QUESTION
do I have to comply with my spouse's lawyer's requests for documents or other information
Asked on Mar 11th, 2017 on Divorce - Wisconsin
More details to this question:
we have a HELOC, which was used as a consolidation loan so we did not have 5 different debts scattered around the calender, stemming from student loans for our son, vehicles we both wanted, and miscellaneous credit card debt. some of the debt was moved around through different credit card offers offering low or no interest rates for a period of time, we did this to try to keep the payments manageable. now my spouse wants to "cherry pick" the HELOC to only repay the part of the HELOC that he believes is his personal part/s of the debt. his lawyer wants documents that show his claimed "portion". it will be quite an amount of work to retrace years of balance transfers, etc., to retrace every transaction. do I have to comply to do this, and since we live in wisconsin, for all 25 years of the marriage, isn't all this considered marital debt?
1 ANSWER
4 Awards
Both sides in a divorce are allowed under Wisconsin law to conduct formal discovery, under chapter 804. If you were served with formal request for production of documents or written interrogatories, you are required to respond within 30 days. So the answer to your question is yes; presumptively also under WI law, all assets and all debts are considered 50/50; your HELOC loan falls into the same category. It is presumed to be an equal marital responsibility and to have served a marital family purpose; their trying to carve out a portion of the loan that only applies to them is an interesting argument, but not consistent with the law, unless you gambled away the money or otherwise engaged in marital waste.
Answered on Mar 12th, 2017 at 8:26 AM
David B. Karp Karp & Iancu, S.C. 933 North Mayfair Road #300 Milwaukee, WI 53226 414 453 0800 dbk@karplawfirm.com www.karplawfirm.com