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Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Michael Mantell with another edition of Family Law Matters with certified family law specialist, Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, who’s the founder and managing partner of the Primus Family Law Group. Hi Bonnie. Hi Michael, how are you doing today? Good, you know, ordinarily I’m outside but it’s so warm in San Diego today, too hot.

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Gotta be in the air conditioning. Absolutely. So here we are.

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Bonnie, your firm is filled with a unique depth of resources and experience in marital dissolution and post-divorce matters. People think of you as tenacious and formidable. Last couple of Family Law Matter editions, we’ve thrown some quick questions at you and you’ve handled them beautifully and shown everyone why you are as tenacious and formidable as you are.

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So today I’ve collected some more questions from our viewers and I wanna toss them out to you and get some quick answers, okay? Sure, sounds like fun. Okay, all right. The first question, this is on so many people’s minds.

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I’m interested to see how you handle this. What can I do to control the cost of my divorce? Hmm, cooperate. Not just with the other side.

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We know that can be difficult to do but cooperate with your attorney because people don’t realize that your attorney spends time. That time could be writing emails, that time could be on the phone but your attorney gets paid by the time that we spend. And while Primus doesn’t sit there with one of those things that count the seconds, if we have to email our clients over and over and over to get documentation, if we have to chase you down, that makes it more expensive.

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Now, there are certain things that we have to do, Michael, regardless of whether you like it or not. You have to share your information with the other side, your financial information. What you believe is separate and what you believe is community.

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You have to share that information and the documentation. So technically the other side shouldn’t even have to ask for it. You should be ready to turn it over.

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What becomes expensive is when you don’t turn it over and they have to do things like discovery. These things can add thousands, thousands of dollars to your case unnecessarily. And oftentimes when people play those games, you see your costs skyrocket.

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So cooperation. Great answer, there it is. Leave it to Bonnie for a straight, simple and clear answer.

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That’s what clients like about you. You seek to avoid unnecessary battles and wars. You like to move your clients through the process positively and efficiently.

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So here’s another question. What are the steps my spouse may take to increase the cost of my divorce and how can we handle that? Well, that goes right back to question one. For example, some people want to play these games and they hire attorneys that like to play these games because it is more expensive and the only ones who end up benefiting then are the attorneys.

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Your kid’s college funds gets dissipated, but the attorneys, they get paid. So how you can avoid it, I mean, often the other side will issue discovery, discovery that isn’t necessary or that’s very large and it creates your attorney and you to have to do extra work. So how do we combat that? Well, one of the ways is when we do our initial documents, we try to do them as complete as possible to leave as little questions left.

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If the other side has less questions, they have less demands for answers for those questions. The other way is if they do send out unreasonable discovery, then we have procedural methods that we can use to block some of that from impeding our progress. Okay, now you handle everything from prenups to postnups to divorce and everything in between? No postnups, we do not do agreements.

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So that was the question, what is a postnup? A postnuptial agreement is an agreement once you guys got married, it’s a contract. And it’s how you wanna divide your property like a premarital agreement. It’s the same thing, but it’s just done after you’re married.

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And those have different problems and different ways of enforcement. And it’s a lot more complicated than our little segment would be to go through, but I’m not in favor of them. Your little segment, which covers so many stressful concerns.

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Here’s another one. Could you please explain community property? Sure, everything you acquire, be it assets or debts during the marriage. So from the day you got married until the day you separated, that’s your community property.

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Now you may have had things before your marriage, like for example, retirement. Sometimes you started your retirement before you got married. There is that separate piece from when you started it until the day you got married is your separate money.

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And anything that if it grew in value, stays separate, but then you have this other piece, that’s community because it was acquired during the marriage. People often ask me, well, what about, I don’t know about his or her credit cards. I didn’t have access to them and I don’t know what was bought.

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Well, the presumption is, I’m sorry you take the good with the bad. So if you’re gonna take somebody’s assets, you’re also stuck with the debts and those get divided equally, whether or not you knew what they were buying. So describe separate property then.

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Separate property is everything you got before you were married or after you were separated, or if you inherited it, or if it was a specific gift to you. So Michael, if I give you a car and I make it specific to Michael, it’s Michael’s, not Michael’s and Michael’s wife. Even after the marriage.

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Right. You know, grandparents often give kids their own gifts and don’t expect to be, it’s not a loan. Those are gifts.

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Sometimes it’s a gift to the community. It could be a down payment from grandparents. Sometimes it’s a gift to one person, a piece of jewelry that could be worth a lot of money, but it’s a gift.

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We have so many more questions that people have sent in to ask you. How about if we save some of those for our next edition of Family Law Matters? Sounds like a plan. I hope that helps those that are out there.

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You know, and if you have any more questions on that front, you can always reach out to us because we do offer a 30 minute free phone consultation and that would be 619-574-8000. Or you can reach us on our website, www.primusfamilylaw.com. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Bonnie.