Well, it’s officially November, which means that the holidays are literally right around the corner. For most people, it’s a pretty joyful, exciting time – looking forward to some extra time off of work, watching the Thanksgiving Day parade in your pajamas, enjoying Christmas breakfast with the extended fam, avoiding that annual family drama or...
Celebrating Holidays When You’re Separated
On Friday, we talked about custody and visitation cases where a grandparent – or other non parent – petitions the court for custody and/or visitation. The cases I described on Friday are otherwise normal custody cases, where mom and dad share custody and visitation of the minor children in question. In those cases, grandparents (or...
Believe me, I am far from a spiritual adviser. What I am, though, is someone who has seen a lot of divorce. I’ve seen women in my office make arguments for divorce, and arguments against divorce. Though my general feeling is that most people who say that they don’t believe in divorce haven’t been unhappily...
I hate these cases. Really, really hate them. I see moms with some frequency who come in and tell me that they were trying not to make any future issues with custody and visitation, but that their child asked them to intervene for one reason or another. Usually, these children are older teenagers (15+) and...
On Monday, we started talking about child support, and how it’s calculated. It’s actually pretty straightforward, though the child support guideline figures can vary dramatically, which makes it a refreshing area of law. We ran the guidelines a bunch of different ways, using the same income figures, to show you the difference between one and...
Child support is one of those refreshing areas of law where there are black and white, hard and fast answers. As long as we know what numbers – regarding your income and your child’s father’s income, daycare expenses, health care expenses, etc – we can quickly and easily compute child support. From that point, it...
I hear you; this is hard. Divorce is scary. It’s overwhelming. It’s so wide-reaching, too! Buying a house or car is expensive, but a divorce divides EVERYTHING you’ve earned, purchased, or acquired (including debt, including calculating support, and including custody and visitation) during the course of your entire marriage. If that’s daunting, well, that’s a...
Basically, in Virginia, you can get divorced in one of two ways. Either you guys duke it all out in front of a judge, who ultimately rules on how everything will get divided in your case, or, alternatively, you and your husband reach an agreement regarding how everything will be divided. In the latter case...