pre-divorce checklist

The SAHM pre-divorce checklist

July 11, 2018Eileen Rose

If you have the luxury of knowing in advance that your marriage is about to end, you have time to make your next few weeks, months, and years a lot easier by making your way through this checklist:

• If possible, find a nearby trusted friend or family member who can help you.
• Find and collect key personal documents for you and your kids: birth certificates, passports, social security cards, your will and related documents (advance directives, power of attorney, medical power of attorney), your academic records, and give them to your trusted friend or family, or keep them in a safe place (not your house) that you will maintain control over–for example, your car, your purse (if it’s big enough and secure enough), your safety deposit box (if you have one–or consider opening one if you have time).
• Get a new email account. You can easily set one up for free through Gmail or Yahoo. If you share a computer with your spouse or are concerned that your spouse is tracking your online activity, set up your new email account at a public computer or through a secret browsing window. (In Google Chrome, it’s called an “incognito window,” and you can access it through the File menu in Chrome.)
• Assess your financial situation. I’ll write a separate post on this later; it’s complicated and very important. The short version is this: make sure you have easy access to some money, either through your own individual bank account or credit card or through a loan from a family member or very close friend.
• Using your public internet access or your secret browser (see above), find a lawyer and meet with them. If you can’t pay them up front because you don’t have ready access to cash, they should understand. If they aren’t willing to work with you because you can’t pay them up front, find a different lawyer. I’ll write another post on lawyers later, too.
• If you aren’t already seeing a counselor, find one of those, too. I’ll write a separate post about the importance of counselors.
• Decide how to make and keep copies of key documents that you don’t need originals of.  If you share a computer with your spouse and your records are saved electronically, you can download these documents onto a USB thumb drive if your computer has a USB port (some newer ones don’t), or you can upload copies of them to an online document storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive. (NOTE: if you and your spouse already have a Dropbox or Google account, set up your own separate account for this purpose using your new email address.) You can also just print out hard copies. If you’re having trouble with figuring out how to access the electronic records or how to make electronic copies, find a loyal geeky friend (or a geeky friend of a loyal friend) to help you out.
• Using the copy system you’ve decided on (see above), make copies of the following documents:
  • insurance policies (health, auto, life–yours and his, etc.)
  • medical records for you and your kids
  • prescription drug information for you and your kids
  • property records (current mortgage(s), real estate contract(s) for property you own jointly or separately, rental agreement(s))
  • academic records for your kids
  • auto records (lease, sale, and/or loan documents; maintenance records)
  • recent financial statements (bank accounts, credit cards accounts, retirement accounts, loans)
  • recent family budget, if any
  • cell phone contracts
  • marriage license(s) and certificate(s)
• Prepare for what I call the “electronic divorce”:
  • Do you share photos and/or documents online? Make copies and save them on your USB drive or your own personal Dropbox or Google Drive account. Ask your geeky friend for help if you can’t figure out how to do this without letting your spouse know what you’re doing.
  • Do you share passwords and online accounts with your spouse? If you’re not sure, consider the websites you visit regularly, and the ones you’ll need to visit regularly–bank websites, cell phone service websites, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, credit card websites, health insurance websites, etc. Check your saved websites if you’re having trouble remembering which websites you might share. Or if you have a password manager like LastPass or 1Password, go through your password “vault” to make sure you’re not missing anything. Make a comprehensive list (either online or on paper, whichever is easiest for you) of usernames and passwords for all of these sites, or, if you have your own password manager account already, update it with your new email address. (I usually wouldn’t recommend keeping a list of passwords, but these are unusual circumstances that you’re planning for.)
• Start separating out your photos, keepsakes, out of season clothes, and anything else you’ll want to take with you but won’t be missed by your spouse (don’t empty out your closet, for example) and give them to your trusted friend for safekeeping, or store them in boxes that you can access easily but that your spouse will overlook. If you have a lot of stuff, and you have access to some cash, you might consider renting a storage unit.
• If you have weapons in your home and you have any reason at all to be concerned for the safety of you or your kids, strongly consider removing the weapons from your home.
• If you can, make plans for where to stay temporarily if you end up leaving the home you share with your spouse.
• Don’t forget to breathe. You will be OK. You will be better than OK.