Default California Divorce & Terminating Spousal Support Issues
Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com, in this video we’re talking about 2 things. We’re talking about terminating spouse support in a long term marriage, in one that is over 10 years, and the difference in a true default and a default with agreement related to terminating spouse support in marriages over 10 years.
So, a true default is where the parties are not in agreement and the respondent is not participating so, that’s fact number one. When you are going to do a default and you’ve been married longer than 10 years, you cannot terminate the courts jurisdiction over the issue of spouse support on your petition.
If you mark that on your petition which many people do, when you go to submit your judgment and you mark terminate the court’s jurisdiction over the issue of spouse support, the court’s is going to reject your judgment and tell you that you cannot terminate spouse support on a marriage of longer than 10 years unless by agreement. Well you don’t have an agreement, you have a true default where the respondent is not participating at all. So, if you want to terminate spouse support on a long term marriage we recommend, and you’ll be required to submit an agreement.
So, we’ve had parties call us where they need help with their divorce, they’re in agreement, they’re trying to do a true default because they don’t want to pay the response fee which is fine, but you can still do that after a default with an agreement and the only way to terminate the court’s jurisdiction over the issue of spouse support marriage on a long term marriage is to do it by agreement.
So, the 1st question I’ll ask the clients is if the other party will participate, then we can do this as an agreement and it’s easy to terminate the spouse support by agreement but on a default with a long term marriage you cannot.
Now here’s catch number 2, once the court rejects your judgment and says well you’ve been married a lot longer than 10 years, California law states that jurisdiction will be reserved indefinitely so then you change your judgment to say reserve jurisdiction, then they reject the judgment again saying you did not request to reserve in the petition, so you cannot ask for that in your judgment It’s a total trick. So, what you have to do then is amend your petition to mark reserved jurisdiction, re-file it, re-serve it, wait the 30 days again and then file your judgment.
So, what we recommend is if you get stuck there it’s best to see if the other party will sign off, it’ll be faster, you don’t have to restart the dates but if not the only way to fix it is to amend the petition, mark the reserved jurisdiction, refile, reserve, wait 30 days and then turn in your judgment.
Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day if you need any help with your divorce give us a call, 661 281 0266. Thanks for watching.
