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HOW MUCH WILL MY DIVORCE COST?

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You have options on how to finalize your divorce.  And the costs will depend on the method you select.  The Court fee for filing a divorce is approximately $395 and there is an additional recording fee depending on the county where the case is filed.

DO IT YOURSELF DIVORCE

You can download the Florida Supreme Court forms for free, fill them in with your spouse and file them yourselves and then proceed through the court process.   The only cost is the filing fee.  However, you must consider the length of time this will take you to prepare the forms without assistance and to process the forms through the court process which may take many months.

PARALEGAL DIVORCE

There are paralegal services that will help you fill in the Florida Supreme Court forms.  These services cannot prepare any documents other than the standard forms and cannot offer any legal advice.  They also cannot file the case for you and obtain the Final Judgment on your behalf.  The costs for the assistance to prepare the forms is approximately $400 to $800.

FLAT FEE DIVORCE

My office can assist you in preparing all documents necessary to obtain a final judgment of dissolution.  This includes a Marital Settlement Agreement drafted by the attorney and a Parenting Plan if necessary also prepared by the attorney.  In addition, there are a number of pleadings that must be presented to the court will be prepared and presented to the Judge.  We will then file the final documents necessary to obtain the Final Judgment on your behalf.  In many cases this process can be completed in less than a month.  The cost of this services is $2,000 for a divorce without children and $2,500 for a divorce with minor children.

MEDIATED DIVORCE

I am also a Supreme Court Certified Family Mediator and can assist you and your spouse to negotiate the terms of a Marital Settlement Agreement and Parenting Plan if you and your spouse are struggling with the terms.  As the mediator I cannot file the final documents but can assist you through the process or refer you to an attorney to complete the process.  The cost of this service is $350 per hour but the final cost will depend upon the number of issues to be addressed and the number of meetings necessary to resolve the issues.  Each meeting last approximately two hours and normally there are on average between three to five meetings.

COLLABORATIVE DIVORCE

As an attorney with over twenty years of experience representing parties in divorce and paternity, I can represent you in a collaborative divorce process when there are more difficult issues to be decided.  My fees for this representation of a party in a collaborative divorce is $400 per hour.  This process also includes a neutral financial professional, a neutral facilitator and a collaborative attorney for your spouse.  There are times when I am also selected as the neutral facilitator in the collaborative process and I charge $250 per hour for these services.  While this process is certainly more expensive than the options above, it is much less expensive than the average fully litigated divorce.  A comparison of the Collaborative Process for a case with minor children to a fully litigated divorce can be found here.

A LITIGATED DIVORCE

My office does not represent clients in this process.  I stopped handling litigated divorces in 2012 after many years of assisting clients through this process.  Part of the reason for this is the extreme costs involved which I did not find in my client’s best interest.  Some cases require litigation to resolve the issues, but I strongly advise clients to consider if this is necessary and the costs involved. A comparison of the costs of a Collaborative Divorce and a Litigated Divorce can be found here.

How to save money on your divorce.

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$“Civility costs nothing and buys everything” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

“Be prepared and be honest” John Wooden

One of the most common questions I am asked during an initial consultation with a new client is “how much is this divorce going to cost me?”  I completely understand the concern that most clients have about the financial costs involved in a divorce including the costs of the attorney, other professionals, and the court fees.  There are other costs that you should consider as well, such as the time away from work or family, as well as the emotional and psychological costs to you and your family.  So, the proper question to ask is how can you minimize all of these costs associated with divorce?  Here are my top five suggestions:

♦     Prepare!  The number one thing that anyone can do before beginning the divorce process is research and prepare.  You want to learn all that you can about the process and your options.  You want to learn about options such as mediation and collaborative divorce.  You also will want to also know as much as can about your family’s finances.  A good list of documents that you should have available can be found here.  These are the Mandatory Disclosure documents in Florida and are a comprehensive list of documents that will give you a good picture of your family’s income and expenses.  In addition, preparing a family budget will give you a good idea of your family’s income and support needs after the divorce. You will also want to prepare a list of your family’s assets and their net worth as well as a list of the outstanding debts and liabilities owed by your family.  A good way to consider all of these issues is to prepare a Financial Affidavit form which asks you to consider your income, expenses, assets and liabilities.  (A Florida Financial Affidavit can be found here.)

♦     Fix your priorities.  Everything does not have to be a battle.  If you have children, your first priority should be to shield the children from the litigation and emotional strain of the divorce.  Your next priority should be to move through this process with as little emotional and financial suffering as possible.  It is often easy to let your emotions take control over the process and make decisions out of anger or frustration.  This can often be a costly mistake.  With the goals of shielding the children and obtaining a smooth divorce you can then prioritize the issues of your case easier.  Remember, the less you disagree about, the less the divorce will cost you.  If you find setting your emotions aside as you negotiate difficult, you may want to consider a hiring a counselor or coach to help you through the divorce process.

♦     Negotiate!  The costs involved in a litigated divorce can be staggering.  It is not unusual for a litigated divorce to cost tens of thousands of dollars for each side.  And this does not consider the destructive emotional costs involved in litigation.  The most efficient way to avoid the extreme costs of litigation is to negotiate early and often.  As you negotiate keep in mind your priorities so that you don’t become embroiled in a fight over certain issues simply because your spouse “pushed your buttons”.  It is also important to keep in mind that the research you conducted early will allow you to have a stronger position in the negotiations as you will be well informed about the reality of your family’s financial situation.

♦     Consider alternative forms of resolving the case.  If you and your spouse are able to negotiate effectively alone then this can result in an extremely low cost divorce with the attorneys only involved in drafting and reviewing the agreement and filing it with the court.  If you need more help with the negotiations consider hiring a qualified mediator or collaborative attorney to assist you with the negotiations.   By avoiding litigation, you are eliminating the high costs of depositions, court hearings, expert witness fees, and other fees associated with litigation.

♦     Be conservative with your professional’s time.  If you hire a professional mediator or attorney to assist you with your divorce, you must first ensure that you enter into contract with the professional that outlines exactly how you will be charged.  In almost all cases the contract will detail hourly billing for the professional’s services.  You now have control over how much the professional charges by how much you require of their office.  If your attorney requests you provide documentation required to provide to the other side, then gather the information requested, organize it and provide it to the attorney in an efficient manner.  The same goes for forms that your attorney requests you fill out.  Also, if you have questions, it is often better to keep a list and once a week send an e-mail with the list of questions and a request that you set a time to speak to your attorney to discuss these.  The attorney may be able to answer many by return e-mail or may find that setting an appointment to speak is more efficient.  In either case, your attorney will have an opportunity to properly prepare for the questions and answer them in the most efficient manner.   Also, be aware that many attorneys have paralegals that can assist you with basic work at a much lower hourly rate.

There is no “standard fees” for a divorce in most cases.  And there may be aspects of the costs your divorce over which you do not have control.  In some cases one spouse may be unwilling to negotiate in good faith and want to force the case to a trial.  However, the more responsibility you can take over the aspects of your divorce, the less the overall cost will be.

The Six Steps to Negotiations

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steps

“Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life”  Ralph Ransom, Artist & Author

 

Every negotiation follows certain simple steps.  We are often not even aware that we are following the steps.  Sometimes we may skip a step but I would say this is at our own peril as the side that avoids or ignores a step is at a complete disadvantage.  When we were young and in a hurry we may try to climb steps two at a time or jump down steps in even longer leaps.  But an adult would always admonish us that it was not safe to miss steps and that we should be careful in using the steps as laid out for us.

In this series of articles I am going to break down each of the critical steps to a negotiation.  These steps apply equally to a negotiation that is facilitated by a mediator and to any negotiation that you find yourself in on a daily basis.  As a trained mediator I see many parties come to the mediation unprepared and without having gone through these steps.  This is a sure sign that the mediation is going to be more difficult and may very well result in an impasse.  This is so unfortunate because a little preparation could have saved the time and expense of the mediation and resulted in a signed agreement.

The steps in their simplest form are as follows:

  1. Identify the issues and the positions.
  2. Consider both side’s options to resolve the issues
  3. Research everything
  4. Establish the ground rules
  5. Bargain: Look for overlap and ways to resolve the issues that best meet the most concerns of the parties
  6. Memorialize the agreement

I will discuss each of these steps in some detail in future posts.  For a simple “negotiation” like deciding on a dinner menu for the family or determining what time is curfew for your teenager, each step may be simple and require less than a minute.  But for complicated issues like a divorce, the dissolution of a family business or resolving an international crisis each step may need painstaking attention and take days or weeks before the parties are ready to move on to the next step.   No matter what type of negotiation you find yourself in, a thorough understand of these steps and a willingness to commit the time necessary for each will result in a better likelihood of reaching an agreement and walking away with a deal that each side can live with.

PEACEful Divorce: A checklist for dissolving a marriage

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sito_Peace_Flowers“Give Peace a Chance.”  John Lennon

With only a brief review of this blog or my company website (www.professionalresolutioncenter.com) a visitor can tell that I am all about finding peaceful ways to resolve human conflict.  My company’s moto is “Peaceful Resolution to Complex Issues”.   But in the case of this article, I am not talking so much about the method of dissolving a marriage as I am about the checklist of things to consider when considering a divorce.  There is a certain irony to using the acronym P*E*A*C*E to organize and prepare for your divorce.  Yet it is actually the tool used to teach new lawyers and judges about the system to process a divorce (at least in Florida).  I am a strong proponent of having a peaceful divorce by using either mediation or collaborative representation to avoid the adversarial process of litigation.  But regardless of the process you employ, you can use “PEACE” to ensure you have covered your most important issues.  The checklist looks like this:

P arental Responsibility

E quitable Distribution

A limony

C hild Support

E verything Else

P is for Parental Responsibility:

The first thing you should consider is Parental Responsibility (unless you don’t have children then you can obviously skip this step).  While there are a number of sections of the Florida Statutes that address parenting issues, the section that addresses time sharing is found at Florida Statute 61.13.  The two main aspects of parental responsibility are (1) who makes major decisions affecting the children and (2) where do the children go to sleep each night.  These are two distinct issues to be considered as the children may sleep the majority of time at Dad’s house, but both Mom and Dad may have an equal say in whether Johnny gets braces or Taylor gets to go to band camp in Georgia.  In Florida it is most common for the parties to have “shared parental responsibility” wherein the parents have an equal say in the major life decisions affecting the children.  However, in some cases the parties may agree, or the court may order that, in the case the parties cannot agree on a decision after consulting each other,  one parent will have ultimate decision making on certain issues like education or medical care.  In extreme cases the court may order that one parent have sole decision making, that is they need not consult the other parent when making decisions affecting the children.

The second issue to be addressed is the time sharing schedule for the children.  Florida and many states have done away with “custody” and “visitation” and moved to the more realistic and equitable status of time sharing.  If a judge is to determine a time sharing schedule they are told to consider twenty factors to decide what schedule is in the best interest of the children.  Clearly, the parents, who know the children and the situation of the family are in a better place to determine what schedule will work best for them.  Samples of the Florida Supreme Court and Twelfth Judicial Circuit Parenting Plans can be found here.

E is for Equitable Distribution

The next thing to consider is how the parties will divide up their assets and debts.  Again several areas of the law address these issues, but the main provisions are to be found in Florida Statute 61.075.  If the court is to determine the equitable distribution, then they must first determine what is or is not marital assets and liabilities.  There are countless cases that discuss the finer points of what is and what is not marital (i.e. I owned a house before the marriage, but during the marriage you helped me put on a new roof and remodel the kitchen and my pay check was used to pay the mortgage, is any of the appreciation of the property marital?)  The statute helps to answer these questions but often, in complicated cases, if the parties cannot agree, then these issues get turned over to the judge for a decision.  After there is a determination of what is martial and what is non-marital, then the marital items must be “equitably divided”.  The statute says that the law starts with the premise that the division should be equal unless there is a justification for an unequal distribution based upon ten factors, including the catch all “any other factor necessary to do equity and justice between the parties”.  You can imagine how this can be fought out if the parties don’t reach an agreement.

A is for Alimony

The third item on our divorce checklist is Alimony or spousal support.  The rules for alimony can be found at Florida Statute 61.08.  This is probably the most hotly contested area of any divorce.  However, with careful consideration  and some creative thinking, it is very possible to come to an agreement on spousal support and avoid litigation.  Basically, as of July 2013, there are four kinds of alimony in Florida: (1) bridge the gap; (2) rehabilitative; (3) durational and (4) permanent periodic.  (If you are reading this after May 2014 this entire section might have changed as there has been considerable pressure to change the alimony statute in Florida for the past several years.)  For purposes of determining alimony the marriages are divided into three categories depending on their length: (1) short term marriages are any less than seven years, (2) medium term marriages are any between seven and seventeen years and (3) long term marriages are any longer than seventeen years.  First there must be a determination as to whether either party has a need for alimony and then a determination if the other party has an ability to pay alimony.  If there is a “need and ability to pay” then there must a determination as the amount and type of alimony.  For this the Court considers the length of marriage and ten factors (including again the lovely catch all “any other factor necessary to do equity and justice between the parties”.)  There is currently no formula to use to determine how much alimony should be paid and for how long.  It is easy to understand why this issue has become perhaps the most litigated issue in any divorce.

C is for Child Support

The determination of child support is one of the more straight forward areas of divorce law as it is based upon “guidelines” found at Florida Statute 61.30.  While there may be some dispute about the income of each parent based when a parent is unemployed, under-employed or self-employed., once the actual income is decided, then calculating child support is a matter of filing in a formula and seeing what comes out the other side.  The form used to calculate the formula can be found here.  While these are guidelines and may be modified by agreement or the court, it is important to remember that the statute is clear that parents have an obligation to support their children and this is the area where the courts exercise the least flexibility.   Under child support the parties should also consider such factors as which parent will supply health insurance for the children and how will uncovered medical bills be paid?  How will the parties divide the Federal Tax Deduction and Earned Income Credit for the children?  Also, the parties may be able to come to agreements about child support issues that the Court does not have authority to consider under the statute such as issues of support of children while attending college, payment of tuition for college, and how the parties will divide the payment of extra-curricular activities.

E is for Everything Else

So, after considering all of these issues, what else is left?  The E for everything else.  This is where the parties or the Judge can decide which party will pay for the attorney fees (consider Florida Statute 61.16), will the Wife have her name restored to her maiden name, do there have to be additional orders from the court to divide certain retirement plans or to re-title property, etc.

The order of the issues in the PEACE method is also important.  Alimony can only be determined after  Equitable Distribution because how the assets are divided (family business, investments, rental property) may affect the income that each party has available.  Child support can only be determined after Alimony because child support is based upon the proportional share of the family income held by each parent and if alimony is provided then this will shift the proportions of overall income.  And clearly “everything else” comes after everything else.  So, use the checklist in the order it is provided.  Ignore anything that does not apply to your family (no children then no parental responsibility or child support) and consider each factor to come to an equitable resolution of your case.

Hopefully this article will help you, the dear reader, understand some of the basic factors to consider if you are considering a divorce.  Hopefully it has also helped you realize why advice from a well qualified attorney can be so valuable if you find yourself in a situation where a divorce is happening.  This article is not meant to take the place of the careful advice of an attorney trained in marital and family law.   Whether you decide to proceed in a collaborative, mediated or litigated divorce, the PEACE outline provides a short checklist of the issues to be addressed.

Knowledge is the Key to Great Negotiations

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In less enlightened times, the best way to impress women was to own a hot car. But women wised up and realized it was better to buy their own hot cars so they wouldn’t have to ride around with jerks.  

Scott Adams, American cartoonist

I am thrilled to be facilitating a workshop at the 21st Annual Conference for ADR Professionals: “Expanding Our Horizons” on August 9-10, 2013, at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando, Florida.  My Workshop is “Diversity: Delights and Downfalls”, a session that will explore in particular age and gender issues in mediation.  In preparing for the session, I have been reading a lot of articles and research papers about women in negotiations.

One such article, published a while ago but that came back to my attention with this research is a story that ran on NPR in January 2012: Women’s Car-Shopping Tactics Steer Them Toward Better Deals by Dana Farrington.  The main point of the story was that women were often getting better deals than men in the traditionally masculine realm of car buying.  According to the article, the reason that women are doing so much better at getting good deals in the car dealership is because women over research the event before being approached by the salesman.  Women had researched the details of the car, price, and financing terms and were in fact over prepared for the purchase.  By the time they enter the dealership they are not “browsers” but rather well informed buyers.  Because of this, they are prepared to negotiate a reasonable deal for this substantial purchase.

The reason I bring this up is not to further divide the genders.  Rather, the lesson to be learned here is perhaps the most important  lesson in any negotiation or mediation for everyone.  The most critical time of every negotiation occurs before you enter the room.  The most important investment is the time spent preparing.  Every time you enter into a negotiation the importance of the outcome  should be equal to the investment of your time in preparing.  If you are negotiating what movie you will see with your spouse, you may want to investigate the basic synopsis and reviews of the latest blockbusters.  If you are negotiating the terms of your divorce from your spouse you want to do a lot more research on parenting issues, values of assets and liabilities, income potentials of both of you and your partner.  If you are negotiating an international trade agreement, the research will obviously be incredibly complex and detailed.

As a mediator, the greatest downfall I see in mediation conferences is the lack of preparation by the parties.  You cannot expect favorable outcomes if you do not invest the time in detailed preparations.  This is why you should be as well prepared for the informal mediation process as you would be for the formal litigation process.

A New Reality for Elder Care

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“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” Andy Rooney

The Herald Tribune, Sarasota is publishing a three articles series on in-home care for our aging population.  This is a fascinating series and I highly recommend that everyone read it.  http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130526/ARTICLE/130529745/2416/NEWS?p=1&tc=pg

The series should help bring awareness that every family needs a plan to meet the needs of our loved ones as they age.  The articles point out how difficult and expensive it can be to find quality in home care.  While surveys have shown that most people wish to live out their lives in their own homes, many cannot afford the care that is necessary to fulfill this wish.  Often, to make ends meet, in home care is provided by family members who may have to make major life changes to meet the needs of their loved ones.

These problems and issues should be addressed head on by all concerned loved ones.  If everyone cannot agree upon the best solutions then they can look to elder mediation as a way to explore all possible ways to address the needs of the elder.  With elder mediation we bring together the interested family members, the caregivers and the experts in the field to ensure that all issues are appropriately addressed and resolved.