and in most courts she's not mom's actually committing extortion mom is actually doing something that's criminal in nature and it's a second-degree felony you see mom is trying to get dad to do something that he does not want to do and a big issue of his custody arrangement by using something over his head she's trying to threaten him in a way that if he doesn't do what she wants him to do she's going to hurt him that is extortion it's a crime and if something like that happens to you you tell your lawyer about it because your lawyer can take certain actions to try to nip it in the bud before things get out of hand divorce dirty trick number seven faking violence using it as a custody play domestic violence is very real and unfortunately we see way too much of it in the divorce courts to help combat domestic violence the law is created what we call domestic violence injunctions or restraining orders which are a tool that a party who is a victim of defect domestic violence can use they can go to court and they can ask the court for a restraining order to keep the party that's committing violence against them to keep them away and is part of these restraining orders the courts necessarily have to address custody issues and if a restraining order is granted we often see that the party who gets the restraining order will have time sharing with the kids or a hundred percent time with the kids until everything gets figured out later in divorce court the problem is that there sometimes some parties will abuse this technique they'll abuse the process of the restraining order and use it as a custody play against the other spouse so for example imagine the situation where mom and dad get into an argument and they know divorce is coming they're living together and they know that soon they're gonna be living apart and mom and dad have two children and the parties can't agree on where the kids are going to spend the night when the two parties move into different households sometimes we say situation where one of the parties so for example maybe mom runs to the courthouse and exagerate s-- the fight creates a situation of domestic violence that really didn't happen and is granted a domestic violence injunction and a restraining order so that mom as part of the restraining order because the court has to fix this emergency situation gives mom a hundred percent time sharing with the now if this happens to you and you're in the situation where somebody's abuse the process to get a restraining order against you and you don't have your kids the reality is it takes quick work and it takes a lot of work at the very front end of your divorce by your lawyers to unravel the damage that's done and to make sure that you get to see your kids again it has happened to you make sure to talk to a lawyer right away about it to talk about a plan an expedited plan to solve the problem dirty divorce trick number eight conflicting out attorneys so as attorneys we have this rule that we are not allowed to represent two parties who are adverse to each other so practical terms in a divorce you can't represent the husband and represent the wife because you aren't able to do the best job you can for both parties at the same time so sometimes we'll see one of the parties will run around town and set appointments with every divorce lawyer that they can and share and spill the beans about their case and talk to every divorce lawyer they can so that the divorce lawyer is conflicted out from representing the other spouse and this is true even if the party who does this doesn't retain the other or doesn't retain all the lawyers just the very act of sitting down in talking to the lawyer under a lawyer's ethics may preclude that lawyer from representing the other spouse divorce dirty trick number nine using children as leverage for a better financial deal imagine the situation where mom and dad have been together for quite some time they have children together mom's been a stay-at-home mom dad is out there in the workforce he makes the money and divorce time comes around and dad wants to keep as much of his money as he can maybe even more than what the law says that he should keep now dad loves his children but dad hasn't really bonded with the kids and really he doesn't want to have a ton of time with the kids because he's never really had a ton of time with the kids and conversely mom is very aligned with the kids she's very close to them and she wants to have lots of time fact most of the time with the kids because that's what she's used to and most importantly that's what the kids are used to and mom believes genuinely that that's how the kids will thrive the dirty trick that we see all too much is dad knowing that this is a trigger point for mom knowing that mom really wants to have the kid most of the time dad will say you know what mom I want 50/50 timeshare or maybe even dad will say that I want the kids most of the time in a situation that really the two parties should be able to get together and work out early in the process if they were both focused on what's best for the children turns into a litigated matter or what dad's really trying to do is negotiate in the big scheme of things he's trying to trade time with the children in exchange for more money so what do you do in a situation like this well the good news is that there are experts that can be hired if needed to get into the dynamic of your particular family and to render an opinion to the courts that's not based on dad's wishes or mom's wishes and it's certainly not based on dad's desire to try to leverage kids for the finances but instead it's based on what's in the best interest of the kids and two very important factors that the courts look at when determining what's in the best interest of the kids is which parent is going to facilitate a good relationship with the other pair and what have the kids been used to before so can we keep things consistent for the kids going for divorce dirty trick number ten parental alienation sometimes one of the parties can get so angry at the other party that they want to hurt the other party that they align with their children and use their children almost as a sounding board to tell their children how bad the other party is and in its extreme cases this can be called parental alienation it's a situation where the children become strongly aligned with one of the parties because of the actions taken body by that party with the children one of the most important factors in a custody case if the judges were to have decide where the children are going to be is which parent is going to nurture and facilitate a good relationship with the children and the other parent and parental alienation is the exact opposite of that now what do you do in a situation where you have a parent that's alienating the children from the other parent there aren't any great answers but the best thing that you can do if it really seems to be the case of parental alienation is to get an expert involved there are child psychologists that are trained not just in diagnosing parent parental alienation but also bringing the issue and testifying in front of the judge so that the judge understands what's going on and testifying in front of the judge to give the judge some corrective measures that the judge can take to try to salvage and rehabilitate the relationship between the alienated parent and the children divorce dirty trick number 11 is racking up credit card debt on another spouses credit card so in many families we have joint credit cards where one party is a primary and the other is a secondary and unfortunately when the emotions of divorce get a little bit out of control we've seen one party take a credit card and rack up debt on it to try to limit the ability of the other party to go ahead and spend the things that they might need during a divorce process is there a solution to this yes your attorney can go in front of a judge and take care of it if your spouse is acting crazy and racking up your credit card debt and when your case is finalized your attorney can make sure that the numbers all work out at the end so that your credit card gets paid and your left and you leave the divorce on good financial footing

Channel: How To Divorce - Florida

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Keywords: Dirty Divorce Tricks Spouses Play, Dirty Divorce Tricks, Dirty Divorce Tricks Spouses, how to file for divorce in florida, Steps in a Florida Divorce, divorce in florida, florida divorce laws, filing for divorce in florida, florida divorce forms, legal separation in florida, dissolution of marriage florida, how to get a divorce in florida, divorce papers florida, Divorce Law Florida, Florida Divorce FAQ, how to avoid Dirty Divorce

Id: Zeuq66TsKO0

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018