Andrea Kaye and Stan Prowse Legal Eagle Radio

About Andrea Kaye and Stan Prowse Legal Eagle Radio

The Stan Prowse "Legal Eagle Segments"on the Andrea Kaye Radio Talk Show are designed to be an easy listening source of information on famil law, divorce and legal help for military service members.

Publisher

Stan Prowse

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Jan 2015

Latest episode

21 Apr 2016

Latest episodes

23 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Apr 2016

   Military Divorces Are Different

   Military divorces (http://stanprowse.com/help-for-military-servicemen) are different, right from the beginning. If we're talking about a service member who's on deployment, we have to know where he or she is in order to serve the member with the petition for dissolution of marriage. In some situations, there is no way to find out, because the nature of the member's current deployment may mean that the member's whereabouts is classified information. We also have to determine if our court will have personal jurisdiction over the member, even if we can serve the member properly. Many service members maintain their legal residence (http://stanprowse.com/moving-away-after-divorce) in the state they lived in before they joined the service. Let's say we are talking about a female whose legal residence is in Alabama. We also know her current address, but she's not in California and she's never lived in California. Even if we can serve her, she may decide not to file a response. If she doesn't file a response, as a general rule the court doesn't have personal jurisdiction over her. We can still ask the court to enter her default, and the court can deal with custody of minor children (http://stanprowse.com/divorce-rights) in most circumstances, but otherwise as a general rule the court can't do anything else but dissolve the parties' marriage. For example, the court can't deal with the division of community property (http://stanprowse.com/property-division-in-divorce). If there is any of consequence, that's a problem. Another problem is delay. Under the Service Members Civil Relief Act (https://www.servicememberscivilreliefact.com/?gclid=CjwKEAiAi52mBRDkq5bX0vq1-RQSJAAq_7IGycv9Cq4ROnuOq-ezMUcXWEuWDcHRZhUaGtv7ivQRlhoC7yvw_wcB), a service member on active duty can obtain a postponement (called a stay) of court proceedings if the member's duties do not permit leave time to go to court. The procedure the member must follow to obtain a stay is complicated, but with persistence it can be accomplished. Another problem is establishing the member's income for purposes of spousal and child support (http://stanprowse.com/modifying-child-support). A service member's pay stub is a Leave and Earnings Statement. It's nothing like a civilian's pay stub, and a lawyer unfamiliar with one will have a very difficult time understanding it. Dividing military retirement benefits (http://stanprowse.com/dividing-a-military-pension-is-a-minefield) is also considerably different than dividing civilian retirement benefits. This list of differences between military divorces and civilian divorces goes on and on. If you or your spouse is a service member, and you need a divorce (http://stanprowse.com/divorce), find a family law attorney (http://stanprowse.com/family-law-attorney) that is experienced in military divorces. We have that experience.

2. 

   21 Apr 2016

   Senior Divorce

   Senior Divorce For Those Over 50 According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, the overall divorce (http://stanprowse.com/divorce/divorce-3) rate has decreased slightly.  However, the divorce rate (http://stanprowse.com/separate-property-in-marriage) among people over 50 has increased substantially.  In 1990, the rate was one in ten.  In 2009, the rate was one in four.  In other words, nowadays 40% of all divorces involve spouses over 50 years old.  We’ll call them senior divorces.  For me 40% is a surprising statistic.  Although I haven’t kept track, it seems that most of the divorces I’ve handled were between spouses with small children (http://stanprowse.com/child-custody-disputes), which would make Mom and Dad roughly 25 to 40. We’ve all heard about couples staying together ‘for the sake of the children (http://stanprowse.com/child-witnesses-in-divorce)’ and parting company only after the kids were grown up and gone.  Those may have been senior divorces, but years ago they were only noteworthy because they didn’t seem to happen very often, and friends and neighbors were shocked when they did.  You’d think surviving twenty or so years of marriage would be a pretty good indicator that ‘til death do us part’ would turn out to be true.  However, something must have been going on to increase the rate of senior divorces fourfold in 19 years. One thing that’s obvious is the increased number of households with working women.  When I was a child, none of my friends had working Moms.  They were all home in their house dresses, doing laundry and baking cookies.  Without jobs and their own incomes they were financially dependent on their husbands, and after their children left home they turned to garden clubs and charity balls.  By the time women were 50, divorce for most of them was virtually unthinkable economically, so they just didn’t think of it.  Period. No Fault Divorce and The Desire for Financial Independence It was also unthinkable socially.  It’s easy to forget that no fault divorce is a relatively recent invention.  Before no fault, a spouse who wanted a divorce had an affirmative burden to prove he or she was entitled to one, because the other spouse had done something morally reprehensible, like beating or cheating.  People hired private detectives.  It was a big deal.  Now if you want a divorce, you just check the “irreconcilable differences” box on the form.  If your spouse doesn’t want a divorce, too bad for him or her.  For better or worse, divorce is now normal.  A senior divorce is no longer embarrassing. We also live in an age that demands and celebrates happiness and self-fulfillment.  Unhappiness and self-sacrifice and are decidedly out of fashion.  A joyless and confining marriage should not be endured, especially after the children are out of the way.  Instead it should be ended, and ending the second is probably easier than ending the third, and so on.  In this climate, an increasing rate of senior divorce was probably inevitable.  Fiftieth wedding anniversaries may become highly unusual.  Even passing that milestone is no guarantee of staying together - we recently divorced a couple in their 80’s! The contrast between yesterday and today is easy to see and goes a long way towards explaining the rising rate of senior divorce.  Working women are educated and financially independent, which makes emotional independence attainable once it feels necessary.  A wife’s financial independence (http://stanprowse.com/planning-for-divorce) also reduces a husband’s guilt if he instigates the breakup. Whether you’re female or male, or 60 or 70, waking up in the morning and feeling you have to go out on your own again and “find yourself” is now Ok instead of alarmingly weird. So, all you grown children feeling smug about having parents who never divorced, watch out.  Any day now with little or no warning, Mom or Dad may well decide to take off for greener pastures and surprise the daylights out of you. Carlsbad Divorce Attorney Stanley D. Prowse is a California Certified Family Law Specialist. We welcome your legal inquiries.

3. 

   21 Apr 2016

   California Divorce Essentials

   California’s legislature has given husbands, wives, and domestic partners of any persuasion the right to dissolve their marriages or domestic partnerships on the basis of irreconcilable differences.  Fault is not an issue.  Singing,“You cheated, you lied, you said that you loved me,” in Family Court gets you nowhere.  The process is also form driven.  There is one for almost everything and you have to use them.  And if you force yourself to read them carefully they do make sense.  Better yet, if you and your attorney fill them out completely when you’re supposed to and follow the italicized instructions exactly, things will go along much more quickly and much less expensively than otherwise.  The basics are not complex.  Dissolution of a marriage or a domestic partnership involves three major issues: Property Division, Child Support and Child Custody (only if you have minor children), and Spousal Support. Property Division (http://stanprowse.com/property-division-in-divorce) The first issue is identifying all of the assets and debts both of you have, characterizing each as community or separate, dividing the community items in half, and confirming which separate items belong to each of you.  Everything you earn or acquire while you were married (which for convenience in this discussion includes being in a domestic partnership) and still living together (before your date of separation) is presumed to be community, the same for debts.  Separate assets and debts are those you had before you married, gifts or inheritances you received while married, and assets and debts explicitly acquired by you as separate property while married, unless you mixed up separate with community so you can no longer identify the separate.  Do your best to accept the proposition that fifty cents of every dollar you ever earned while married belonged to the other guy.  It’s true unless you have a prenuptial agreement that says otherwise. Child Custody and Support (http://stanprowse.com/child-custody-disputes) The second issue is child custody and support.  These days you have to be a very bad person or live in Outer Mongolia not to have joint legal and physical custody, so arguments over sole legal or physical custody have largely given way to arguments over timeshare - the ratio of the time (as a percentage) each of you has responsibility for the kids.  If you can’t agree on who has the kids when, don’t start World War III over it.  The State will happy to decide what’s best for them whether you like it or not.  Before a judge can make an order on the subject you have to go to mediation with Family Court Services.  If you still can’t agree, the FCS mediator will recommend a timesharing schedule to the judge, and the judge will adopt the recommendation as the order almost every time. Now that you know the time share percentages, calculating child support is easy.  A computer program is mandatory.  Although the program is the most complicated in the country, the inputs are simple.  The first is the timeshare of each party.  The second is the average monthly income of each party over the past twelve months, which for most people is not hard to determine.  Sorry, debts don’t count in determining what you pay.  Neither do expenses, except for health insurance, child care costs, and a few other deductions.  If you can’t manage your child support and your debts at the same time, your next stop may be bankruptcy court. Spousal Support (http://stanprowse.com/spousal-support-california) The third issue is spousal support, which is either temporary (prejudgment) or permanent (post judgment).  You can agree on this yourselves.  If you can’t the computer program for child support also spits out a number for temporary spousal support.  It’s not mandatory to use the number for temporary support, but it’s usually what’s ordered.  The judges aren’t supposed to use the program for permanent spousal support, but they do anyway - nobody really knows what to do with the specific factors set out in the Family Code for permanent support (http://stanprowse.com/modifying-child-support), although everybody agrees that permanent spousal support should probably be lower than temporary.  Unless you’ve been married  for only a few years, the judge will probably not order a termination date for spousal support.  If you want it recalculated or terminated you’ll have to come back later and convince the judge that something has changed to justify doing so.  Each party has an obligation to become self supporting and to contribute to the support of the kids, but it’s easier to announce that rule than enforce it.  Compelling a previously non-working spousal support payee back into full-time employment is a protracted and expensive proposition. And there you have it.  The devil is in the details. Carlsbad Divorce Attorney Stanley D. Prowse is a California Certified Family Law Specialist. We welcome your legal inquiries.

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