Professional Divorce Service In Santa Clarita | SCV Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

When people are looking for an affordable way to get divorced in Santa Clarita, many chose to use our professional divorce service.  We are the only licensed and bonded divorce document preparation firm in Santa Clarita.

What makes us a professional divorce service?  That is a good question.

First off, we have the experience it takes to get your divorce completed.  Our experience started in the self help centers in the Los Angeles Family Law courts many years ago.  Cutting our teeth learning the divorce process from the ground up while assisting people who could not afford an attorney.

The next thing we did is complete an internship with the family law department in the Los Angeles Superior Courts.  We worked at the Lancaster Branch, Central Branch and San Fernando Branch.  We sat with the family law clerks and learned from the judges as we sat and assisted the judicial assistants in the court room.  We still have our foot in the door with the Los Angeles Superior Court and still assist them to this day.

After working at the court, we worked for one of Santa Clarita’s largest family law firms for over 2 years.  We gained insights from the attorney perspective.  It was only after numerous year of experience with the divorce courts and family law attorneys, did we start our divorce document preparation service in Santa Clarita.

So that pretty much sums up our experience.  Since starting our professional divorce service, we have gained great strides and our business continues to expand.  We now prepare approximately 6-8 new divorce cases every week here from our little office.

Folks are beginning to realized that when it comes to getting a divorce in Santa Clarita and the surrounding Los Angeles area, that we are the place to go for professional divorce services.

One of the things we have done that has made us successful is that we decided early on that we would only do divorce cases. We are not the only licensed and bonded legal document preparation service in Los Angeles, but we are the only ones that specialize in only divorce cases.  This makes us the obvious choice when you decide to get divorced in Santa Clarita.

We are Santa Clarita’s only professional divorce service.  Please give us a call for more information.

Where Did You Get Stuck With Your California Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

People get stuck attempting to complete their California divorce at different points.  This means that people are calling on us for help with their divorce at different stages and we thought we would share these different stages as to suggest you are not alone.

Some people realize right from the get-go that they don’t have the time or desire to attempt their California divorce on their own.  These folks seek out our affordable California divorce service right from the beginning.  These folks will save much time and heartache.

The next place you may decide to get professional divorce assistance is after you have attempted to file your initial set of papers.  What we find is that folks will attempt to fill out the summons and petition and then have it rejected by the court.  Or if they did fill out the forms, they don’t know how to property serve and file the proof of service. We get many calls for assistance at this stage.

Sadly, filing the initial divorce documents is, by far, the easiest part of the divorce case.  The next step is preparing your preliminary declaration of disclosure.  We have talked about he complexity of these specific divorce forms in other articles.  These need to be property prepared and a specific form filed with the court.  We find that these financial disclosures are particularly troublesome for folks.

The last part of your California divorce case is having to complete the judgment.  The judgment is comprised of between 15 and 25 forms, all which will detail the agreements between you and your spouse, including distribution of assets and debts, parenting plans, child support, spousal support and any other agreements you want wrapped up in the divorce judgment.

We have found that people who have attempted to complete their own divorce will have to call us at some point.  The final judgment is the most difficult part and many people face numerous judgment rejections from the court which draw out the case for several years.

We recommend that you call our Santa Clarita Divorce Service from the very beginning so we can professionally prepare your divorce documents.  But regardless of where you have got stuck with your California divorce, we can pick up where you got stuck.

How To File Divorce In California And Serve Spouse In Another State

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This article will discuss the issue of getting a divorce in California when your spouse lives in another state.  We will discuss how you can accomplish your divorce when you are living in different states or even different Countries.

First, let’s talk about jurisdiction.  Only one of you have to live in the State of California to file for divorce.  Just make sure you meet the criteria to file which means being a resident of the State of California for at least 6 months and of the County for the at least the last 3 months immediately preceding the filing of the Petition for divorce in California.

We have many clients who have been separated for a while and they are just getting around to filing for divorce in California.  Sometimes this results in one of the parties moving out of states.  Here is how we deal with this.

You will file your divorce case in the County you live in.  For instance, we are in Santa Clarita, which in in Los Angeles County.  Because we do not have branch court, all our filings go to the San Fernando Courthouse.

Once you have filed, the next step is to serve your spouse.  And you don’t have to hire a process server if your spouse will cooperate.  We use an not well known process called, “Notice of Acknowledgment of Receipt”.  This allows you to mail your initial filing documents to your spouse.  When they sign the acknowledgment and return it to you, file a proof of service.  This is an effective way to serve your spouse without having to hire a process server and is a perfectly acceptable way to serve these papers.

Once you have completed the service, the County in which you filed now has jurisdiction over your spouse and can make the final orders over your divorce case.

We get this question a lot and wanted to address it on our blog so hopefully folks with this same questions can find the answer here.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm that specializes in California divorce.  We provide a flat fee divorce service that takes care of your entire divorce from start to finish.

SCV Divorce Service Rapidly Expands

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We have been fortunate to say the least.  We opened our little Santa Clarita divorce service just over a year ago.  In that short year we have bootstrapped a small start up with literally nothing more than a desire to assist Santa Clarita families with affordable divorce options.

We believe we have found a niche service and one that was apparently desperately needed in Santa Clarita.  We did our due diligence and discovered that there was not an affordable divorce service in Santa Clarita.  We thought there was a market for our service and we were right.

We have seen rapid expansion and this week had to add additional office space and have added an office here in Santa Clarita.  We are still in the same building as we have found great success from using the Barrister Suites building off The Old Road north of Newhall Ranch Road.

We have gone from a single office with just one employee (me!) to now 6 employees and a second office.  I have moved myself out of the original office and find myself with a private office just as I did before we did not have any employees to speak of.

As we get our team in place, we are now geared up to help even more people with a better way of getting divorced.  One that will not leave you with high costs of using an attorney.

We plan on ramping up our marketing efforts now that we can handle a large load of clients.  Up until now, we have been careful to only take on the amount of clients we could successfully provide excellent customer service to.

If you find yourself needed to get divorce anywhere in Los Angeles County, we would be honored if you allowed us to assist you.  We have a great system in place to efficiently help you through your divorce and have the experience it takes to get the job done.

California Divorce Not Completed But I Remarried

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This blog post is a transcription of video where we discussed issues where people are attempting to complete their own California divorce.  They think they are divorced and re-marry, only to learn several years later, and after already re-marrying, that they are not divorced from their first spouse.  You can read the transcript or watch the video below.

Hi, this is Tim Blankenship with divorce 661.com and today we are talking about what to do  If you become remarried and then find out later that your divorce from your previous marriage was never completed. My name is Tim Blankenship I’m a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service and we specialize in California divorce and let’s get right into it.

So I have had several cases just this week alone, where I received a phone call and the party on the phone told me that they thought they completed their divorce many years ago and have remarried and have now discovered that there divorce was never finalized   So I wanted to address a couple of issues and why this is happening in and give you a way of how you can fix this and talk about a little bit of the Rules of Court in regards to you what you need to do and if you’re breaking the law and things like that.

So let’s first talk about these particular cases and you’ll probably find that you’re  having similar trouble.  On this first case, the gal called me. She  thought she had divorced over 10 years ago she went to get remarried and they did it just through are usually went to the county got remarried of it that they want to have a church ceremony.
The church  asked them for a copy of the divorce decree. So they sent a letter to the court and asked for a copy of their divorce judgment and received a letter saying we see you filed for divorce, but no judgment has been entered. So she was shocked to learn that her divorce was not finalized. She thought that she had done and taken all the steps and completed the divorce case and that she was legally remarried. So what were doing with her is we have to complete her divorce 10 years after the fact, even though she’s been legally married for for this period of time.

The next one is is pretty similar, except in this case, as this was where the party was trying to file a default got the default approved and thought the default meant that the that judgment was entered, and what this boils down to is when parties are representing themselves, and that was the case in both of these instances the these parties represent themselves. They did not have attorneys which is totally fine, except for the fact that when you’re you go a completely alone, without assistance from say a company like us. These are the issues and  you will have problems like this.

What you need to do is you should use a service like ours to begin with just to avoid these types of problems. But here’s what we had to do on and are doing currently in these particular cases. When we check the court website and we sent our courrier down to get copies of what it been done. We realize that very little of the case in both of these instances have been done.  All they had done was filed the initial petition, served the petition on the other party and that was literally it that’s all they did so, how they thought that they were divorced is beyond me because there was no judgment entered.

We see these types of problems all the time. So here’s we’ll actually be doing. We have to basically picked up where they left off and complete the process. Fortunately, in both these cases the other party didn’t file a response. The reason that’s important is because if these parties had if the other party filed a response in either of these cases, we would have to track them down as they would have to be involved in the case because they filed a response.

One of these cases was 18 years ago I was interested to look at the paperwork  and it looked like at the court forms look like that long ago.  This one was 18 years ago – she thought she had been divorce. They had a child together. The child turned 18. They thought the divorce was finalized and it wasn’t so we have to go back and again a response is not filed so we were able to pick up where they left off and do a default case.

And the good news is we don’t have to track down the spouses because of course this much time gone by this they have no idea where the other party lives. So let’s talk about pre-existing marriages. So you’ve gotten remarried. Apparently this is something that’s fairly common where folks think they are divorced but are not.

So the question becomes am I legally married. That’s a good question. I looked up and a little research there is a something called prior existing marriage. So for instance this though the lady in my office yesterday. She says number one, Am I still legally married?  And number two, you know, this does not mean my husband is not my husband. My current husband?

So I told her she’s probably currently married, but I told her, and somewhat jokingly, that, but her husband knew her current husband has a way of divorcing her, because there is a pre-existing marriage as looking it up on the on the divorce forms in California. When you file for divorce. One of the options to choose is to say I want to nullify the marriage the voidable marriage because of a pre-existing marriage that you were not aware of.

So if your husband was not aware you were  previously married and you now find out you have cause for divorce if that’s if you’re looking for a way out, exposed, but that both the spouses and have been you there get shaped we said this jokingly, of course, to get to the process for them wrap things up and finish the case of this is the reason I want to get this video out here and do this right, this blog post on this issue is because obviously there’s a lot of this going around.

The court procedures are very confusing, people don’t know what forms to do with and they think their divorced and are not they’re getting remarried there having children with their new husbands and this can run into all kinds of other problems with that as to whose child is. Is the child presumed to be the new husbands or the previous husbands child.

So it brings up a couple of this interesting topics, but really what I want to get out there is you really need to get assistance with your divorce from the get-go. You need to have either an attorney or if you are looking for a more cost effective approach. You can use a service like ours.  We are a legal document preparation service. We only specialize in divorce in California. We handle divorce cases all across California.

So we recommend you use our service from the beginning. If you have we watching this video, but if you find yourself in this particular situation. I just know we can help you give us a call. We need to track down your case number, see where left off and let you know the steps we need to take to finish the divorce case for you.

My name is Tim Blankenship divorce661.com is our website. Please call me if you need assistance with their divorce number 661-281-0266, and as always, thanks for watching.

5 Helpful Divorce Tips When Representing Self | Santa Clarita Divorce

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We have been getting a lot of exposure on our Santa Clarita Divorce Google+ Business Page and thought we would provide folks looking for divorce assistance with some helpful tips on a variety of issues people face when representing themselves.

We are always looking for ways to get information regarding divorce out, and we learned that we can redistribute our content from our blog to Google Plus and then link that content back to our blog.

When Does The Divorce Process Start?

Have you heard of the 6 month waiting period when going through divorce.  This is one of them most misunderstood issues of divorce.  In this video we discuss what you have to do to get the clock ticking on the 6 month waiting period and tell you when the divorce process actually starts.

What Divorce Documents Should You File First?

When people are going to get divorced, they often think they have to have everything figured out before they ever file the first divorce forms.  This is simply not true.  Divorce is a process and has several steps.  The fist step is to file your initial divorce papers so a case number can be issues and your case opened with the courts.  In this podcast we discuss exactly which forms you need to file to start your California divorce case.

How Spousal Support Works

If you think your spouse is going to want spousal support, you will want to watch this video.  We discuss how spousal support is determined and discuss the court’s spousal support calculator known as a Dissomaster Report.  Watch this video where we discuss how California spousal support is determined.

How To Apply For A Fee Waiver For Your Divorce

If you cannot afford the whopping $435 filing fees for divorce, there may be a way to get your court fees waived.  So far, we have a 100% approval rate for getting our clients court fees waived.  There are some specific income requirements you have to meet, otherwise you have to prove to the court that you cannot afford your court fees and still pay for the necessities of life.  In this video we show you how to prepare the divorce fee waiver.

Why You Should Not Attempt To Complete Your Own Divorce

The divorce process is long and complicated.  While technically you are allowed to complete your own divorce, many have tried and many have failed.  In this podcast, we discuss the issues you will be faced with and common problems of trying to file your own divorce case in California.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service in Santa Clarita that specializes in divorce in California.  For a free phone consultation, please call us at 661-281-0266.

 

California Divorce Costs | Attorney vs. Legal Document Assistant | Santa Clarita

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This article is about the California divorce process and the costs associated with getting divorced.  We compare the costs of divorce of using a divorce attorney and using the services of our divorce legal document preparation service in California.

Please feel free to watch the video below.  We also have included the transcribed version of the video.

Hi, this is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Today we are doing another live broadcast and are also having this transcribed at the same time so we can embed this into our blog and uploaded this to an audio file. This is if our  computer can keep up with that.

So today we’re talking about the divorce costs and specifically going to talk about the difference between the cost of hiring an attorney to do your California divorce or hiring someone like my firm, which we are legal document assistants.

First off, let me tell you what a legal document assistant is. We are a licensed and bonded  legal document preparation firm and we just happen to specialize in the divorce process in California.  We are able to work without an attorney in our office which allows us to provide a more affordable service.

So let’s get into the divorce cost attorney versus legal document assistant. So obviously attorneys are doing  a much different job than we do. Mostly the divorce process is completing paperwork. There are occasions where you may need attorney and that’s if you need legal advice or if you need to be represented in court. Those are the two things that we are unable to do. Our license does not allow us to do that. And that’s because we are not attorneys. So if you feel that you will need legal advice or you’ll need to go to court to be represented that there you probably will need an attorney.

So lets back up just a bit and talk about the beginning of the divorce process in California. The California divorce process is mostly made up of paperwork.  You have you’re initial documents that need to be completed followed by doing your financial disclosures which these do no require an attorney. In fact, the divorce process in California can be completed entirely by a legal document preparation firm such as ours without any attorney supervision or without you ever needing to speak with an attorney.

Now we do have clients who start with us and they know they may need attorney down the road, but they want to get as much of the paperwork done as possible before going out and hiring attorney. So lets talk about the cost little bit. The average cost to have your divorce completed by an attorney and this is some research I’ve done online. You can find it as well if you were to look for it is about $20,000.  And that’s $20,000 per person, not the total of both parties.

We have clients who call us who have spoke with attorneys and they are to shocked by the amount of money that they are going to charge them for the divorce after they’ve talk to an attorney. They generally will call our company to find out if there are some other form options for the divorce case. So when we talk to them go weeks find them the difference you want people to understand that there is a difference between what attorneys doing what we do, but the end of the day we can help clients get through the entire divorce process from start to finish without any attorney supervision and without you ever needing to speak to an attorney.

Now if there it we run into trouble, and you do need to legal advice, not a problem. We can always refer you to an attorney in your area and you can get some legal advice a consultation if you need be, and then we can get right back to work for you. We can always just do that for you and you don’t have to hire the attorney to do that for you.

My name is Tim Blankenship. We are licensed and bonded legal document preparation service specialize in divorce. When you use our services. We worked on a flat fee basis. We do not use a retainer fee. We will quote you a flat fee for your divorce and that will be the total cost start to finish. We do everything for you from filing initial paperwork to prepare all the forms.  We taken down everything to the court for you and this is a complete service from start to finish, meaning from initial forms to service to judgment all for a flat fee.

You can go to our website at divorce661.com and we have some pricing packages you can see, based upon at the amount of work that needs to be done if you have children if you have property that needs to be separated those all are determining factors on the total cost of your divorce.  And feel free to look at our pricing page for more information.

Going back to retainers and how those work many people tell us that they spoke to an attorney and he told them the cost would be say $3500 or $4000.  Now what that is is that’s just a retainer that’s not the total cost of your divorce. The total cost your divorce is going to be whatever it takes at that attorney’s hourly rate to get the case finished. So if they’re asking for 3500 $4000 or $5000. That number doesn’t really matter because they are going to bill at their hourly rates if it’s $300,  $400, $500 an hour. They will bill you at that hourly rate until that monies extinguished and if your divorce cases is not finished you’re on the hook for the difference.

So that’s how divorce cases can end up in the $20,000 range. Based on the high attorney hourly rates. So if you’re looking for more affordable service to get your divorce completed and if your case is mostly amicable in nature, even if it’s not amicable, even if you know your going to need a divorce attorney, but you want to save some upfront costs on the document preparation we can really help you save some money by using our service.

So feel free to give me a call, my name is Tim Blankenship and our website is www.divorce661.com. My direct number is 661-281-0266.

California Divorce Resources, Tips & Help | California Divorce Service

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

Hi this is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. This is a transcription of our divorce master radio broadcast.

In this broadcast. We discuss some California divorce tips, tricks and helpful advice. We also will be discussing where you can find free online legal reference materials.

Beginning of transcription.

Hello everybody this is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Today we’re talking about the California divorce process and specifically where you can find some free help and legal reference materials.

There are many ways you can access free information on the Internet for the California divorce process, but many times people find it hard to understand.

Listen to internet radio with Tim Blankenship on BlogTalkRadio

Basically what we have done is taken the information from the courts websites and explained it in understandable terms. We have done this by placing helpful tutorials on our YouTube channel, as well as on audio on both our podcasts and blog talk radio show.

Speaking about our blog talk radio show, these make sure to join us Wednesday evenings at 6 PM Pacific on divorce master radio which if you’re listening to on this blog, you’re most likely listening to a archived version of the show.

So let’s start talking about some of the helpful resources on our website. If you go to our blog at divorce661.com you’ll notice that we have a legal resources tab. If you click on this tab, you’ll see that we have over 20+ links to various court websites that will help you do everything from researching case law to finding free family law forms for your divorce in California.

For instance, some of the links you can find are the California Rules of Court, California family law codes, failing to determine how much the divorce filing fees are in your county, California case law, free online legal research using find law, and how to look up your divorce case summary.

We also have links that link directly to the California Superior Court websites that will take you directly to information such as learning about the basics of divorce, the steps for filing for divorce, how to respond to a divorce filing, how to complete your divorce case, and other frequently asked questions.

The reason we provide all this free information and resources is we know that there are people out there that don’t have the financial resources to hire a professional legal document preparation service such as ours. For those people who want to make it easy to access information and explained the legal process and forms in understandable terms.

For those people looking for a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm that specializes in California divorce such as us this information serves as a useful tool to help these potential clients of ours find our service online. So you can see that by providing this free information on California divorce, we both attract new clients and help those looking for free information about the California divorce process.

Make sure to go to our blog at divorce661.com and get direct access to free information and helpful tips on the California divorce process.

My name is Tim Blankenship I’m a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm specializing in California divorce. We can help you with your California divorce anywhere in the state of California. Please take the time to read our website. Watch our YouTube videos and listen to our podcasts and when you’re ready please feel free to give us a call, would be happy to help you complete your California divorce.

End transcription.

 

Completing The California Divorce Summons & Petition [Slideshare & Podcast]

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

This article includes information on how to complete the California Summons and Petition.  It includes a Slideshare and podcast.  The text of this article are is the transcription of the audio.

Hi this is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com today we are talking about the upload we did to slide share. We wanted to go over the slide share and upload this audio to our slide share website what we have uploaded today which is the initial documents you’ll need to start your California divorce.

What we have here is the petition the summons the family law case cover sheet and a form called the declaration under uniform Child custody jurisdiction and enforcement act. These are the initial four forms you need to get your case filed in California and we uploaded these documents to slide share because these are documents that have some helpful information on them.

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What you’ll see is if you open up the slide share and you’ll find on our slide share.net site or on our website divorce 661.com on the petition and on all the forms there’s some helpful information on what to write down.  The biggest question people have when completing these documents is how to fill them out and have questions on what box do I check etc.  So we are going to briefly go over these forms you can use the slide share as an example when completing your document. We are going to talk about these a little bit.  First we have the petition and those on the petition that it tells you exactly what to do with the top with your name and address city state and ZIP Code where put the core information. Who’s the respondent who’s the petitioner and what box to mark for dissolution of marriage.

As you see them go down the form as far as statistical facts, declaration regarding children what to write if you have separate property, what to write if you have community property of petitioner’s requests.  At number six that lets you know what to fill out as far as irreconcilable differences. As far as number seven in petitioner’s requests because either giving information on who when and how to choose legal custody and physical custody they can use this form as a as a template if you will and will help you answer some of the questions you have as to filling out the petition.

The next form you’ll see in the slide share is the summons. The summons is fairly easy to complete this not a whole lot of information that needs to go on here. Basically just rename the attorney’s name and if you’re representing yourself which if your listing to this you probably are, you’re going to be your own attorneys and your information will go there.

Please note on the back of the summons there is some important information under standard family law restraining orders just make sure to take a look and read that, it is important to know.

The next form is the family law case cover sheet.  The cover sheet is only used to determine jurisdiction for the courts.  They want to  know where you live so they can make sure you’re in the right court. That form is fairly straightforward to fill out. It’s easy, not a lot to it,  just make you sure you sign it on page 2.

If you have children there’s one more form, it’s called the declaration under uniform child custody jurisdiction and enforcement act.  This form you’ll need if you have children and again is  fairly straight forward. They just want to know where your children have lived for the last five years because they will be making orders over your children they want to make sure they have the ability to do that.

So I hope you found this article and our our slide share helpful. We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation firm specializing in divorce, so if you want help and professional assistance in preparing your divorce I would be glad to help you out. We do provide these free tutorials and slide shares for those people who have more time than money, but if you are looking for professional divorce assistance anywhere in California please feel free to give us a call.  We would be happy to help you out because that’s what we do as a business.

My name is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com You can reach me direct at 661-281-0266

Free California Divorce Consultations Another Way To Connect With Clients

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

We just got done completing a new podcast on Blog Talk Radio where we were talked about our free divorce consultations that we offer in California.

We were discussing that we are a content-based company. This means that we are constantly giving out free information on our websites logs YouTube videos and on our podcasts.

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Providing free divorce consultations in California is just one more way we are able to provide additional free information to people who are looking for answers to the questions they have about California divorce.

We feel that it’s important to provide information to our clients. This is how people are able to find our divorce service.

When people ask a question about divorce we want them to find our blogs when they’re looking for answers. We hope they are able to get the answers they are looking for, but were also looking to get in front of our clients so if they do need divorce assistance in California that they will call us when they need help.

Make sure to tune into our Blog Talk Radio show called Divorce Master Radio we are hosting a live radio event every Wednesday at 6 PM. You can call and ask questions will be talking about a new topic every week.

To learn more about our free divorce consultations in California make sure to listen to the blog talk radio show that we’ve embedded into this article.

Please give us a call if you have any questions about California divorce. We would be happy to answer your questions and see if our service would be something that you could use to help with your divorce. You can reach us at 661-281-0266.