What Kind of Divorce Do You Want?
Getting a Divorce? You have divorce options.
“Now that you’ve made the difficult decision to get a divorce, the next decision you have to make, a decision that shouldn’t be quite so difficult, is how to get divorced. How do you want to get divorced? Yep! You do have a choice in that. There are divorce options.
Most people when they talk about getting a divorce or think about getting a divorce, in their mind they see the traditional, in court, litigation, hiring lawyers, an expensive, traumatic, time consuming, stressful, lengthy, process. But that is not the only option that you have for getting a divorce, you don’t have to a traditional, in-court divorce. You have other options available to you.
What are your goals?
Now, the options available to you depend somewhat on you and your partners willingness to cooperate; and how the divorce starts will affect that greatly. Before we get there, the first thing that you have to do is identify for yourself the goals for your divorce, and for your life after divorce.
You have to play the movie forward and think about where you want to be 2, 5, 10 years post-divorce. For example: if you have children, you may have goals about parenting time or parenting skills, or the wellbeing of your children, or all of those things and more. You probably have goals related to communication with your co-parent, or flexibility in scheduling, or child care.
Most people have financial goals such as financial stability, maybe getting out of debt, saving for retirement, living with a new budget, all those sorts of things. You probably have personal goals as you look at your life post-divorce, maybe career goals. There are just all sorts of goals, anything that you can imagine. To help you with this, I have on my website at www.masterscdc.com. a comprehensive list of goals and interests for you to consider.
Once you’ve figured out what is most important to you, it will be easier for you to figure out what kind of a divorce you desire. So here are some additional questions to help you think about this.
What is most important?
Number one, in the situation, what is most important to you? Your relationships, or the issues? Or are both equally important? If it is relationships you definitely don’t want to be in litigation. Because one thing I know for sure is that litigation harms, or even destroys relationships.
Number two, is it important for you to be able to work together on a long-term basis to resolve issues? And do you believe you’ll be able to do that?
For example, if your children are very young and you’re going to be co-parenting for the next 16-17 years. Again a no-court, non-traditional approach is going to help enhance that co-parenting relationship and communication.
Is a creative outcome important to you in resolving your problems? If so, a judge cannot be creative. A judge has a very narrow range of options and most of them are pretty binary– one person wins, and one person loses.
That’s not the case if you choose a non-adversarial process for our divorce. Are you able and willing to examine problems deeply, and look for creative solutions?
Is reaching a resolution quickly a high priority for you?
Do you have limited time or resources?
I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have limited time and resources! So if you answered yes to any of those last three questions then a no-court option is going to work better for you.
No Court Option?
What do I mean by no-court options? I mean mediation, I mean collaborative divorce, I mean cooperative divorce, all of which are explained on my website, and all of which I will be talking to you in greater detail about in the next couple of series of videos that I’m going to release for you.
For now, if you’d like more information about your divorce options I’d love to talk to you personally. Please give me a call at (386) 271-8044 or there is tons of information on my website at www.masterscdc.com”