The marital home is property that is purchased during the marriage. Whether both people’s name is on the title of the property or not, it’s going to be considered to be marital property if it was purchased with marital funds. The marital home is not an asset that you can very easily divide. What the court’s going to do is review several options. As we talked about before, everything is supposed to be divided equally.
The court could award the house to one person or the court could actually sell the property and divide the proceeds. Let’s say that one person wants to keep the house. Let’s say everything else is otherwise divided equally. Let’s say that there’s $50,000 in equity in that house. What the court may do is have the person who keeps the house pay the other person $25,000.
The court will give the person keeping the house a reasonable amount of time to refinance. I’ve seen judges not put any kind of strict deadlines on refinancing.
Sometimes the court will just order the property to be sold. When the property is ordered to be sold, generally the proceeds are going to be divided equally. There’s some offsets that happens if a person continues to make payments, but that’s really more than we have time to get into today. These are called “Conrad Credits.” We will save that for another time.
