One of the primary questions that the divorce process addresses is “who gets what.” In more formal terms, how will marital property be divided. In today’s digital age, identifying the existence of marital property is getting increasingly more complicated. The purpose of this article is to help you to understand the basics and how getting good legal advice can help you navigate through these complexities.
Bank accounts in the digital age
When managing finances in the digital age, there are more places than ever for you to keep your money. Services like PayPal and Venmo along with digital currencies like Bitcoin are becoming more popular. You may not be aware when a spouse opens these accounts and finding all the information surrounding these accounts is complicated.
While these accounts are more complicated to track down, they all provide a paper trail. Now more than ever it’s important for those considering divorce to have a family lawyer who is experienced in detail asset training. A good family lawyer will act quickly to preserve and ensure that all existing accounts are kept intact and records for those accounts are provided.
Addressing and managing marital property
Perhaps the most important thing in understanding how marital property gets divided is that full disclosure of property and assets is required. When you hire a family lawyer to represent you in getting a divorce, your lawyer will ask you for a full accounting of all of the marital assets, real estate and other property acquired during the marriage by you and your spouse.
Your lawyer will then review the details around each asset. Their focus will be to provide a clear view of all assets and their value. Once they have this view of assets and property, they will then work through the division of each asset and to optimize that division for tax treatment.
What about digital assets?
Dividing your property is always difficult. The introduction of digital assets can add to the challenge. With today’s cloud services there are a variety of intangible assets that only exist in digital format. It’s not unusual to have shared email and social media accounts, websites, airline mileage rewards, domain names, music, photo libraries, blogs, and video libraries.
In some of these cases, like shared iTunes music libraries or Amazon digital video or book libraries, you can’t simply transfer portions of these libraries to another account. Depending upon the size of these libraries and the level to which they were shared, the division of these assets can get more difficult.
If you find yourself in a situation where you and your spouse have a significant number of digital assets acquired as a married couple, it’s important to find a family law attorney who is skilled in understanding how to determine the value of these assets and helping you to work through the property division of these assets.
Consult with Jackson Family Law to achieve the best resolution for you.
At Jackson Family Law, Ruth Jackson and her team are ready to help you with the division of your property in the digital age. Ruth has extensive experience and expertise in gathering and analyzing electronic evidence in order to achieve the best resolution for you. With a special focus on protecting those without financial knowledge, Ruth is dedicated to providing you with the clarity needed to achieve the best resolution possible.
THE BEST FAMILY LAW ATTORNEYS IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY
Serving the residents of Kenton County, Campbell County and Boone County, the law office of Jackson Family Law is ready to help you with your family law issues. At Jackson Family Law you won’t get lost in the shuffle. Our service oriented staff is highly organized and highly responsive, promptly responding to all client communications.
