Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com and this video I want to talk about a case we handled where the parties were not in agreement and 1 spouse had already filed the request in or default.

Typical divorce, 1 party files the other party will respond. Many times you have, well not many times, all the time you have 30 days to file your response. You can go beyond the 30 days, however, if you do there’s a risk that your spouse will file a request in or default, which basically kicks you out of the case. Now on this particular case we are not working with the clients yet.

They are trying to do their divorce on their own an they’re supposedly working together but the husband behind the scenes while telling his wife they are working towards an agreement, behind the scenes he was trying to finalize the divorce through a default. So while he’s telling her don’t file a response we’re going to enter a written agreement with the court behind the scenes he was trying to push through a default judgment.

So by the time she figured it out he had already filed the default basically kicking her out of the case and trying to do that behind the scenes. In fact, was even trying to file the judgment without her. So he’s telling her 1 thing, we’re going to work on an agreement and behind the scenes playing a game with the courts trying to push through the divorce judgment without her.

So what we had to do was set aside the default. So we had to file a motion to set aside the default and then ask the court to enter the response. That’s the process you go through when you want to set aside the default. I’ll say 99 percent of the time they will do that for a good reason. So what happened was we were filing the motion. We got a court date for the set aside and of course with the courts being so busy the court date was pushed out 45 to 60 days out. So this was going to give an opportunity for time to go through where the husband was still trying to push through the judgment.

Now because the courts are so busy and they may not be on the same page the judgment clerk with the actual court clerk, it’s possible that the judgment could get pushed through. So fortunately the husband did not know what he was doing and the judgment kept getting rejected but even though he knew that the set aside motion was on calendar and there’s going to be a court to ask for the default to be set aside he continued to try and file his judgment.

I think it was at least 3 times during the time we’re waiting for the hearing. He’s trying to push through this judgment as a default even though the default set aside was on calendar. Ultimately the default was set aside. He was unsuccessful in pushing through his default judgment with the court so now the case is going to trial because she wanted to have an opportunity to be heard and because he was trying to trick her into filing a default judgment that’s one of the reasons you can have the judgment set aside.

So even i guess the purpose of this video is that even if a default has been filed against you we can usually have the default set aside so you can enter the case and go to trial and be part of coming towards an agreement through the trial process.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this video we’re talking about what is the preliminary declaration of disclosure.

So when you’re going through divorce, one party will file the other will respond. The next step is both parties need to prepare their preliminary declaration of disclosure and I get asked often what that is. So here’s what compromises the preliminary declaration disclosure. You have your FL 140, which is the declaration of disclosure.

It’s basically a face sheet and then you have the FL 142 which is a schedule of assets and debts, and you have the income and expense declaration which is the FL 150.

Those 3 forms is what comprises your declaration of disclosure, your preliminary declaration of disclosure when going through a divorce in California. Tim Blankenship, Divorce661.com, hope that video was helpful and take care.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com, and in this video we’re talking about request for orders or when you ask the court for a temporary hearing to handle certain issues what the next steps are. So many times you’ll go to court on the request for order. This is when you fill out an FL 300, say you’re asking for spouse support or custody or something like that.

You’ll go to the hearing, after the hearing the judge will make certain orders. Now 2 things will occur. Either they will write the order there at the hearing itself or they will prepare what’s called a minute order and you will be required to prepare what’s called an order after hearing, and I’m not 100 percent why they go 1 way or another.

I think it’s just with the judges preference, but we see half the time they’ll have an order that will be made at court and the judge will draft the order, or the judge’s clerk will draft the order, and the other half the time we see a minute order, which isn’t an order per say. It’s not an order that will be followed basically is a partial transcript or just the clerks notes of what the judge said.

So if you go to a request for, if you go on a hearing and the judge makes orders and they do not write the order on the spot and all they have is a minute order. You’re going to need to get a copy of the minute order so you can then draft the order after hearing. Now for our clients who we send to court on the request for orders if there’s an order after hearing that needs to be prepared, we just need to get a copy of the minute order which the courts will generally produce within a few days of the hearing so we can see the language of the order.

And then as far as the order after hearing concerned we basically draft an order after the hearing that basically states what was in the minute order, and then both parties sign that and that becomes the official order of the court.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. If you have any more questions about request for orders or order after hears or what needs to transpire after you go to court, give us a call at 661-281-0266 or go to Divorce661.com for more information. Thanks for watching.

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this video podcast we’re talking about how to file and serve your response when going through a divorce in California.

So when you start a divorce case and you start a petition you first have to file the petition, get a case number, and then you file. When you’re filing the response it’s exactly the opposite.

You have to first serve it before you can file it because you have to file a proof of service showing that your response has been served rather, before you can file it. so when you fill out your response you’re going to have to attach a proof of service by mail or personal service, but by mail is fine and you have to attach that to the back of your response form otherwise the court will reject the filing of your response.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com, hope this video was hepful, take care and have a great day.

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this is a 2nd video where I’m talking about the use of private judges, when you shouldn’t, when you should, and what the differences are.

Specifically this particular case was a client who became a client but who called me after having a consultation with a divorce attorney who basically sold her a bill of goods essentially. And this is what they were told.

They were sold on the fact that they should use a private judge for their divorce and were told specifically that if you go through the normal divorce channels that your divorce is going to take 2 years through the court system. And they had an amicable uncontested divorce case so the information that they were provided by this law firm was absolutely incorrect.

It does not take 2 years to get through a divorce, especially when it’s amicable, we generally will do a case that is amicable or parties have all their agreements in place in a matter of hours, in fact people will come in we’ll get through their entire divorce case in a matter of hours.

Of this other client who signed up with me he said Tim we have all our agreements how soon can you get your paperwork done and I said how soon can you get this too me? And he sent it over and I said I’ll get this done before end of business today.

Now procedurally through the court process I can get it through the court in 1 to 3 months that the faster with court processing time frames that we can get through even though there’s a 6 month cooling off period, we can still get the paperwork done quicker.

So, it’s not taking 2 years. Here was the issue, here was the reason they were explaining this, this client was told if you use a private judge your divorce can be done in a shorter period of time more like 6 months as opposed to 2 years.

So, what they were doing was, hey if you go this route it’s going to take 2 years, use our service for a private judge and we’ll get you through faster. That’s a bad sales approach, that’s all there doing. That’s their little sales gimmick, it’s going to take you 2 years but hire us to do your divorce and hire our private judge and we’ll take care of all the paperwork and get you through the system faster.

I don’t care how fast you guys come up with your agreement you cannot circumvent procedure. You still have to file the case, serve it, do your disclosures, do all the things that have to get done in order to finalize your divorce and using a private judge, that judge cannot then go to court and say here we’re not going to serve it we don’t need to file it, we have an agreement, you can’t circumvent it.

So, a private judge is very much like mediation in that they’re going to make a decision or mediation is more they are going to help you come up with your agreement. Whereas the private judge is a judge and make rulings on your case. But I don’t think it’s a good way to go unless you like I was reading this article from another law firm, unless you have, there’s pros and cons just know that.

If you have a case where you don’t want to go through the public venue of the court system and you want it to be heard by a private judge that would be the way to go. But not for any reasons of speed, not for any reasons of cost effectiveness, none of that.

So, this gal had actually already signed up with the service and she said, why would you think they would tell me this and I’m starting to feel like they made it sound so difficult that they put me into this higher package pricing service that they had with a private judge under the auspice that it would be faster. And that’s how they were selling their bill of goods.

And I just think it’s a bad way to go. In fact, she canceled service for them and hired us because we’re going to have her case done this week. No private judge and one 5th of the cost and we’re going to get her paperwork done in just a couple of days and then we’re going to put it through the court system. Not going to take 2 years, probably going to take 30 to 60 days to get her judgment processed with the courts.

So just be careful what your listening too I really love like this client that just signed up with us, they had done all her homework, watched our videos, our podcast, read our blog, read my book just about everything I didn’t have to say a word, she basically was talking and then you said this on this video, this on that video and my job was done, I said your hired because she knew everything I knew.

And that’s perfect, that’s exactly what you should be doing when you are about to go through a divorce process, because there’s a lot of bad information out there and unfortunately while we like to put a lot of information to education everybody there’s a lot of people are using that information and using it to sell you a bill of goods.

Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Feel free to call me for a free consultation and you could do so by scheduling it right through our website at divorce661.com.

California Divorce And How To Avoid Paying Court Fees

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this is just a quick video I’m sharing on how to save money on court fees.

So, I just had a client call me and obviously this is going to be a case if you are on good terms with your spouse or fairly good terms. But had a client call and she had mentioned hey we’re going to get divorced, we’re in agreement so forth and I always talk about people’s finances and see what they got going on. And turns out that the husband is not working.

So, I said well if you guys are on good terms and the husband is not working why don’t we file this in his name using a request for a fee waiver since he’s unemployed and would qualify for a fee waiver and file in his name. That way there will be no court fees at all if you know the way we handle our cases, we file for divorce and we have the other party specifically and purposefully not respond so they don’t have to pay the response fees, still get you through the divorce with just one filing fee.

But the spouses, if one of them is unemployed or for one reason or another may qualify for a fee waiver, all suggested our clients to file in the person who does not have an income name so we ask for a fee waiver. And if we go this route, basically we’ll have no fees at all. So, the petitioner will not have to pay a fee because they qualify for a fee waiver in this case.

And the respondent we are not going to have file a response and it still gets their case through on an agreement. So, there will basically be no court fees. If you have questions about this and the way I kind of sell my service is in this case they would have had 870 dollars in court fees. That would had just almost covers my cost for preparing their entire divorce. So, they’re basically getting their divorce for free essentially and in the worst case we have where we get one of the court fees waived in all cases.

And that’s on if it’s amicable of course. So give me a call if you have any questions about this I always hate to get the call Tim we started our divorce and I filed and my spouse respond so we’re all paid up in fees and now we need help, I wish they would have called me in advance, prior to filing the response fee because I would have been able to have that either waived or not have them file a response at all. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com, give me a call for a free consultation.

You can actually book that directly through our website at divorce661.com there’s a blue tab that says schedule a call with Tim and you can schedule a free consultation with me. Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com, hope

How We Process California Divorce Cases For Fast Approval

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. Today we’re talking about how you can submit your divorce case to get it done faster through the court.

So, a lot of people there’s a lot of confusion about this whole 6 month deal. 6 months is just the soonest your divorce can be finalized no matter how fast you get your case done. For instance, people come to us and get their case done in a single sitting. Both parties are here and we get everything completed but we still have to go through the process.

And a lot of people think Tim so we have to wait 6 months and then we turn in our final agreements? No that’s not the case. Once the petition been filed and your spouse has been served, you have to wait 30 days to go by ad then if you guys have a full agreement by that point what we do is we turn everything in. Your judgment, all your procedural forms, your declarations, everything.

All agreements after 30 days after the petition’s been filed. Once it’s submitted it gets in line with the judgment clerk to be reviewed so they’ll review it and they’ll approve it even though the 6 months have not past. So, what happens is they will approve it and they will push out the 6 months and I’m going to show you here, I’m going to refer a case that we recently filed your looking at it now, you can see that the jurisdiction date at number three was that it was served on November 16, 2016.

But if you look at number 4 it says that court order cause appearing that your divorce is entered as May 17, 2017. The reason they’re able to do this is because they’re pushing out the 6 month mark. So, it’s 6 months and a day from November 16, 2016. Now if you look at the upper right hand corner you can see that this was filed on January 26, 2017.

Just further to my point that as long as the 30 days have gone by you can submit all your agreements, get your case approved by the courts. So, they have a court ordered divorce that’s completely done just that it won’t be the single status won’t kick in until May 17, 2017. But they are completely done. Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Please give us a call for a free consultation at 662810266 or feel free

Avoid Personal Service of California Divorce Papers By Using Acknowledgment Form

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And just a real quick video here, a lot of people are concerned when it comes to divorce of being served.

There’s this whole scary thing of being served probably because we watch it on TV and people know they’re going to have someone follow them or show up to their work place and be served. I want you to know if you’re a client of mine we do not serve those papers upon you by process server unless you’re one of our very few percentages of cases where you guys are not in agreement, most of our clients are in agreement or working to achieve an agreement and we never serve through a process server the other party.

So, you don’t have to worry if you guys are coming on board with us, about having someone show up at your home or office to serve you divorce paper, we absolutely don’t do that. There’s a way of serving which is called the notice of acknowledgment and receipt, it’s basically we file the case, the other person does need to be served and to do that we would just have you sign a piece of paper that says you’ve received a copy. It’s that simple.

Then I file a proof of service saying that you signed a notice of acknowledgment and that counts as being served so along with going through an amicable divorce you don’t have to worry about being embarrassed or concerned about being served. Any type of paperwork nothing’s going to come from the court everything would be through our office and generally what will happen is we’ll file the case, I’ll send a copy out to you. Once you know it’s been filed and there will be a form attached called the notice of acknowledgment you’ll sign that and mail that back to me.

I file that with the court and you have been served it’s not as scary as it needs to be. Tim Blankenship divorce661.com. If you have questions or looking for assistance with your divorce in California please give me a call 6612810266. You can also always just go to our website at divorce661.com and click the blue button that says schedule a call with

So, I’ve had a lot of requests for people wanting to know how to complete their divorce if they do not want child support.

So, the issue is child support is mandatory in California. So, you have to package up your divorce case in a special or a specific way rather if you do not want there to be child support. Or if you want there to be a zero child support order.

Over the years it’s been a pretty common practice that people say Tim I don’t want a child support order, we’re going to handle everything outside of court can we do that? The answer is yes, but there is a little trick to it.

So, this video is going to discuss exactly how to do your divorce with children when you want there to be zero child support order. So even if you don’t want child support you still need to have a child support order attachment form which is this form here. So let’s get started and let’s go through the form of how were going to complete this.

So, you’re going to complete this as you would normally follow the tutorial, you’re going to mark that this is an attachment to the FL 180. You have to have a DissoMaster print out, this is a court calculation if your using California divorce tutor, one of the services I provide is I say I’ll give you a free DissoMaster and there’s specific information I need in order to do that, because when asking for zero child support the DissoMaster has to match up and show that there’s zero support for the courts calculator.

And that’s the only way to do this, to fill out the form the way I’m going to show you and you need DissoMaster showing zero child support. So I marked this box here number 1, you’re going to, all this you can skip, when you have a DissoMaster you only need to include this data if it’s not part of the DissoMaster.

So you can skip all this, you don’t need to put the income, number of children, that’s all going to be part of the DissoMaster it’s going to include all that. You’re going to come down here to number six, you’re going to mark the child support box, you’re not going to mark anything here because there’s not going to be any payment of child support you’re still going to put the child’s name, so you’re going to put name of child.

You’re going to put their date of birth just like you normally would. You’re going to put zero here, and then here you’re going to say, no child support due either party and you’ll come down here to other and mark this box and you’re going to say, get ahead of myself here, bear with me.

You’re going to mark the other box here and you’re going to put no child support per DissoMaster, okay. And go over to page 2, and if you’re not having child support you’re likely not going to have any of these.

So here, zero, total net child support zero, you still want to do the healthcare expenses, if both of you are going to be responsible if health care is going to be carried by either party. Alright over to page 3, so page 3 you’re going to go here to number 11 and you’re going to say see attachment FL dash 342 which is this form, number 11.

So, we’re just going to reference this item number here and then we’re going to do an attachment. So when there’s no child support there has to be a specific declaration written, and it’s just cut and paste. So here you can see I already done it, you can Google MC-025.

It’s just an attachment page, you can get this right off of Google. You’re going to put attachment for FL 342 for number 11, and this form will go right behind the 342 in your judgment package. And then you’re going to copy and paste this language in here, it’s basically saying based on the custodial arrangement above set forth, and the current financial status of the parties, neither party shall be obligated at this time.

It just lets you know that you have the right to child support, that you’ve been fully informed of your rights, so on and so forth. You can read this but without this declaration or language or legalize they will not approve a zero child support order so you need to include this portion of it. So I’ll make this available as kind of just a PDF download in California divorce tutor. That way you can just print this because nothing’s gonna change here, this is always going to remain the same.

This will be a tutorial as far as filling out the FL 342 for a zero child support order and then make sure you email me with the information I request for preparing a DissoMaster for you because that needs to be a part of this as well. Tim Blankenship with Divorce661.com.

Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this is just a quick video, I want to talk to you about whether or not you need to notarize your divorce judgment paperwork when you turn it in.

So, I’m just as a blanket statement I’m going to tell you yes. What I’ve done as a practice probably in the last year is just advised all my clients, regardless of the circumstances, rather is just across the board both the parties, the petitioner and the respondent should always have the final signature page notarized.

When we prepare your judgment, we will prepare a page that is just has a signature line for the petitioner, the respondent, and the judge. We also have a notary acknowledgment at the bottom so you can take it and have it notarized simply.

The reason we are recommending that you across the board, regardless of the circumstances, that both parties get it notarized, is we’re starting to see a trend, and this started about a year, year and half ago where a clerk here and there around, throughout California is requesting it even though it wasn’t normally the case.

So let me give you some scenarios, if you had an uncontested divorce where the petitioner filed the petition, the respondent filed the response, and that’s what you consider an uncontested case, then you didn’t need to have your signature notarized. And that’s because they know that both parties are involved.

The reason the notary is there is to make sure it is actually the signature of the parties and when no response is filed, in the case of a default or hybrid, where we have a default with the agreement, that again is a time is when you would need to have you signature notarized, the respondent.

Then what started happening is on long term marriages, where we are terminating spouse support, so I don’t want to get to much into the weeds on this. In a long term marriage, the general rule is that California law states there is reserved jurisdiction over the issue of spousal support indefinitely. However, many clients want to terminate that jurisdiction so there’s waiver language to do so.

So, then what happened because spouses where giving up their rights to spousal support on long term marriage, and wanted to waive it, the courts wanted to verify and by doing so asking even on uncontested cases that the parties have their signatures notarized.

So, it’s just easier across the board to tell our clients, everyone get your signature notarized, both the petitioner and the respondent on every case whether it be default, hybrid, or a uncontested case. Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.

Hope this video was helpful, call me if you need any help with your divorce anywhere in California. You can schedule a consultation with me right off our website you can go to divorce661.com. Look for the blue button that says schedule a call with Tim and you’ll have access to my calendar and we’ll get you set up, talk to you on the phone to see if we can help you out.