Thinking About Divorce? What You Should Be Doing RIGHT NOW!

· If you’ve been working excessive overtime so that your wife could stay home or your family could live beyond its means: STOP! Support payments are based on your W-2; the court doesn’t differentiate between regular and overtime earnings.

· Start putting money aside if you can: you’re going to need it!

· Stop direct deposit of your payroll check at least a month before you tell your wife that you want a divorce: it can take up to two pay periods to become effective. If you don’t, you’ll risk what happened to my husband: his soon-to-be-ex withdrew ALL of the money from their joint checking account as soon as his deposit hit. (She also stole his next [paper] payroll check, which he’d hidden under the floor mat of his truck. She found it, forged it, and cashed it at their bank’s ATM. So be careful!)

· Safeguard anything that's precious to you that you can't live without (photos, DVDs, CDs, tools, etc.)…NOW! That means start taking those things out of the house: not enough for anyone to notice, but a little here and there. Otherwise, you'll risk never seeing some of this stuff again regardless of who gets what in the divorce. From our 2002 Sequence of Events: “I arrived home from working a double shift only to discover that [the devil] had stripped our home of every family photograph, photo album, portrait and videotape. I’d been warned by others (my attorney included) to safeguard anything of value—sentimental or otherwise—that was in our home; however, even after all the nastiness [the devil] had put me through, I knew she understood how precious our family photos were to me and couldn’t bring myself to believe that she’d commit such a contemptuous act. And yet she did.”

· If she isn’t working, make sure she gets a job! And soon! The devil wasn’t working when she and my husband separated, and he was initially ordered to pay her $2,592 a month family support even though he was only earning $3,600 a month! (Remember: you can’t just work overtime to make up the difference during this time because your permanent support will be based on your total earnings. The more you earn, the more you’ll be ordered to pay, and the more hours you’ll have to work just to get by.)

· Still undecided about whether to divorce? Read the “10-Year Rule” and “Half the Length of the Marriage.” That ought to get you off the fence and help you decide whether you’re either “in” or you’re “out.”