The judgment you submit in your divorce, whether through an agreement or through trial, will supersede any requests you make in either your filed petition or response.
For this reason, what you “request” in your petition or response is just that, requests. They are not requests that will be granted per se, rather they are just an indication to the other party what is on your mind as far as what you are thinking at the time of filing.
For this reason, the filing of the petition and response is mostly boilerplate, statistical information only.
In this episode, we’re talking more about the difference between a default case. A true default meaning no agreement, and a default with an agreement which means with an agreement obviously. I had a client contact me a few weeks ago that was trying to go through the Self Help Center.
I think I did a video on this. Just the frustration and time he put into going down there and all the issues he ran into anyways. He called us, retained us, so we could wrap everything up which we have. The interesting thing is he called me today saying that court called him, which I’ve never heard of that happening in all my years and thousands of cases the court calling someone.
Not sure if that was really the court or not, but they were telling him that because he had put TBD, to be determined, on a property declaration. We’re talking about the FL 160s that he attached to his petition.
He needed to come back in and re file his petition and amend his property declaration, so he called me with some concerns saying that the court was saying there are some issues. The problem was that the court is confused over the difference between a default and a default with agreement.
In the conversation I just had with him, I advised him that yes, it would have been correct where he would have had to amend the petition and update his property declarations from the TBD, to be determined, to an actual value amount with a proposed division of the asset if it was a default without an agreement.
Because he said he would be able to get signatures from his wife we were able to simply have a default with an agreement which will supersede any requests in the petition. That’s why I’m always harping on what a default with an agreement, why it’s so much better than default without an agreement.
You have so much more latitude in what you can do so if you completely screw up the petition and your property declarations are screwed up, and in fact, in our videos, we tell you do not attach a property declaration to your judgment unless you know it’s going to be a true default.
The agreement we put together for you in your judgment that both of you will sign will supersede any requests in the petition that was filed to start the case. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. I hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.
