Today, we’re going to be talking about tangible personal property when it comes to your West Virginia divorce. What is tangible personal property? That is property that is actually something that you can see and you can hold that’s out there or something that is actually in the material world, as opposed to intangible property. Intangible property for example would be like a bank account or stocks. That is intangible property. Now, one of the questions I get sometimes when people come to my office is what to do with tangible property in a divorce and what happens with it? Now, generally, what happens is a court’s first going to make a determination as to whether something is marital property or non-marital property. Non-marital property would be things like items that you brought into the marriage. That would be considered non-marital property.
Let’s say you brought a vehicle when that was paid off prior to getting married. That would be an example of something that would be tangible personal property, or your guns or your tools or your jewelry that you had prior to getting married. That would be non-marital property. Also, things that are gifts would be considered non-marital property. For example, if you get a gift from your parents or a friend, that would be considered to be your separate property. The court’s are going to make the determination whether the property’s marital or non-marital. If the property is marital, what’s supposed to happen is it’s going to go into the property distribution and the court’s going to make a determination about the value of the property. 99% of the time what will happen is that people will just agree as to what property is which persons.
You may say…”Okay, you can get the couch and I can get the car”. The car may not be an issue. Other property like clothing and tools and things that were acquired during the marriage may become the issue. A lot of times people will just decide on that. If you don’t both agree, what the court’s going to do is they’re going to put a value on that property once it’s all tallied up and then the court is going to divide that property between the people. Or alternatively, what the court will do, I’ve seen courts actually take the property and have it sold off. That’s something else that the courts going to do, is that they might sell off all of the tangible personal property and then the proceeds are going to be divided.
Just like we talked before about property distribution, it’s still going to come into the property distribution determination and once it does that, the court’s going to figure out how it should be divided. It’s just like anything else. If it’s considered to be marital property, it’s going to be factored into it in that respect. This sums up the subject of tangible personal property Today.
