The Legal Issues 123
even 70 percent to wife and 30 percent to husband, or whatever
they feel is appropriate. If the court does deviate from the basic
fifty-fifty split, generally the judge will explain why.
Criteria that count. Some of the factors a court might consider
in making an equitable distribution of a couple’s assets include:
(1) the length of the marriage; (2) the respective conditions in
which each side will be left following the divorce; (3) the nature
of the various property items (inherited, separate, or premari-
tal property may be treated differently than that accumulated
during marriage and will often be returned to the spouse who
was the original owner); (4) the responsibilities each party had
during the marriage (including their respective economic and
non-economic contributions); (5) whether there are children and
who they will be living with; (6) the respective health and edu-
cation levels of both parties; (7) dissipation of any assets during
the marriage; and (8) the relative abilities and earning potentials
of the parties.
Specific Property Settlement Items
You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.
—Norman Mailer
The key property settlement items that crop up in divorce cases
are exactly the ones you would expect: the house, retirement
plans, cars, bank accounts, etc. Virtually everything that has been
earned or acquired during the marriage is on the block and divis-
ible. This means everything.
It doesn’t matter that the Porsche has been acquired by a fiend-
ishly clever husband who has been squirreling away part of his
paycheck each month into a separate account titled in his sole
name, and that he bought that Porsche with a check from this
account, and that he is thus hoping he will be able to keep both
the car and the bank account separate in the divorce. It just won’t
happen. Anything that’s been earned by either party during the
course of the marriage, regardless of whose name is on the title,
is generally subject to division in divorce.