Why California Divorce Judgments Are Hard To Get Approved

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

Why California Divorce Judgments Are Hard To Get Approved

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this video is about why it’s so difficult to get your divorce judgment approved through the courts. So normally when you do your divorce paperwork, you do your summons petition, your disclosures, all your paperwork, 1st when you go to court and you file those documents, the courts take your money, they file your form and you just assume everything’s fine.

Honestly the first time anyone actually looks at your paperwork and reviews it is when you turn in your judgment, and what you normally get when you turn in your judgment is the clerk will review it and after a few months of processes you’ll generally get your case back with a reject letter.

That’s what happens with half my clients that come in, come in as new clients where they haven’t started their case, and the other half of my clients come in and have had their divorce rejected numerous times, as many as 6 times in some cases. So generally, what would happen and I’m gonna put this up so you can see it, you’ll get a reject sheet which will have a list of items that you will need to fix. It will tell you what’s wrong, but it doesn’t tell you how to fix it necessarily so that’s the difficulty.

You’ll get a list of errors but they will not tell you what the corrections are. In fact, they will tell you that they are not allowed to tell you, and in some cases now I’ve been doing this for 6 years, I worked for the courts in the past, I worked for a law firm and I’ve never seen a reject sheet like this one. This one basically says, please be advised that the court will not assist in the preparation of your paperwork.

Your judgment contains multiple errors and or lacks mandatory forms. Please seek legal advice blah, blah, blah. So the funny thing is this, either the clerk was so lazy that they didn’t want to go through and check off what the issues were, or there was so many issues that they just gave it a blanket statement because it was so messed up. Now these folks actually hired me and I corrected everything.

Yes it was a mess and yes the clerk was right, there’s a lot of missing things, and a lot of things were just completely wrong. But it was quite lazy of the clerk to not even list what the issues are because as you can see in the other one I showed you, they marked off probably 12 issues, so they went through it fairly thoroughly and checked off the issues that they had.

Again you get a reject sheet that tells you what the problems are but not necessarily how to fix it. Where this one just said yours is so messed up, I’m not even going to waste my time fixing it. So we took care of that anyways but wanted to let you know no one’s reviewing your paperwork until you’re turning in your judgments.

You can anticipate getting a reject sheet at least once when you turn in your divorce paperwork. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope this video was helpful and if you need help with your divorce give me a call. You can reach me at 6612810266 or just go to divorce661.com and you can schedule and I’ll talk to you soon.

California Divorce Default Set Aside Process & Reasons

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

California Divorce Default Set Aside Process & Reasons

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and the purpose of this video is to explain the process of setting aside a default. So let me set up the scenario real quick. So one of the spouses filed for divorce, 30 days went by and could have been 30 days or a year and the default was filed.

This is when the response is not filed. The petitioner will file a request and or default which basically pushes the respondent out of the case and can no longer file a response or participate. At least that’s what it does in theory and practicality. However, there is a way to get around this, so if a default is filed against you, you can file what’s called a request to set aside the default.

There’s a couple reasons you need to know about in order to do that. You have to file a motion with the court. It’s a request for order for methol 300 and you also need to file your response. So this is how this plays out. The defaults been filed, you want to file the response, you now want to participate or whatever happened has changed and now you want to be a part of the case but you can’t file the response because the defaults been entered.

You file a motion with the court to request the judge to set aside the default. You file the motion and you also file the response at the same time. So what you’re asking the court to do is to set aside the default and to file the response at the same time. This does require a hearing. You have to file a motion. Get a court date, serve the other party and then appear at the hearing and explain to the judge why you think it should be set aside.

Again, there are I believe 4 reasons why you can set aside a default. Just off the top of my head one is a surprise, meaning you weren’t aware that it was going to happen or it could happen, and there are some other reasons. You have to generally within 6 months of the default being filed so you can’t wait 2 years and say oh now I want to be a part of the case and want to set aside the default, but those are the rules.

You have to file a motion, get a court date, you have to file your response at the same time and generally what they’ll do is they’ll hold the response until the judge sets aside the default and there is reason why I did this video today is because we just did a request to set aside default, file the motion, submitted the response with the filing fee check of 435 dollars and I told the client the courts will hold that until the judge approves the set aside in order to file the response because the court and the clerk cannot file the response if the defaults been entered.

So the fact that in this case the response was filed I think was a mistake on the clerk’s part because generally speaking, unless they’ve changed policies, which they couldn’t have because the response couldn’t have been filed as I speak about this as I’m speaking. The clerk could not have filed the response with the default being filed so, in this case I believe the clerk did make an error, but generally what will happen is you file your motion, right now it’s a 90 dollar fee.

You attach your 435 dollar check to the response and they’ll hold it until the time of the hearing and at that time if the judge decides to set aside the default then they’ll file the response at that time. Tim Blankenship, divorce 661.com if you need any assistance with your divorce anywhere in California feel free to give me a call 6612810266, or you can always schedule a consultation right on our website at divorce661.com. Have a great day.

LA County Divorce Self Help Center Even Gets It Wrong

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

LA County Divorce Self Help Center Even Gets It Wrong

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and I field a lot of calls, I probably get 15 to 20 calls a day, maybe 5 of which are people who end up becoming clients or will soon become clients and the other 15 are people that just had a question.

Maybe they’re trying to do their own divorce. It’s not that we provide a free service, however I am willing to spend 5 minutes on the phone with folks to help them resolve perhaps what might be a small issue, or determine if it’s a small issue or just something they can do themselves or where I’d need to step in and help them.

And today’s call was from a gal who tried to file her case in Lancaster. Trying to do it herself using the courts self help center, if there is such a thing. And her comment was how rude and how unhelpful the self help center was and I know that because I worked for the self help centers years ago and know how the clerks and everyone can be, very unfriendly and very unhelpful, but anyways she said that the courts told her that she had to start over entirely.

This was up in Lancaster and they’re renowned for being the least helpful and most unfriendly in all of [UNKNOWN] county as far as from talking to clients of who have tried to do their own divorce in the beginning. But anyways, they had told her that there was something wrong with her proof of service and her notice of acknowledgment.

I said you know what if want to hire me, don’t hire me, send me over what they’re telling you is wrong and I’ll take a look at it. So she scanned over the proof of service and notice of acknowledgment and I took a quick look. It took all of 5 seconds and there was nothing wrong with it at all. So I asked her to check with the clerk and see what it is specifically they were saying, but it appears that they were mistaken in telling her that she needs to start over because there was absolutely nothing wrong with her proof of service. So I guess the purpose of this video is number 1 to tell you the clerks aren’t perfect.

They make mistakes like everyone else. Some of them just don’t care. Other times they just make a mistake, and often times I’ll be, even if we get rejected judgments I will read their response and rationale for the rejection and I will usually have to, not argue with them but send them my rationale and the reasoning why I think it should be processed as is, and I’m usually correct.

So number 1, they’re not that helpful. Number 2, they sometimes can be wrong and in this case they were just wrong and giving wrong information, and we see that quite a bit. Even the reject sheets that they send out will have things that are incorrect on them.

They’ll say forms are missing when they’re not. They’ll say things aren’t marked when they are. They’ll say to include forms which aren’t required. So just give them the benefit of the doubt, but they are wrong often and we’ll take a look at things and fix things when people do need help.

If you have something that comes up and you just want me to take a quick look at it I don’t mind. You can always schedule a consultation with me or give me a call. I might spend 5 minutes on the phone with folks trying to square away what they’ve got going on, or answer simple questions if it is simple, otherwise we do provide a full service divorce solution, and many times our clients use us for that, but sometimes just giving them a little bit of help to help them finalize their divorce case. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.

If you have any questions just give me a call. You can schedule a consultation right off our website at divorce661.com and be happy to help you

Long Term California Divorce : How To Terminate Spousal Support

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

Long Term California Divorce : How To Terminate Spousal Support

Hi, Tim Blankenship here at divorce661.com and this video is about when you’re trying to terminate spouse on a long term marriage. I’m going to try to make this brief but it can get quite complex.

You know long term is anything over 10 years. The rule of California is that the court will retain jurisdiction over the issue of spouse support indefinitely. So it means you guys can say no spouse support, 0 support order however, the court will maintain jurisdiction over that.

Meaning at any time during the future either one of you can go back to court and ask for spouse support if there’s a change in circumstance such as a child loss, etcetera. A lot of people don’t want to leave that door open even though policy is that the courts will maintain jurisdiction indefinitely.

A lot of our clients want to terminate jurisdiction over the issue of spouse support, even on long term marriages so they can close that door and never have that issue be revisited down the road. In doing so the parties have to agree to do that, both spouses have to agree.

In fact there’s a whole page waiver that says basically for no reason in the future, no matter what happens you’re waiving your right and the court no longer has jurisdiction, blah blah blah and you guys would both waive, both have to sign and initial that specific waiver language.

So when people call me and say Tim I tried to do my own divorce and my divorce is being rejected and they’re saying I can’t terminate spouse support and we have a long term marriage etcetera, what they’re trying to do is a default case. A default is where the other party, the respondent participate at all. So as, for court policy, the court has to reject your judgment.

They cannot go against California law and allow you to terminate support on long term marriages except by agreement. So we got, many people come to us say Tim, we’re having this problem. We tried to return our judgment, they’re rejecting it because they say we can’t waive it even though I marked terminate jurisdiction on the petition and that’s because they’re trying to do a true default versus a hybrid.

A hybrid is a case where, and what’s going on here is people are trying to save on court fees and it’s the same thing we do, but what you want to do is a hybrid which is a default with an agreement, as opposed to a true default. Both of those neither party has to, I’m sorry, the respondent doesn’t have to response, so the same court fee savings is there but people get confused between a default and default with agreements.

If you’re trying to terminate spouse, long term marriage and you guys sign the waiver language then you need to have the other party involved still don’t have to file a response, but then you can terminate support on a long term marriage.

If you have no choice but to do it by default and they’re option is going to be mark the reserved jurisdiction over the spouse support on your spouse support order for judgment. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com. Hope this was helpful.

If you want to schedule a call with me you can go to divorce661.com and you can do that through the blue button that says schedule a call with Tim, and if you need my assistance feel free to set that up and we hope to talk to you about helping you prepare or finish your divorce in California.

Thank you so much for watching and have a great day.

FL-180 : Number Of Pages On California Divorce Judgment Required

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

FL-180 : Number Of Pages On California Divorce Judgment Required

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com with today’s divorce 661 tip of the day. Now this is going to be a pretty straight forward one, but it is a reason that your judgment will get rejected none the less and it happens quite a bit.

So when you turn in your final judgment paperwork the cover sheet is a FL 180. It says judgment. On page 2 there’s a little line that says number of pages attached. What you need to do is count every page following that 2nd page of the judgment and write that number down. Honestly, people forget it and the court will reject your judgment if you do not put the number of pages that follow.

The court will not count it and fill it in for you. They will straight out reject your judgment and send it back to you for the tissue alone. So make sure you include the pages.

Obviously it’s important because if you have, say there’s 10 pages and when they get it there’s actually 12 the courts going to assume that pages were added after the fact, or if you have the wrong number or no number at all as far as number of pages the courts going to assume, they need to know how many pages that they are reviewing and verifying.

So don’t forget to add the number of pages to prevent your judgment from being rejected. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com. Thanks for watching.

How To Modify Your Child Support & Spousal Support

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

How To Modify Your Child Support & Spousal Support

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com with today’s divorce661 tip of the day. So if you are going to modify child support or spouse support keep in mind that the court has the ability to make changes.

They retain jurisdiction over the issue of support, both child support and spousal support in most cases and that allows you if there is a change in circumstances to ask the court to make modifications to support.

For instance, if you have an increase or decrease in income wither you are the payer or the receiving spouse of support, you have 2 options. You can either petition the court to ask the court to modify support based on the change in circumstances.

In this case we’re talking about income, or, what I 1st tell my clients is if you guys are still on good terms to speak to your spouse. Let the other spouse know about the change in circumstances as far as income, let me run some numbers regarding child support and spouse support, and if you guys agree to those numbers all I have to do is draft a stipulation.

You can avoid court. It takes a couple days to draft this document. There’s no court involved. There’s a small filing fee of 20 dollars with the court. I draft a document, you guys sign it and you’re done. As opposed to going to court, filing a motion, having the other person served, going to the hearing and having the judge make the order.

I did a longer video about this called stipulate versus litigate, meaning come to an agreement as opposed to going to court. I hope you enjoyed today’s divorce661 tip of the day. Tim Blankenship, with divorce661.com. Have a great day.

Waiving Child Support : California Divorce & Child Support

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

Waiving Child Support : California Divorce & Child Support

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this video we are going to address the question if child support can be waived in a California divorce. The question is can you waive child support in a divorce.

Let me set up the scenario for you. Let’s assume that you’re going through a divorce and the other spouse is not participating and you don’t want to pay or receive child support for one reason or another.

When that happens what I sometimes see people do when they’re trying to do their own divorce is they will put in their judgment, their divorce judgment, final paperwork you turn into the court, and they’ll say no child support requested. You can’t do that. You can ask for there not to be child support but you cannot say no child support.

The courts going to want to know based on incomes of the parties what the child support should be. What the guideline amount should be. Now, you can get away with not having child support, but there’s a specific way to do that, and that way is to have the jurisdiction reserved over the issue of child support.

So while you can’t say no child support, you can say the court will retain jurisdiction for future determination over child support, and that’s the way you can get out of paying for child support.

I’m going to do another video as well, probably right behind this one to explain to you how you can ask for a ZERO support order even though child support may be ordered in a certain amount normally, based on income and time share. So make sure to watch that.

So just real quick recap, no you cannot waive child support. There has to be an order for support or you have to ask the court to retain jurisdiction over the issue of child support for your judgment to be approved on that issue. Tim Blankenship, divorce 661.com. If you have any questions just give me a call or you can go to my website for more information at divorce661.com. Thanks for watching.

FL-150 : How To Avoid Filing & Protect My Privacy During California Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

FL-150 : How To Avoid Filing & Protect My Privacy During California Divorce

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. So this videos going to be on how to, how do I want to say this? How to protect your assets. How to give as little information to the courts as possible, let me explain.

When we prepare judgments, when we handle divorce cases we give the courts as little information as possible. Meaning, when we’re listing assets and debts we just name the asset and the last 4 digits of the account.

That’s all we give them. That’s all the courts require, and a lot of people when they do a divorce they’ll put their full name, full account number, full social security number, I mean everything. You’re setting yourself up for identity theft to be honest with you, and have your assets potentially stolen from you.

So protecting people, we do that, but also a lot of people say Tim why do I have to include, or why I do I have to prepare an expense declaration. So if there are children in your marriage, minor children, and you are going through a divorce in California you need to do an income and expense declaration and it needs to be filed with the court.

Now, there is a little loop hole there. If you have an uncontested case where a petition is filed and a response is filed, you do not have to file that income and expense declaration. So a couple of things here. The reason I’m bringing this up is I had a client say Tim we’re in full agreement, why do I need to turn in an income and expense declaration to court?

We wanted to protect our privacy, we don’t want to list our name, where we worked, employers address because potentially that’s public record, which is true. I said the only way to accomplish that, and here’s the trick, the reason for this video. If you want to avoid filing an income and expense declaration for the court have the respondent file a response.

It will make your case uncontested and it while the income and expense is still prepared as a matter of disclosure policy, you don’t have to file it with the court. So we do that now for our clients. We generally will not have them file a response to save them money. It’s one of the tricks we do.

So if you’re going to get divorced call us before you file anything because you don’t have to file a response if you’re in agreement because we can get your through on just one fee and save you money, but in this particular case say Tim how can we avoid filing the income and expense declaration and I said simple, file the response.

All you have to do is pay another 475 dollars. It can protect your identity and in that way you don’t have to file the income and expense with the court. So that’s a little hack for you. If you don’t want to file that just have the response file, have your case be uncontested and you don’t need to file it. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.

I hope that was helpful. If you’ d like to schedule a call with me please go to divorce661.com and click on the blue button that says schedule a call with Tim and we can chat and we’d love to help you with your divorce anywhere in California. Talk to you soon and hope you have a great day.

What To Do With Your Home During California Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

What To Do With Your Home During California Divorce

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this video we’re talking about how to deal with your family at your home while going through a divorce.

So essentially you have a handful of options when it comes to dealing with your house. Number 1 obviously, the 1st option would be to sell the house. Well normally that might be the easiest way to go if you guys need to split the equity in the property because each of you need some, let’s say getting started money.

Maybe you’re going to buy a new residence and you need some liquid cash to be able to that. That’s number 1 option.

Number 2, one of you could buy the other party out. Now this is possible only in a few occasions, and can address some of the quick issues with what could possibly come up with the buyout. Number 1 is there could be no equity in the home and therefore there’s no way to really refinance the property. Number 2, there might be credit or income issues for qualifying for the other person, for the person keeping the home to qualify for the buyout.

And number 3, it just may not be possible for you guys to come up with the money as a buyout either with a 2nd or something like that. So that option may not be on the table. However, consider the fact that you can is other equity, other assets to offset.

So for example, if there was 100,000 dollars in equity, 50,000 each party, and you guys wanted to do a quote unquote “buyout” for the house it doesn’t have to come from the house necessarily. Maybe there’s 50,000 dollars in another asset, a vehicle, maybe a 401K, maybe a savings account and you use that to offset the difference.

That can be a workable option, and number 3, what we see sometimes is when there are minor children many times one of the spouses prefers to stay in the house for a period of time post divorce. So you get through the divorce process but maybe the kids are 15, 16 or it doesn’t matter age. Maybe you guys agreed to keep the children in the family home with one of the spouses so the kids don’t have the disruption from moving and so forth.

We’ve seen that quite a bit as well. So sell, buyout and, or keep the house. Both of you maintain it. Figure out a way to make it work. Again, we’ve done that plenty of times. Keeping one a spouse and the minor children in the house with a future sale date meaning the parties agree to keep the house until the kids, you know, the last child turns 18 and graduates from high school, something like that.

So that’s kind of your options when it comes to dealing with your house during divorce in California. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope this was helpful. If you have any questions feel free to give me a call. The number’s on your screen or you can go to divorce 661.com and schedule a consultation with me directly. Thanks for watching and have a great day.

California Divorce : STRS & PERS Pensions Included In Judgment

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

California Divorce : STRS & PERS Pensions Included In Judgment

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com with this video we are talking about if you have a STRS or PERS pension, so we’re talking state teacher retirement system or public employee retirement system pension.

You want to make sure that you do include those on your divorce judgment, whether your case is amicable or not. Let me give you a for instance, many of our clients call us when we are handling their divorce and say they have no assets or debts and when I inquire further they say well we do have assets and debts but they are each in our own names and that’s fine, a lot of people keep their own assets or debts but we still want to include those on the judgment so you guys are protected.

Now, when it comes to certain pensions, in this case we’re talking about STRS and PERS, they are going to require that those assets appears specifically on your divorce decree on your judgment showing that you are receiving 100 percent of your pension, so even if you’re going to say no assets, no debts, at a minimum you need to include that you will be keeping your own STRS and or PERS or vice versa or whatever the case may be because when you go to take your ex spouse off of your, remove them as beneficiaries they’re going to say well show us that you have received or been confirmed in the divorce as your sole and separate property, your STRS and PERS pension.

So the point of this video is make sure you’re including at least those on your judgment, otherwise you’re going to need to file an amended judgment and usually in the form of a stipulation, which we recently had to do for a client who omitted an asset by mistake and when he called STRS they said sorry we can’t confirm this to you, you know we need to have it as part of the divorce decree and so we had to file an stipulation confirming the omitted asset to him as a sole and separate property, fairly easy fix it’s just better to make sure you’re listing your property because had he not listed this or forgot that he omitted it, the PERS and STRS basically said we can’t help you until you get this on there.

The asset was unconfirmed to either party so it kind of left the door open for division of that asset, so it’s just important to make sure you guys are declaring and confirming to each of you your sole and separate property. In this case specifically the STRS and PERS when it comes to pensions.