While a divorce is stressful enough for the adults involved, divorce can be even more difficult for children, who may not always understand why you are separating. Divorce is likely to make children scared, uncertain, confused, sad, and/or angry. Given the extreme emotions that your children may have when they learn about your intended divorce,…
Whether your spouse will receive any portion of your business in your divorce depends greatly on a number of different factors. Whether all or part of the business constitutes community or separate property, the length of your marriage, ownership of the business, and the longevity of the business are all factors that help determine how…
There are several different options for enforcing a child support order that are allowable under federal and state law. When a parent has a court order to pay child support and fails to pay as ordered, the consequences can be quite severe. Many of these enforcement techniques negatively affect a non-paying parent’s career opportunities. The…
Mediation is a form of alternative dispute resolution that is designed to help people settle legal disputes outside of the courtroom. The courts in Benton, Franklin, Yakima and Walla Walla counties require all parties in most domestic relations cases to go to mediation. In a mediation, a neutral third party called a mediator works with…
All children get sick or injured from time to time, and resulting medical costs can pile up very quickly. For this reason, health insurance coverage is essential to controlling the costs associated with illness or injury, although premiums for health insurance are rarely cheap. When parents divorce, the medical expenses for their children do not…
Washington law refers to alimony or spousal support as maintenance. In a divorce, the court may order one spouse to pay a certain amount of money to the other spouse on a set schedule, or a certain bill that is due on a regular basis, in order to support that spouse. There is no set…
Health insurance is an important consideration for most people, given the high cost of medical bills. Without health insurance, a catastrophic illness or injury can quickly drive a family into bankruptcy. In many situations, one spouse may have covered the other spouse and children on his or her employer-sponsored health insurance plan throughout their marriage.…
While the process for getting a divorce and getting a legal separation are essentially the same, the results are different. When a divorce becomes final, the parties are permanently and legally divorced and free to remarry. At the conclusion of a legal separation, however, the parties are still legally married. This means that they are…
Washington law uses the term “residential schedule” to describe what is commonly known as visitation. A parenting plan contains information about a family’s residential schedule. In most cases of divorce or separation that involve a child, one parent is designated the residential parent (custodial parent) and the other parent is designated the non-residential parent (noncustodial…