Write down everything that you’ve agreed on, and go to a lawyer to have a separation agreement drawn up. The lawyer will probably have 10 more things you didn’t consider that you’ll need to agree on. The big ones are legal and physical custody, alimony (if any), the house, and retirement accounts. Get the separation agreement signed ASAP.
I’m not saying this because I think you or your wife are bad people or acting dishonestly, but it’s pretty common for an amicable divorce to turn not amicable quickly.
I assume you’ve run the child support guidelines in your state to figure out a support amount?
Marriage itself is fine, just needs to be strongly discouraged before like age 27 or something. I married my first wife at 35. I’ll let you know when she divorces me.
Yea I think this is the advice I would give someone now, and date the person for a long time before you marry them, also live with them before if possible.
Agree 100% here. I dated my now wife for 10 years before we got married. Lived together for 7 of those. Sorry to hear about the divorce, but sounds like it’s going as well as it can.
Thanks and yea we already worked out the child support from the state guidelines and i agreed to about double that with alimony for 4 years. The limit for Alimony is 5yrs now at least in AL so i can still do ok on that amount for the next 4 years and I figure thats more than fair.
As an attorney who has done quite a bit of family law I would give you two suggestions.
-Retain an attorney who represents you even if it is uncontested. Get advice from she/he.
-Don’t agree to pay more than your legal obligation in the actual decree. If you want to voluntarily do it fine. But divorce decrees are not easy to modify and if things change you will regret it.
Disclaimer: This is not intended as legal advice in Alabama.
this is good advice, i have two questions though. My concern is that by retaining an attorney that she would do the same and we would start down a road that wouldn’t really benefit us? I have relatives who are lawyers but not family law so I’ve talked things over with them but not with a lawyer that practices family law. I have only agreed to pay what the law mandates as far as child support but theres not much of a guideline for alimony so I’m fairly lost there, I kinda figured I’d just do what I thought seemed fair and worst case its 4 years and its over. Fair thinking?
At least here you can do what is called a waiver divorce. Simply put you get an attorney who drafts everything. She signs the decree and a waiver waiving her need to appear for anything and her ability to desire counsel. That is what I would recommend. No ethical attorney can actually represent both of you anyways because it is a direct conflict of interest.
Alimony is need based here. I don’t know the law there.
My ultimate point is the decree is the fall back. Outside of that you guys can do whatever you want as long as you both agree to it. So for example your decree with with max specificity will lay out custody. Who gets what holiday. When do you switch who has the kids. Etc. But you guys can agree to whatever outside of the decree. The decree is there for when your relationship breaks down. It will control at that point. So it’s important that it isn’t full of detrimental stuff for you.
Yea that is pretty much the plan, to have an attorney draft it and we just sign off. The alimony was the only thing I was somewhat unsure about, child support is cut and dry but as far as I can tell with Alabama alimony law its just whatever the judge thinks fits the case, other than a 5 year limit, which we are trying to avoid a judge determining that obviously.
This is basically all i can find:
Periodic alimony is when one spouse provides a set amount of support to the other on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis for a specific amount of time. The most common type of periodic alimony is “rehabilitative support,” which is a payment to the lesser earning spouse only until that spouse can obtain proper job training, education, or skills to enter the workforce and become self-supporting. Rehabilitative support is common in cases where one party left the workforce to raise a family.
She is working now as I said and had been working as of last year but only 15 an hour and as of now probably not a full 40 hours a week although probably between 30-40 depending on week.
So she could clearly support herself on that, and then she would have child support, but it definitely wouldn’t be enough for her to stay in our current residence or one thats similar. So does that mean i should give enough to make that possible at least for a few years while she works on a plan to be able to do it all herself? Seems fair enough to me for that to be the case but IANAL lol.
edit: Probably at a minimum I’ll have my sisters go over it with me and any advice before signing anything, just to make sure I’m not tying myself into a bad spot as you are saying as well. I guess I could go get a lawyer and just be like look i just need to know what alimony I would expect in my situation and thats it thanks?
Not many divorce cases here include alimony just fyi. Like I said the standard here is need, not equality so unless one party is unable to work or there is a humongous income disparity alimony doesn’t happen. Child support calculators already take into account normal differences in income. I would hire an attorney for just you and ask them whether your situation would be a normal case for alimony in your state.
To be clear I’m not advocating for fucking her over. I’m advocating not fucking yourself over. From my experience the leaving party feels guilt and that results in divorce decree disaster in some cases.
Are you sure she hasn’t already consulted with an attorney? Couldn’t you consult with one without retaining them for this yet (thus without her knowing) to make sure you’re not making any big mistakes?
I’m not saying fuck her over, but it sounds like you may be about to pay her a lot more than you have to.
Tell her you will pay for the attorney for an uncontested divorce @wirelessgrinder if you haven’t already. Make the agreed decree fair. Save tens of thousands.
Yea agreed on the not fucking myself over, I don’t think i have much guilt in the area, but just moreso figured if I went with what i thought was fair and reasonable then I could avoid it being messy for myself and the kids and also avoid getting fucked over by her lawyer, which tbh I don’t know what to extent that is possible really, I figure the deal we were already talking about was about the best deal possible she could get lawyer or no lawyer but IANAL.
Agreed and maybe so on too much so yea i will do that i think.
I think this was pretty much assumed but one other thing with that i guess, we have a joint checking account that we both are checks are going into so there isn’t really a her money and my money at this point. So yea i just figured “we” would pay for the lawyer to write it up and then split our assets as decreed and be done with it.
ha i used to read OOT a fair amount but don’t remember that one, good shit.
Seriously though everyone thats replied here in some way, much love, this place means a lot to me.
Also not really relevant but I got some more shit news today to hopefully top off the year, fingers crossed no more after this. My boss called me today and said they that basically we are losing one of our markets which means we need to restructure and obviously goin to lose some people, I’m safe thankfully which from what he had indicated previously I figured that would be the case but still good to know for sure. It sucks though as I have had 5+ year working relationships with probably 5-10 people that I know and like, 2 of which work for me currently and most worked for me at one point or another. Shit sucks
Its really sucks not being able to be with my wife since Covid hit, but on the other hand if I’d been in the Wuhan lockdown with her we’d probably be divorced now. So there’s that.
I’m only now able to breathe after stressing for twenty years about staying on the optimal, diplomatic course and not costing myself unnecessarily extra along the way.
