Legislation passed in March, 2021 gives parents the opportunity to agree upon modifications of custody and placement orders based upon specific prospective events that are reasonably likely to occur within 2 years. Until recent legislation was passed, courts could not enter custody or placement orders based on a contingent condition which would occur in the future. Even when predictable events would occur, such as a child reaching school age, parents could not agree in advance on which school the child would attend. Instead, they had to hope they could agree upon the selection of a school shortly before the decision had to be made. If they could not, one or the other [...]

Your Options for Enforcing the Terms of Your Marital Settlement Agreement Are Important. An important aspect of any divorce agreement is not only what you agree on but how and whether the agreement can be enforced. In their Marital Settlement Agreements (MSAs), divorcing parties set out the terms they agree upon for: • the custody, placement and support of their children, • the division of their debts and assets, and • their obligations to one another’s support called maintenance or alimony. This agreement is almost always then incorporated into the court’s order as part of the divorce and once incorporated into the divorce, the agreement become the court’s decree. In drafting [...]

Child support is calculated and ordered when the court enters a judgment in one of the following cases: annulment, divorce, legal separation, or paternity. This is not an exclusive list of events in which the court may order child support. Generally, child support is expressed as a fixed amount of money that must be paid on a regularly occurring basis to support the minor child(ren). The actual amount of child support will depend on the placement schedule between the parents and the parents’ gross incomes. In a primary placement scenario when the child resides primarily with one parent, child support is calculated by multiplying the paying parent’s gross income available for [...]

When a divorce is before the court, the judge must divide all marital assets, including retirement accounts. When the only significant assets are a house and retirement accounts, this can be challenging. There are many ways, however, of creatively dividing retirement accounts, some of which can actually free up cash to ease the time after divorce but before retirement. Here are some general examples: Defined benefit plans. Defined benefit plans are plans that what we generally think of as pensions, where the spouse whose name is on the plan gets a sum certain each month at retirement, not unlike social security. If the other spouse is granted a portion of this [...]