FL-150 : How To Avoid Filing FL-150 During California Divorce :: Divorce661

FL-150 : How To Avoid Filing FL-150 During California Divorce

When you go through a divorce in California, there are many divorce forms you will have to complete. But the type of divorce process you are going through, (Contested, Uncontested or Hybrid) will dictate which set of divorce forms you will use and file.

 

Many of the divorce forms are the same for each of the types of divorce, however in certain types of divorce cases, some forms are filed and some are not.

The purpose of this article is to address one such topic which is how to avoid having to file the FL-150, income and expense declaration.

Now first you may be asking yourself why someone would want to do this. The only reason that has been presented to me is that some clients don’t want to have all their financial information filed with the court and thus part of public record with the courts.

If you have seen the FL-150 income and expense declaration you can see it does have plenty of personal information on it. Such as, how much you make, the name of your employer, when you last filed taxes as well as a list of all your expenses. There is a lot of information that goes on the FL-150 and I can see why some people would not want this part of public records that someone could come across or purposely look for.

All of this has to do with procedure. In some cases, for instance if you have minor children, the income and expense declaration must be filed if you have a default with agreement style case, but is not necessary when you have an uncontested divorce case (petition filed and response filed)

So in this case with my clients, they were going to have to file their FL-150 and they asked if there was a way to avoid having to file it with the court. The answer was to have the Respondent file a Response despite the fact that they are in full agreement. This prevents them from having to file the FL-150 with the court, but just remember you still need to complete it as part of the disclosure process.