Cost Of Uncontested Divorce In California

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com here to answer the question, how much does it cost to file for divorce in California? So I’m going to answer this in 2 ways. 1st of all, let’s talk about the court filing fees.

As of this video, May 2017, the court fees in most of California are 435 dollars. Now what you need to know is there’s 2 fees. One to file the petition, you have to pay 435 dollars and if you’re going to have the other party file a response, it’s another 435 dollars. So you’re looking at 870 dollars in court fees. Now that said, if you’re using a service like mine, and we do serve all of California with serving divorce clients. We generally, if you’re amicable can get you through the court process on just one fee.

So we actually will save you guys, collectively, as a group, 435 dollars in filing fees and then when you kind of tack on our cost for assisting you with your divorce it kind of is a swap as a far as what it’s going to cost you to get through the divorce process. Now the second answer is kind of the unknowns, are you going to do your divorce yourself?

In which case you’re not going to pay with money to do your divorce case, but you’re going to pay in time rather for spending your time in court and going to the self help centers, filling out forms, trying to figure out this very confusing process we call divorce in California. You can do one level up and you can use a service like ours, we are a legal document preparation firm specializing in California divorce serving all the California courts.

If you’re looking for some professional non attorney services to assist you, we would be the folks to help you. Our fees start at 699 dollars for our service. You can find more at divorce661.com and then finally you have divorce attorney obviously and cost of that is going to be based on the hourly rate of the attorney. I’ll tell you the average in California is anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 dollars just as a retainer.

That’s not the total cost of your divorce. But if you had an amicable divorce and kind of apples to apples, do it yourself, use us, or use an attorney, I would say 3,500 to 5,000 dollars for an uncontested case and of course, if it’s a contested case sky’s the limit, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 dollars a piece if things are going very sideways and you have a lot of court appearances and so forth. So hope that answered your question on how much it costs to file for a divorce in California.

If you have any questions about our service please give me a call, 6612810266 or go to divorce661.com for more information. Thanks for watching.