Marital Home Division | Atlanta Divorce Laws
Common Property Issues & Actual Division
Maybe the most common is what to do with the marital home and it’s not such an simple issue as one might think. Issues run the gamut. For example, what if one party wants to stay in the house, but the other party is the person whose name is on the mortgage? You don’t want to let that party stay in the house when they have no skin of the game. What if they don’t pay the mortgage? The other guy’s the one who’s going to be collected on and have their credit rating hurt. So, you need to address issues like that.
There’s also issues, how do you value the home? What if you want to sell the home? What’s the procedure to do it? You don’t want to happen what happened on one of the cases I had where previous counsel before me had agreed they’ll just average up the husband and wife’s selling price and sell it as an average. The home stayed in the market for 720 days. It deteriorated to practically nothing because the wife wanted to stay in there free. So, it was worth $2,000,000. The husband thought it was worth nothing, so it was worth $400,000. You average it together, it wasn’t worth anywhere near what the average was. So, you have to take into consideration things even as minute as the process to sell the home.
By: Scott Shaw