Legal Separation Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

How will my divorce be affected if I have been separated from my wife for years?

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The separation ends up giving us kind of a dry run of what life is gonna be like after the divorce, because in many ways you’ve been living divorce. You just haven’t been legally divorced. It allows us to see how well have the children done going between the two homes, and has that schedule worked out, and are there changes that need to be made to that schedule? Another valuable aspect of seeing what that post-living – post-separation life is like is that you’ve got living expenses for each house. We don’t have to project or estimate what your living expenses are gonna be like when you go into separate homes.

We’ve already got – see on a monthly basis what that track record is, so it may tell us right away as to, oh, well, with the child support considerations involved, the – turns out there’s no need for spousal maintenance, because we’ve already got demonstrated monthly expenses. And so, in some ways it’s valuable, but then also there could be some other concerns when it comes to deterioration of assets or depreciation, such as lack of home upkeep by the spouse that stayed in the home, or questions of, “Well, gee, during the last three years during separation, I’ve made all these IRA contributions. Why should those be divided in half when we’ve been living separately?” So, there’s some other concerns that come up.

Stillwater family law attorney, Matt Ludt, discusses separation and divorce.

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