What Happens When the Marital Home Legally Belongs to Only One Spouse?
Sometimes getting divorced enables you to find words to express feelings you could never identify. For example, it might not be until after you file for divorce that you realize how, during the decades you were married, your spouse’s relatives never treated you like part of the family. In some families, this exclusion is subtle; your in-laws may have inside jokes that you find perplexing, or they might invite you to family gatherings in ways that set you up to decline the invitation; they must know that you can’t miss work to attend a weeklong girls’ trip in another state with your husband’s sisters and sisters-in-law or that the cost of travel is prohibitive. Other times, it is obvious that your spouse’s strongest connection is to his family of origin instead of to you, such as if he jointly owns his house with a blood relative instead of with you. None of this changes the principles of equitable distribution in divorce, but sometimes it makes it more difficult to determine the value of the marital property. If your spouse finally chose his family of origin over you once and for all, and now your concern is to get your fair share of the marital property, contact a Boca Raton divorce lawyer.
Divorcing a Mama’s Boy
Most assets that you acquire during your marriage are marital property, but if you have owned an asset since before you married your spouse, it is your separate property. Likewise, inherited money and settlements from personal injury or workers’ compensation cases are separate property. Any separate asset can become marital if you share it with your spouse. In the case of a house that belongs to you, but where your spouse moved in after you got married, the house belongs to you after divorce, but the amount that it appreciated in value during your marriage is marital property subject to equitable distribution.
In a Palm Beach County divorce case, a young man bought a house jointly with his mother. Shortly thereafter, he got married, and his wife moved in. The wife renovated the house with the work of her own hands, and she used money she received through a personal injury settlement to buy materials for the renovation. The couple eventually divorced after more than 20 years of marriage, but their divorce case was fraught with controversy over what portion of the house’s value was marital property and how much of that value the wife would get. The wife’s name was never on the title to the house, but the fact that she lived there for decades and spent her money renovating it shows that the husband shared the house with her.
Contact Schwartz | White About Finding the Marital Property in a House That Never Belonged to You
A South Florida family law attorney can help you if, for the duration of your marriage, you lived in a house that belonged only to your spouse. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=11751828128683925796&q=divorce+pool&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2015&as_yhi=2025
