Hello everyone. It’s Chris, Pritt back again with a new topic in West Virginia divorce. Today, we’re going to be talking about documents you need to be getting prior to filing for divorce.
This is something that you need to be thinking about, whether you’re filing on your own or whether you’re going to be filing with an attorney. Either way, these are some documents that you need to be thinking about rounding up. Some of those documents include your past few tax returns. That’s something that you will often need to get ahold of in particular if you were the person who is filing the initial filings. It’s not quite as important because in the instance of, let’s say filling an answer because then you don’t have to worry about getting those. After all, they’re going to be already provided to you.
The other document you need to think about getting a hold of is your past few pay stubs. I would recommend at least going back six months, depending on the issues that are involved in the case. You don’t necessarily have to file all of those, but just get a hold of them. The reason for that is when it comes to child support and spousal support how much you’ve been making could be a huge factor. More specifically with overtime pay because there are sometimes calculations you do with overtime. Also, if you are in business for yourself, getting a hold of your spreadsheets, showing income, profits, and losses, and so forth. So the court can have a pretty good idea as to what you have coming in.
Other documents you need to be thinking about getting are debts that you’ve acquired for things such as credit cards and mortgages or secured debts. Secured debts are things like a mortgage or a debt that’s associated with a vehicle. Those are considered to be secured debts. Basically, anything showing debts, whether it’s you or your spouse, you should be rounding those up.
Furthermore, you should be rounding up titles to property. That’s something else that’s going to be very, very important to get. Also, get statements for your bank accounts and retirement accounts. That is going to be a big factor in terms of equitable distribution, which we’ve talked about in prior videos. So getting ahold of those records as well is going to be very important.
Now sometimes for whatever reason, people don’t have access to all of these records, the best piece of advice I can give you on that is just do your best to get those records. So you don’t necessarily need all of these records to file, but try to have them on reserve just in case something becomes an issue because there going to be very, very helpful. Oftentimes the other side will go through what’s called discovery where they can request those documents and you can do the same thing. A couple of other things you may want to be getting ahold of would be marriage certificates and your children’s social security cards as well as your own. Those are some basics in terms of documents to be thinking about rounding up.
This consists of today’s discussion. As always, if you have any questions feel free to give us a call at (304) 720 4412 or email us at chris@prittlaw.com.
