How can I preemptively be prepared for a divorce if I feel my spouse is up to something?

Start gather data, and counsel with an attorney about your rights and how to handle the possible and probable situations which may arise.

You need to speak with a divorce attorney. It would be helpful if you could get copies of all the financial records to show the attorney.

There are step that can be taken to safeguard your position. Consult an experienced divorce lawyer to discuss information-gathering techniques.

You should try to gather as much financial information as possible, such as bank account statements, tax returns, retirement account information from before he transferred it to on-line, his income information, etc.

You want to be prepared for a hypothetical divorce? There is no such thing. Either you want a divorce or you don't. Make up your mind and if you decide you want a divorce and have questions about how to proceed, get back to LawQA with your specific question(s).

Make sure you have all of the family financial information available.

If you want to ?prepare? for a divorce, there are a number of things that you can do: 1) Sit down and talk to your husband about these issues. You?re married; you have a child together? you ought to be able to discuss your concerns. An alternative would be to request that he go to counseling. The counseling could be to address your marital issues and/or to talk through the issues of having an amicable divorce and coming up with a parenting plan for your 14 year old. 2) Start doing some basic financial planning for yourself. If you do get divorced, where are you going to live? What are your financial needs going to be? I recommend assembling a list of your assets and debts. What is a fair way to divide these? 3) Start working on a parenting plan for your child. If you and your husband separate, what type of plan would best serve your daughter? 4) Start researching your divorce issues: talk to some lawyers, research your issues on the internet. I have sections on my website that address the divorce process, the division of property, and spousal maintenance. 5) Again, talk to your husband. If he is unwilling to share financial information with you, that is a pretty big sign that something is wrong. In general, my experience from working on problems is that when left unaddressed, they tend to get worse and slowly become harder and harder to solve.

You need to obtain financial information ASAP.

Get copies of all the financial information you can, account numbers, most recent statement even if it's old, tax returns for the last three years. You are entitled to part of his retirement. Knowing the name and address of his employer will allow an attorney to get his retirement etc. info from his employer. If you want out, see a lawyer and start the process. You can't do anything preemptively other than knowing the extent of assets and debts. Sitting down and talking to him about things like assets is what functional families do periodically so you can do that without any discussion of divorce. If something happens to him, you should have things like passwords to access all the accounts. That in itself is a reasonable and ordinary discussion.

How can you preemptively be prepared for a divorce if I feel my spouse is up to something? Start! Now! Doing something, even if it's not much, is better than nothing. Confront and overcome your fears about the unknown by taking a step to knowing more. So what are the best ways to start, especially if you don't have a lot of money or a lot of enthusiasm for the subject? If you have Internet access, Google "how does divorce work in [then write name of your state]?" And start learning the lingo of divorce and how the process works both inside and outside of court. Mind you, not everything you read on the Internet is of high quality, but you should be able to tell the gems from the garbage without too much effort. Go to your local library, and ask the librarian what books on divorce are most often checked out. But don't stop there; also asked the librarian his or her opinion of what the best books on divorce are, regardless of how popular they may be. Check these books out and read them. If you liked them a lot, via copy for yourself and underline the part you like best and want to remember. Most cities have meet up groups that you can locate online who read together weekly or monthly to talk about divorce and help people understand it better and learn how to cope with divorce. Meetup.com is a great place to start. Finally, when you think you're ready to deal with the specific problems of your own divorce, and you have done your research and are armed with the knowledge divorce to help you pick a good lawyer, start interviewing lawyers and pick the one that best suits you. When interviewing lawyers, if the lawyer seems uncomfortable or annoyed with your questions and help you understand, that is almost certainly a lawyer to avoid.