You may have heard the term “silent divorce” before and were wondering how a silent divorce can potentially interfere with your familial assets.
What is a Silent Divorce?
A silent divorce typically occurs when a couple is legally married but has no emotional or physical connection. The couple could be staying together for the children, societal pressures, or other personal reasons to the couples. However, when the divorce proceedings are in court, there is a way to make the court proceedings “silent” as well. This includes not informing friends or family members during the court proceedings of the divorce and keeping the children “silent” on the proceedings of the divorce.
Where are your Assets?
All of your assets acquired as a couple during the course of the marriage must be located and accessible for court purposes during divorce proceedings. If your assets are so hidden that they are not identified during divorce court proceedings, this can amount to a contempt of court charge against you. Regardless if you and your spouse, during a divorce proceeding, choose to keep the details silent about your divorce, both people to the couple must still provide information about assets to the courts when asked.
How to Keep your Divorce Proceedings Silent
When you speak with your attorney about your divorce case, you are entitled to a legal protection called the “attorney-client” privilege. This means that anything you say, with a few legal exceptions to your attorney in the proceedings of a divorce case, is entitled to attorney-client confidentiality, unless you chose to share that information with a third party. If you chose to tell third-party information that you had previously only shared with your attorney, this invalidates the attorney-client confidentiality privilege, and this information can become public knowledge.
What are the penalties for not disclosing assets during a divorce proceeding?
According to Justicia.com, If a spouse is caught hiding assets, the court may require them to pay the spouse’s share of the assets to them. For example, if $10,000 in marital assets were hidden, the judge may order the spouse who hid the assets to pay $5,000 to the other spouse. In a few states, a spouse can even be sentenced to jail for continuing to hide assets after a court has already ruled about the hidden assets.
Title Issues After Death
Sometimes, in silent divorce proceedings, some issues come into play surrounding the very nature of assets after one party dies. This is because passwords and usernames are lost with time, the documents are physically lost or never located again, or because the divorce was silent, they were not shared with other family members.
Have a plan to protect your assets
One way to ensure that your assets are protected during silent divorce proceedings is to ensure that all of the information is available for family members or children to view, such as investment accounts passwords being located in asset and trust documents, or the title to the account only being in the individual spouse’s name. You can speak with a trusted and knowledgeable fiduciary agent, to ensure that your assets are protected during a silent divorce or other divorce proceedings.
WassermanFiduciary. com