Maybe not surprisingly, divorce can bring out the worst in people and draw up issues that were not easy to resolve in the past, let alone during a divorce. What’s the biggest issue people come across? Asset wise, that has to be money.
Money has a large impact on your life, and a divorce has the potential to help or hinder you in the future. Assets that you’ve built up, like your home, mortgage, and other property, need to be split, but if you aren’t careful about how you split these assets, you could lose out on more than you expected.
Now, there are cases where separate property was brought into the marriage, and because of that, that property will go back to the original owner. That’s fair in most cases. However, when you consider assets like inheritances that were in a shared bank account or money from selling your home, you need to understand that it could be split, and it may not be split evenly, depending on your circumstances.
Colorado law does require a divorce to have assets that are divided equitably. This means that it’s more likely for the outcome of your divorce to be fair; but what’s fair? Equitable doesn’t need to mean equal.
Colorado has several kinds of formulas that could be used to determine an equitable distribution. For instance, a spousal maintenance calculator can be used to determine how much one person has to pay the other. Thinking of this situation, consider the fact that the spouse earning more money during the marriage might think he or she deserves more than the stay-at-home parent. Or, the stay-at-home parent may think he or she deserves more of the assets for being unable to work or continue an education. The court will aim to make the division fair with respect to those feelings and will most likely try to split assets as equally as possible in these cases.
Source: The Gazette, “It’s Your Money: Money is biggest issue with divorce” Linda Leitz, accessed Mar. 19, 2015