Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this episode, we’re talking about California child custody agreements and parenting plans. Basically, what you can come up with and what is required by the courts as far as a parenting plan?

People have asked me what’s required. Like how much detail does the court need as far as a custom plan? Here’s the answer.  The courts do not need a detailed parenting plan at all. All they need to know is how you are going to label your custody.

Meaning, are you going to have joint legal and joint physical or is one party going to be the sole physical custodial parent etc.? You don’t need an actual detail plan. For people who want to have an open parenting plan and not a specified plan, you can simply say joint legal, joint physical, and reasonable right of visitation to the other party.

That’s sufficient enough for the court. They’re not going to kick that back and say no we need a parenting plan. If you want an open schedule for people that maybe have schedules that change frequently, law enforcement officers, nurses, firefighters, people that have a changing schedule, you may not want a detailed parenting plan.

It may not be workable because maybe your schedule changes frequently. Now in the alternative, you can have a detailed parenting plan so if you have a good relationship with your spouse and the open parenting plan works that’s great. But if you want to have some detail or specificity of your parenting plan, you can have as detailed as a plan as you want.

You can attach the attachments that are part of the court orders. You can have a joint legal custody attachment. You can have a physical custody attachment. You can have a detailed plan where you are laying out every hour and every minute who picks up in what vehicle. I mean you can get as detailed as you want. It’s not necessary, but you can have an open plan, a very detailed plan, or anything in the middle.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.come. I hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this episode, we’re talking about assets and debts property. Not just real property. Not just a home but when we say property we’re talking about any type of assets and debts.

Commonly we’ll have people tell me is when I say, hey, do you have any property to divide or any assets or debts divided they’ll commonly say no we don’t have anything together. Well having something together, and what they mean is in each other’s name, meaning they each have assets of death in their own name but not combined assets and debts.

That’s not how that works in a California divorce it is about when the asset or debt was acquired. Regardless of whose name it’s in.

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So, if you guys acquired an asset or debt during the marriage, a credit card in your spouse’s name, a car in your name, it’s considered a shared asset or shared debt. Doesn’t mean you have to divide it, it just means it has to be addressed and has to be confirmed to one of you or the other.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. I hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a better way to serve your divorce documents when your case is amicable. I’ve said this a million times.

The reason I’m bringing this up is I had a client this week who is trying to do his own divorce, hadn’t used us, hadn’t called us for advice, try to do his own divorce. It was amicable, so he goes down to court files his paperwork, and then he has someone serve his wife. The wife is at work. Process server shows up at work, you’ve been served. You know how it goes.

You’ve seen it on television. People don’t like that. I don’t care how amicable your divorce is, if you have your wife or your spouse served paperwork it’s going to start you down a dark road. No one likes to be served. There’s a different way of doing it. We never have our clients served by a process server or anybody for that matter.

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There’s a way you can have a single form signed. You just provide it to your wife or your spouse or your husband. You provide them a form. You give them copies of the paperwork. They sign a form saying they acknowledge receiving a copy of it and everyone’s happy.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.come. I hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and today we’re talking about some issues we’re seeing, in this case particularly with the Pomona Courthouse.

So, when you file for divorce and you’re doing your judgment, we’re talking about the FL 180, the final paperwork, you’ll notice at the bottom it says this judgment contains provision for child support or family support. It’s letter H on page 1.

What this is telling you is that if you have a child support order, then you need to attach an FL 191. The FL 191 is a child case registry form. Now, it says you have 10 days to do that after you file the judgment, so in most cases we are not ever filing this case registry form, although the judgment form says it’s required and we’ve never had any issues.

Recently we’ve been having issues with the Pomona Courthouse wherein they are rejecting judgments that do not have the case registry form attached at the time of submission of the judgment, so of course we’re now complying with that and making sure we’re doing that.

Obviously, there is either a new clerk or a new judge who is in there and is making sure or demanding that that be turned in. In addition, Pomona is also now making it mandatory that, when there is a child support order, that a FL 195 Withholding Order also be attached.

They’re not even allowing that to be something that you guys can agree upon. I’m going to do another video about what to do about that FL 195, which is the Withholding Order. Many people who are paying support do not want to have support being paid directly from their employer, or maybe they just don’t want their employer knowing they’re paying child support.

It is sort of a personal issue and I get that. If you have a Pomona case, we’re not seeing this in any other courts right now except Pomona. Pomona is requiring and they are rejecting judgments if there is no case registry form and if there’s no withholding order when there is child support involved.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and today we’re talking about whether or not you can file court documents by mail.

You might find yourself out of town or in a different state dealing with a divorce in California and you may need to get some documents filed, or perhaps you just don’t want to have to drive down to the courthouse because it’s 20, 30 miles away.

There is a way to file your divorce paperwork by mail, but there’s a certain way you want to do that. Here’s how you do that.

1st of all you have to, obviously, mail your documents to the court, but what you need to do is have a copy of whatever it is you want to receive back, because you’re going to want to get copies of whatever you’re filing back. You have to have an original followed by a copy, followed by postage returning to you, so a self addressed, stamped envelope back to you.

If you mail in documents to the court with just an original, they’re not going to mail you a copy, they’re not going to make a copy, mostly because they charge for it. And, number 2, they won’t just put it in an envelope and address it to you, so you have to basically spoon feed the court.

If you’re going to mail it in, mail it with the original and a copy, and I’d even put a note to be clear that you want a copy of what you’re filing and to mail it back to you in the self addressed, stamped envelope. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you have a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here at divorce661.com and in this video we’re talking about the Income Withholding Order, also known as the FL 195. The FL 195 essentially is a form that you can fill out to have child support automatically taken out of the payor’s check when paying support.

So if you’re the one paying support, you can file this with the court, either party can file it, and you can get the judge to sign off on it and essentially you then serve it on the employer. Then the employer will pay direct the child support, and/or spouse support but we don’t recommend it for the spouse support.

The issue that we’re having, what I want to discuss specifically in this video, is we are starting to see some courts make it mandatory that, when there is an order for child support, they are making it mandatory that an FL 195 also be filed. Now, there isn’t anything that says this has to be done, but we are seeing one particular court, and I just did a video about this court, which is the Pomona Courthouse.

We are seeing where they are now rejecting judgments where there is child support and they are requiring that an FL 195 Income Withholding Order be filed, as well. That’s causing some concern for our clients. This is new. We never file the FL 195, and most of our cases that have children have child support built in and we just have it paid directly to the spouse receiving.

Now we have a court requiring the FL 195 and they’re rejecting the judgment in its entirety, meaning they won’t even accept it, without the FL 195 being attached. So, that said, we are having to file it. Otherwise, of course, we can’t file the judgment and when we notify our clients that we’re seeing this trend, they of course become concerned because they didn’t want that to happen. They didn’t want to have an Income Withholding Order for various reasons.

They didn’t want their employer to know, maybe they work for a small employer and they don’t want them to know that they’re having to pay child support, or maybe even that they got divorced. So, here’s the work around. We’re filing the 195 when mandatory by the court and then what we’re telling our clients is, just don’t send it to your employer.

So you have a court order for Income Withholding Order, the only way that’s going to happen and come out of your check is if you send it to your employer once it’s filed. So, the court isn’t going to do that. When they file it, they’re not mailing it to the employer. If that changes, I’ll let you know, but as of this recording they are not sending these out nor have they ever.

You file the Income Withholding Order, they mail it back to you and it’s up to the person who filed it to send it to the employer to collect the child support. So the work around on the FL 195 if you find it’s being required in a court you’re filing in. Go ahead and file it, and then just don’t send it to your employer. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this video we’re talking about spousal support orders and child support orders, specifically related to when there’s a request for 0 support in both spousal and child support.

So, when you do have a spousal support order you’re going to indicate how much is going to be paid, same with child support, and you’re going to state how much is going to be paid, for which children, for how long, on what days, etcetera. You also have to have a start date. When is the child support or spousal support going to start?

You’re going to have to put a date in there. For spousal support you’ll have to put an end date or until further of the court. For children it’s just built in until 18 and graduated from high school. When you have 0 support for either child or spousal support we have some courts in California that are now requesting that a start date still be placed in there.

So, when will the start date for 0 support begin, I guess, is the rationale. We’ve never had to do that before, and now we’ve started to get some judgments returned with the court saying, even though there’s no support, we still need a start date on the either child support order or the spousal support order. We’ve just been putting it in there.

Doesn’t really make a lot of sense, doesn’t make a difference. Across the board, when we see a trend of things starting to happen, we’ll comply with that. When we are completing your judgment, you will see a start date whether or not there’s a request for spousal or child support. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this episode we’re talking about law firms posing as mediators in your case. Let me set this up. I don’t want to say that attorneys can’t be mediators and they’re faking being a mediator. I want you to understand when someone has an attorney that they are not your mediator.

Let me explain. We had clients that were going to work with us, they were amicable. We were supposed to start on a certain date and then I never got the call. When I followed up with them it turned out that the other spouse went out and hired an attorney. The impression that the other party had, that the wife had, is that it was their mediator.

So when I called her I say, well send me a copy of what you received in the mail. She was served by mail, which is fine. When I looked at the petition that was filed, the attorney was at the top of the form. The attorney’s name appeared at the top of the form. The letter came from the attorney’s office.

The issue here was, in misunderstanding or mis-characterizing the role of the attorney, the wife thought that that was their mediator and she was going to be helping them both. You can have a mediator who is an attorney, but they do not represent either side. If you’re receiving a petition or any paperwork from an attorney and their name is at the top of the paperwork, they represent that party. They do not represent you, and they don’t have your best interests in mind.

In fact, they have their client’s best interests in mind. In this particular case I had to explain to this wife that she needed to respond. She couldn’t take it on face value that this was going to be the attorney mediating the case because she was the attorney of record for the husband. You’ve got to be careful with, as I say, attorneys posing at mediators.

If she didn’t call me or we didn’t talk, she would have assumed all this time that the attorney was working for both their best interests in an amicable case while the attorney was working in the husband’s best interest as attorney of record of him, yet saying she’s helping to mediate the case. So, just be careful and understand the roles of the players in your divorce.

For us, we are a neutral 3rd party. We don’t represent clients in any cases at all as our role. We do pure mediated cases and amicable cases for folks trying to get through this. So there’s never a concern with us. It’s when there’s an attorney you need to really make sure who they are representing or if they are truly paying a mediated role. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.