DIY (Do It Yourself) can be fun for home improvement, crafts, or baking. But doing your own divorce can be rather like building your own house from scratch when the most you have ever done is patch a wall.
You’ve seen the signs. You can get a divorce for $399 apparently….they will hand you the paperwork anyway. Why drop a retainer with an attorney if you can fill the papers out yourself?
In some cases, you CAN do a divorce on your own.
For example:
- If you have no children…or you don’t care how much you see them or how much you pay in child support.
- If you have no assets at all.
- If you have no debts.
- If you have been married exactly six months, and all the above apply.
- If you hate money and would like to never have any.
- If you love going to court for years to come to argue about things that you didn’t put in a proper property settlement agreement at the time of divorce.
Even if you and your spouse have worked out the terms of the divorce, you still need a lawyer to craft those terms in a proper document and make sure you have thought of everything. Sometimes, we advise clients on a very tight budget that if they want to put the divorce through themselves, they should still have a lawyer draft the marital settlement. If you and your spouse have NOT worked out the terms, you definitely want a lawyer to make sure that all of your rights are protected.
Once your divorce is filed, your arguments may not be over if you don’t carefully and clearly lay out all rights and responsibilities at the onset. You can spend $399 now and pay a lawyer in installments over the next 10 years to fight about all the things you didn’t take care of, or you can invest in your future to get proper representation from the start.
Don’t turn a simple divorce into a complex nightmare by not seeking legal counsel before filing. And don’t let a complex divorce become simply unbearable by thinking you can do it alone.
Call 856-227-7888 for a free consultation to discuss how to manage your divorce for a successful future.
