California Divorce – Can Parties Agree To Keep House And Sell Later

Connor: The same thing with a quick claim deed.

Tim: Yes, it’s going along.

Connor: Yes, other people and that’s another thing too. Some people are misadvising their clients or in Real Estate and say, well, you can pull the spouse off with the quick claim deed.

Tim: Yes.

Connor: But that doesn’t fix it with the loan.

Tim: No!

Connor: So the cleanest break you would ever had, would be just get rid of it, sell it.

Tim: Or refinance it completely out.

Connor: Absolutely! If one of the party is capable and one of them wants to stay in the house, absolutely!

Tim: I have to say, we’ve had a lot of clients just of financial reasons, quick claim off the house and just take the risk of being on the loan.

And just because they don’t want to short sale and ruin their credit and the mortgage were still a lot less than—you know what I mean?

Connor: Sure.

Tim: That they can make that mortgage payment, the other spouse staying in there. And so the credit and they could stay in there.

But I’m telling you the risk is that if they default, you need to come up with some way of making sure that, that payment would be made either they send you a copy of checks being cashed or some way of verifying just trust your ex to do the right thing.

Connor: Some people I have to look at my own situation. At this point, I would trust my wife of 23 years probably.

Tim: Most likely!

Connor: Yes, most likely to do that. And again, there’s a lot relationships. I know you see it too.

Tim: Yes.

Connor: I mean the spouses are so friendly, it’s almost weird. It’s like they’re both about to give released it from prison.

And they’re willing to do whatever it takes. And there’s no argument at all. But I think that’s the smaller part of the people that get Divorced.

Tim: Yes. Alright, let’s talk about keeping the existing mortgage and letting in your spouse stay. We kind of attest on this a little bit.

We actually attest on it a lot. If the spouse stays in the house, it was not refinancing just staying on that same mortgage, there’s that risk involved.

Connor: And the other things too, let’s say there’s only one party that’s on the loan maybe the other spouse could consider writing up a lease agreement for them.

Actually doing it official, but it’s a sticky situation.

Tim: I don’t know. Make sure we understand that.

Connor: Well, let’s say one of –

Tim: Oh, the one who’s on the loan!

Connor: Absolutely!

Tim: Makes lease to the other.

Connor: They could write up an official agreement stating this is what the monthly amounts going to be. This is when it’s due. This is your part of the obligation with the up keeping the house.

You’re not to sub that rooms, whatever that maybe to try to supplement income because now instead of one eviction, if that’s the way it happens to go and see that’s your enforcement mechanism in contract –

Tim: Got you!

Connor: Instead of one, now all of a sudden if they’re renting rooms out to five or six different people, that’s a $50,000 bill all day long to get all these folks out.

Tim: Yes, we’ve seen that happened once. Now we don’t get those types of crazy cases in our office but we’ve had people to do that.

It is funny when you’re just talking, you remind of a certain scenarios when we had someone, both on the home, both on the—you drop your mic?

Connor: Yes.

Tim: Both on the home and both on the loan and title and one spouse had moved out. The other one stopped paying the mortgage.

And so it was in default. Then they filed bankruptcy, so, we could delay it even further.

And all the while, renting out all the rooms and sections of the living room, he had like six people paying them 500-600 bucks a month.

So he’s making 3,000 or 4,000 a month.

Connor: Wow!

Tim: A month and not paying mortgage.

Connor: What a nightmare!

Tim: Until the last we heard in two years he’d been doing this. So it’s just crazy.

And all the while we get the spouse versus team who got the judgment to sell the house. And now he’s squatting and he won’t move out.

So we got those types of issues as well. So alright, let’s see what else we got here.

Oh, I want to talk about evaluation.