How to Save Money on Your Divorce: Personal Property

For some of our clients, money is no object when it comes to their representation. However, the majority of our clients have at least some concern regarding how they will afford our legal services. While the simplest of divorces can come in under $1000 including filing fees, most cases are not that simple. When lawyers have to spend more time sorting out the issues and facts, the cost of a divorce rises. If you are someone who needs or wants to save money on your divorce, here are my top tips on how to save money on your divorce. This post concerns personal property. In future posts, I will cover real property, debts, and other assorted ideas to save you money on your divorce.

Personal property is most of the “stuff’ you own. Cars, furniture, appliances, home furnishings, horses, tools, clothes, and jewelry all fall in the category of personal property. For most people, their personal property is the contents of their home, their garage and any storage units they may have.

This little guy is not worth fighting over in your divorce. Buy a new one instead.

What is not personal property? Your house and any other real estate you own are considered “real property.” Retirement accounts and investment accounts do not fall under the personal property category either.

If you owned an item before marriage, Illinois law considers it your non-marital property. Also gifts given specifically to you , as opposed to you as a couple, qualify as non-marital property. What’s so great about non-martial property? If you can prove it is non-marital, you get to keep it. In most situations, you will not have to prove that your property is non-marital because your spouse will agree that it is yours. Sometimes, however, a spouse does not agree on a designation of an item as non-marital property. In that situation, you need to have some type of proof that the property qualifies as non-marital.

The first step to saving money on the personal property portion of your divorce is taking stock of what you own. Make an inventory. Shoot a video. Create a spreadsheet. You have many options on how to do this.

The best time to do this is when you are still in the phase of just thinking of the divorce before you move out or your spouse moves out. If your spouse moves out, he or she will be taking at least some items and you may have a hard time remembering or knowing what those were. If you are the one to move out, you have multiplied the difficulty of this task because now you are working from memory.

Because your goal in recording what personal property you own is to save money in your divorce, you need to consider the pros and cons to each method of making a record of your personal property. For instance, making a video is an easy method of recording your personal property. You can walk from room to room with your cell phone and shoot videos while you narrate relevant details. This works wonderfully when you need something fast. Unfortunately, you will not save any money if you just make the video and hand it over to your attorney.

So what do you do? Take the video. Narrate while recording the video regarding relevant details that will help you later. Open drawers and closets to shoot the contents. Zoom in on important information that could affect values such as model numbers. Then use that video to help you make an inventory in a word processing document or spreadsheet.

The obvious con to word processing documents and spreadsheets is that they take a lot more time than a video. But in the long run, that con is actually their biggest advantage. The time you spend creating this document or spreadsheet drastically reduces the amount of time that your attorney or her staff has to spend working on a list of your property. When you can provide your attorney with a file that they can access and work with, you have saved them lots of time and yourself lots of money.

Although you can provide us with a handwritten list, this is not going to save us as much time as a word processing document or spreadsheet. We recently had a case with a handwritten list and although we managed to make it work quite well all the way through the hearing in the case, the day came when we needed to prepare a proposed judgment to submit to the judge. At that point, we just could not use the handwritten list anymore. We had to take the time to type up the handwritten list to add to the judgment. If we had a word processing document or spreadsheet, we could have added the same information with just a few keystrokes.

More and more frequently, our clients access their digital world through their phones. Some clients don’t have a desktop or laptop computer. They have the skills to create a digital record of their belongings but not the hardware. If this is you, talk to us. We can schedule a time for you to use one of our computers in our office so that you can make your list. (This is definitely not something every attorney’s office would be willing to do, but we are happy to try to make it work.)

Unless you are an extreme minimalist , you probably won’t have time to add every item that you own to your list. You would not want to do that anyway if your goal is to save money. The more items that your attorneys have to haggle over, the more it will cost you and your spouse. (If you are ordered to pay your spouse’s attorney’s fees, it is now costing you double.) For that reason, you need to focus on the things that are worth a lot of money and the things that money can’t buy. Also, focus on those items that are not very familiar to you.

Most people have a pretty good idea what is worth a lot of money. Vehicles, electronics, tools, some hobby items, appliances, certain furniture pieces. If you are trying to save money on the personal property portion of the divorce, it makes sense to focus on those things that cost big bucks when you bought them and retained their value pretty well. You will save money just replacing items that can be replaced at a small cost, instead of hiring your attorney to fight for them. There is an exception though. Sometimes there are items that money can’t buy. Family photos, sentimental items, baptismal gowns that were your baby’s. Only you can know what those items are worth to you. There might be some things whose value to you far exceed the attorney’s fees expended to have them returned.

Family photos in the courts where we practice tend to be handled one of two ways. Either the parties split the photos or copies are made of the photos. If copies are made, the cost can be split between the parties or one party can be assigned to pay. The age of digital photos is making this much easier because copying digital pictures usually only involves the cost of providing a flash drive or external hard drive.

Pay close attention in your documentation process to the items that are valuable but you do not know anything about. For example, if you husband has a shop full of power tools but you cannot name anything other than the drill and circular saw, it might be worth your while to spend extra time taking pictures or videos of these items. Close-ups on the items and the brand names can be helpful when you try to come up with values for these items. But, you do not want any of these items, you say? That’s ok. When we are trying to sort out property we are looking for an equitable division of values. So the fact that your car is worth $3,000 more than his truck might be able to be balanced out with his man cave full of high quality tools. Hobby items are another area in which one spouse might be heavily invested and the other spouse clueless.

In general, don’t worry about clothing. Generally each party is awarded his or her own clothing and the value of this is not an issue. (This is not to say that it could not become an issue. If you think this could be an issue in your case, let us know.)

So why are people arguing over the dish towels? It’s probably not really about the dish towels. There are a lot of emotions that need to be processed in a divorce. If you are trying to save money in your divorce, take a deep breath and channel Mr. Spock , the fully logical Vulcan from Star Trek. Although Mr. Spock can’t be a good guide for your entire divorce process, he might just be the voice of reason that you need for dividing your personal property.

The person who stays in the home usually ends up with most of the stuff. It’s not a law, just a law of nature. Similar to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in a house tends to stay in a house unless someone acts on that object to take it out. I’m not talking big ticket items here. I am referring to the random ordinary stuff that fills our homes. Sometimes leaving all that stuff behind can be a huge relief. Other times you just need a pot holder to take a hot casserole dish out of the oven. And you need the casserole dish to put in the oven in the first place. You get the picture.

If you are going to be the one leaving, plan ahead. Pack what you will need. Pack what is clearly and obviously yours. Just be reasonable. In the same way that the spouse in the house does not need ALL of the dish towels, pot holders, and dishes, you don’t either. Of these types of general items, the least amount that you need or half is a good amount to shoot for. Try not to take the other person’s favorite things if you can help it. If you are trying to save money, you are trying NOT to start World War III over the personal property.

If you can get along with your spouse well enough to split the personal property yourselves, with no interference help from the attorneys, go for it! This can be a great way to save lots of money on attorneys’ fees. Agree to as much as you can. If you have a few items left in dispute, those might be worth your while to bring to your lawyers. Just remember the parable of the dish towels, plastic food storage containers and garden gnome that I told you.

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