California Divorce | Courts Now Issuing Notice Of Case Review Notices

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California Divorce | Courts Now Issuing Notice Of Case Review Notices

Today we’re talking about some changes the courts have recently, 2013 moving to 2014 started doing, when it comes to folks representing themselves in their divorce in California.

In the past, the courts didn’t really intervene or step in or even monitor really divorces cases to make sure they’re moving through the courts system properly and timely.

And what they’ve done now is they started setting certain milestones and putting certain time limits on when certain things needed to be done and I want to go over a few of those and talk about some notices you may get in the mail.

Number one, if you file your case and you don’t serve it within a reasonable amount of time and I think that time frame is sixty days. So let’s say you filed it on January 1st and now March 1st rolls around and you haven’t serve the divorce paperwork.

You can expect within sixty, ninety days of filing having not served your spouse and filing the proof of service to the court, you can expect to get a notice in the mail from the court saying essentially your case is not complete.

You haven’t filed your proof of service and there are some steps that needed to be taken and it’ll assign a court date and the court date is basically case management court date.

It’s just a quick hearing. They want to make sure that you know what you’re doing. They want to bring you on to court and say you need to file your proof of service, you need to serve. You understand what you’re doing. You need to move this forward.

And there’s going to be a court date. Generally, this particular letter will tell you that if you do certain actions by the date and file certain paperwork by that date. You don’t have to go to hearing. So, it’s nothing to be alarmed about.

It’s just the courts way and this is fairly new, stepping in to push the case forward to make sure those representing themselves are moving forward properly to the divorce in California.

If you like help with your divorce in California, please give us a call. My name is Tim Blankenship and that is all we do.

We specialize in California divorce process. We can help you anywhere in California so please make sure you’ll give us a call. The number is 661-281-0266. We’d be happy to help you out. We’ll talk to you soon.

California Divorce | A Brief Overview Of The Divorce Process

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California Divorce | A Brief Overview Of The Divorce Process

I just wanted to give a quick brief overview of the divorce process very topical.

I talk in detail, in great detail in a lot of my videos about specific forms and how to do things and processes but I’m just going to give a basic overview of how divorce works in California and this applies anywhere in California.

Same procedure anywhere and we do specialize in California divorce and we can help you with your divorce if that’s what you’re looking for.

But I want to just give you a basic overview. This is probably something I say twenty five times a day with every new client that calls us saying, “How does it work?”

This is what the divorce overview looks like. One of you needs to decide who’s going to file for a divorce. Once you do that, you’ll fill out the initial divorce documents which would be the summons and petition.

There are some other documents if you have children, perhaps a local form.

Those are the initial documents you need to file to open your case.

You take your documents down. You’ll file it with the court. You’ll get a case number issued. The next step is you need to serve your spouse.

You can serve your spouse in a couple of ways. It can be done by mail. I’ve done a video on this as well, on how to do it by mail. Or you can have a friend or anyone over eighteen other than you, personally serve the documents and then you’d file the proof of service with the court to let the court know that’s been done.

The next step is to complete your financial disclosures. This is the income and expense, schedule of assets and debts and then you have to file the document to the court to let them know that you have completed the disclosure process.

The purpose of disclosure is to let each of the parties know that this is what you believe to be the assets and debts of the marriage, both of you are responsible for doing that and this process cannot be waived.

Once that’s done, you effectively have the list of all the property, assets and debts that needed to be divided and you can then use that as a guide in how you’re going to divide up your things.

When you go and do that, you will prepare a judgment and that judgment will have everything on there that had to do with your marriage.

It’ll determine property rights. It’ll let the court know who’s getting what. If you have children, you’ll take about custody and visitation plans. You’ll also address spousal support and child support and those will go in the final judgment or agreement, however you want to call it and that will be submitted to the court for review and ultimately the judge will sign it.

Now, it sounds very simple and it can be but obviously the paperwork is confusing. That’s why we’ve been able to run an effective business in preparing divorce documents in California for folks.

So please don’t hesitate to give us a call if you’re looking for help to do that. We have established ourselves in California as the go to company for divorce document preparation.

We have streamlined systems in place. Several staff members waiting to help you out and we can help you anywhere in California so please feel free to give us a call.

You can visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/divorce661 or just go to divorce661.com where we have plugged in to our website our pod casts, our videos, tutorials and everything and more that you want to know about divorce in California.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com, please feel free to give us a call. I’d love to help you out.

California Divorce Service Providing Tips & Assistance On Youtube

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California Divorce Service Providing Tips & Assistance On YouTube

If you’re watching this video, you’re one of thousands of people that come across our YouTube videos every day in searching for a divorce service to help you with your divorce in California.

We have seen more and more people find us through YouTube than, I don’t want to say than our blogs because we have over a thousand articles in written format on our website and blogs, so we do get a lot of visitation or locating us that way but YouTube is obviously the number two search engine in search.

We have a lot of videos and people are finding us more and more through YouTube.

So, if you’re watching this video, make sure to subscribe to our channel at youtube.com/divorce661 and you’ll automatically be able to access all of the videos that we’ve shot, we’ve now hit nearly 300 videos as of this video.

We record several a week with helpful tutorials, tips, things we’re seeing in the courts, and things at that nature. Very helpful information that you can need either for yourself or for someone you may know that needs help with their divorce.

This is Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Make sure to give us a call if you’d like help with your divorce. The number is 661-281-0266. Talk to you soon.

Are You Thinking About Doing Your Own California Divorce

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Are You Thinking About Doing Your Own California Divorce

Today we’re talking about “Should you do your own divorce?”

When is it a good idea to do it yourself? When is it a better idea to maybe hire a company to do that?

Though this last week we’ve done several videos talking to people who are perhaps in the decision making process if they should try and do their own divorce, or should they hire someone or should they get an attorney, people who haven’t started the divorce – that’s what this whole week has been about as far as videos and blog articles are concerned.

And this one, as far as the deciding whether you should do your divorce or not, we’re going to hit this from the topic of money. We’re just talking about money. Should you pay someone to do it or should you do it yourself.

I get calls all the time and I can tell kind of in the other end of the phone that these folks are just trying to get some information out of me and maybe they don’t have the money to do this, sometimes I just can get that feeling by the questions they’re asking and so forth.

When I talk to them, the first thing I’ll say is “look, are you currently employed, are you full employed” and so forth and if they say no or if they say they’re unemployed or something like that, I’ll tell them right off the bat, “this is how you should make your decision on whether to hire us or not.”

If you have more time than money, you know you’re not working, you’re unemployed etc. If you have more time than money, you should do your own divorce.

You can go to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/divorce661. We’ve done a video on just about every divorce form on how to complete it. The courts have a self-help center, it’s free.

The downside is the time commitment is enormous. You’re going to spend a lot of time with the self-help centers. You’re going to spend a lot of time frustrated trying to fill out the forms. You’re going to spend a lot of time doing these things.

But if you cannot afford to have a professional company like this to complete your divorce paperwork, obviously don’t hire us and do it because you have more time than money, it’s very simple.

Now, to the other end of that, if you are fully employed, if you’re working and you can’t take the time to go to court a dozen times over the course of let’s say six months, spending almost all day there.

If you don’t have time or the energy after working all day, to go to your computer at night and spend time on the weekend trying to figure out how to file a divorce form, driving down to the court house.Trying to file them, serve them and figuring out the process and procedure. All of that stuff.

If you have more money than time, I’m not saying you have money to throw away but if taking that time away from your family and job is going to cost you time, energy and frustration then you should hire a company like us to take care of business for you, so you can go on with your life and let the professionals take care of your divorce.

That’s the number one decision making factor on whether you should hire a company to do your own divorce from a money perspective is the time versus money scenario.

When people come to us, like our ideal client, they come to say “Tim, I can’t do this. I don’t want to try and figure all of this stuff. I’m working full time, I can’t miss work.” Those are the folks who use our service.

If you’re unemployed, go to the self-help centers. Use our YouTube channel, go online, spend the time and take the time to figure out on your own.

I hope that was helpful. Tim Blankenship, call the number on your screen. I’d be happy to talk to you and let you know what we can do for you. We do handle divorce cases all throughout California.

118: Another Reason We Don’t Like California Summary Dissolutions

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Another Reason We Don’t Like California Summary Dissolutions

I just got off the phone from a person who was attempting to do their own divorce and it was a very interesting call.

It wasn’t something that I had come across or I had heard of before so I wanted to make sure I jumped into the camera real quick and I literally just got off the phone with them so I wanted to discuss the issues with this.

And this is pertaining to the summary dissolution. If you’ve watch any of my other video regarding summary dissolution, you know I’m not a big proponent of them and I’ll give you several alternatives to the summary dissolution option.

People think it’s a good option, I don’t think it is and here’s one more reason why I don’t like the summary dissolution.

This lady called me, she had filed a summary dissolution and she had it rejected by the court. The reason it was rejected by the court is because she had marked on there that she had been married for more than five years. Well if you’re looking at the rules, which are many, to qualify for summary dissolution. You realized that you cannot be married for more than five years.

Well it was actually a mistake that she made. What she did is she listed a date of marriage and then she listed the date of separation. But on the date of separation, she had listed the date she is filling out the forms by accident instead of putting the actual date of separation.

Which if she had used the correct date of separation, she would have been under five years and perhaps there wouldn’t have been any issues with her divorce.

Because she filed it with the incorrect date of separation than showing it to be over five years, the judge rejected it.

So, what she did was she amended her paperwork, change the date of separation and re-submitted it and it got rejected a second time and the judge said upon rejecting it the second time, you need to file a regular divorce.

So, after speaking with her I realized what had happened. Here’s what the judge is assuming, “oh, you’re going to resubmit it and change the day of your separation? We don’t believe you.

We think that the day of separation is the day you filed the summary dissolution on the first time and you’re just changing the date now so you can resubmit your summary.”

Basically they didn’t believe her and that’s what that boils down to. And now they’re telling her she needs to file a regular divorce.

Here’s the problem with that. She had already worked on the summary paperwork, she had already submitted it, and she was already at that judgment stage.

Now, having to file a regular divorce, she’s going to have to fill out all the regular forms, summons and petition, she’s going to have to file it as an amended using that same case number.

She’s going to have to serve those documents on her spouse, wait another thirty days and then file her judgment and still have to wait the full six months after the date of service of the documents before she can be divorced.

So, what a huge set back, she have already been working on this for several months and it was at the judgment phase and now she’s set back months. Have to go through the whole process again, the regular divorce process.

Filing, serving, waiting six months and this is just one more reason why we don’t advocate using the summary divorce forms in California. There’s a much better way of doing it.

I just wanted to share that with you quickly. Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. If you need help with your divorce in California, call the number on the screen. 681-281-0266.

I’d be happy to help you. Talk to you soon.

4 Reasons Your California Divorce Request To Enter Default Is Rejected

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4 Reasons Your California Divorce Request To Enter Default Is Rejected

Today we’re talking about reasons why you may get your request to enter default rejected.

We had a new client come to use after having their request to enter default rejected and there’s a specific reason why it is rejected and I’ve talked about that in detail because it was something new we hadn’t seen.

But I’m going to go over the top four reasons why your request to enter default will get rejected.

Number one, if your spouse filed a response, you can’t file a request to enter default. It’s only a default if there is no response filed so if a response was filed then your request to enter default will be rejected.

Keep in mind when you submit your request to enter default, it’s not like the other forms that you filed. It doesn’t get stamped right away and entered with the court. It has to sit on the clerk’s desk for a while in a pile and it usually takes them a couple of weeks, sometimes a month to get to.

So, if you’ve waited the thirty days, which is required after your spouse was serve to file your default, it may be as much as another month before it actually gets entered.

Even though thirty days have passed, your spouse can still go in and file a response and so you’d get this back rejected because the response will be entered immediately while the request to enter default would not.

Number two, since filing is a substitution of attorney, filing a notice of change of address. What this is referring to is if you file a request to enter default and the address is different.

Let’s just say your spouse moved and it’s different than the address on your petition, then you’re going to have to either do a change of address or you need to explain to the court why you’re serving the request to enter default at a different location other than the petition.

The next one is if you just simply make an error on the form. It says, the request to enter default is incorrect as to the case number. The name of the parties, the date, the signature or the request to enter default is premature. Meaning, you filed it before the thirty days elapsed.

Number four, proof of service is needed or is incomplete, so you cannot file a default unless you’ve filed your proof of service.

You file the documents, you serve the documents, and you file the proof of service telling the court you served the documents. Thirty days goes by, and then you file the default. If you don’t do it in that order it will be rejected. If you don’t file the proof of service, it’ll be rejected.

If you file the proof of service incorrectly or filled out the proof of service incorrectly, it will be rejected.

That was the top four reasons on top of the one I already mentioned in detail. You can go back a video and find it. It was in regards to having the same address on the petition when filing a default and the courts want to know why. So you can go back and watch that video as well.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. If you have any questions please call the number on your screen. I’ll be happy to help you with your divorce anywhere in California.

3 Ways You Can Serve Your Spouse During California Divorce

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3 Ways You Can Serve Your Spouse During California Divorce

Today we are talking about the three ways you can go about serving your spouse in a divorce.

It seems to be a big misconception that you have to personally serve your spouse the initial divorce papers.

If you look at court procedure, you go to your local court website. It’s going to tell you exactly that. It’s going to say, you file your papers, and then you serve your papers and then it has to be served by personal service, which means anyone over eighteen other than you or by process server.

People will routinely hire a process server or they’ll use the local marshal or sheriffs in the court to do their service and that’s just not necessary. We handle high volume of divorce cases and we very rarely serve our documents by personal service.

The only ones that we do are the ones who are starting out in adversarial tone and that’s the only way service will be accomplished.

But if you’re going through an amicable divorce, you guys are working through your divorce in an agreeable fashion as best as you can. You can serve your documents by mail.

Now, when I say by you can do it, not you, it still applies where you are the only one who cannot do it.

So, you can have a friend mail the filed documents to your spouse along with a form called notice of acknowledgement and receipt and this is basically a form that will be received by the other party and they’ll sign acknowledging receiving the divorce forms.

That document has to be mailed back to the person it was mailed from so then you can file the proof of service with the court saying we serve by mail, by notice of acknowledgement of receipt.

That’s how we serve probably 90% of our documents in our amicable divorce cases in California.

The other way is if your spouse is out of state, you can use the notice of acknowledgement of receipt and do it by mail or you can use certified mail process. They’ll allow you to send it certified mail.

Return receipt requested so when the post office delivers it and they sign saying they handed it to your spouse.

When you get that card back you would file that with the proof of service and that would be a sufficient service in you and that would be the method that you would use if they’re out of state.

Those are the three different ways that you can serve. Personal service should be a last resort unless that’s the only way left to go.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.

Give us a call. We can help you with your divorce case anywhere in California. Talk to you soon.

Santa Clarita Small Business Training & Assistance Small Business Development Center

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Santa Clarita Small Business Training & Assistance Small Business Development Center

This is basically a shout out, this is not what a normal videos that we do for our business here. We are a divorce document preparation firm in Santa Clarita.

Today I’m just giving a shout out if you will to this small business development center at College of the Canyons.

I’ve recently acquired their services, it’s a free service where they help small business owners with the variety of things as far as doing a business plan, how to secure capital for your business.

How to start a business, you don’t even have to have an idea of a business and you can use their services.

The nice thing is they are supported or backed I guess you would say by the SBA so it’s a completely free service. From what I understand, they get paid by achieving milestones. So, if they say “hey we’re going to help you write a business plan.”

And that’s what I’m using them for, now I went to the orientation and even though I’ve been in the operation for three years, I never really put together a business plan because we’re growing so quickly.

I wanted to get a business plan in place, so moving forward we make sure we’re taking the right steps because in the orientation I will tell you the rate that we small businesses fail goes up every year and it is crazy.

I don’t have those with me but it was very interesting. So I want to make sure I have my business plan in place.

I just went to my first intake meeting, where they kind of find out where you are at. Do you have a business, where you’re at, what you’re sales are, do you have employees, things like that.

Kind of set a base line and find out what you need is very informative and I’ll be going to meet with a counselor who’s going to help me with my business plan and make sure that’s tightened up and then again there’s a variety of things you can do.

They also have workshops that you go to and they’re very helpful. The website is COCSBDC.org. They have a tons of information on their website and the reason I wanted to do this video is because in orientation, they made it very clear that they’re hoping that they get a lot more referrals to the small business development center because most of the people as I went there found them on the internet.

Just searching for probably small business assistance or how to write a business plan and their website does come up but they mention they’re trying to get a lot more referrals.

When I was in the orientation it was probably 90% of us. There are probably 20 or 30 of us who strictly found them online and not referral.

So, I’m hoping that this video will help spread the word. I’m going to do many more just as kind of a help flowed or get the word out that they’re there specially if you’re a small business like me. It would have been nice if I had known they existed three years ago.

Because I completely did this on my own without a plan other than the plan in my head and if you’re a small business you know how that goes.

Call them. Let them know that I sent you. I’m doing this purely just to get the word out. Let them know that I referred you. There’s no benefit to me but I’m sure they would appreciate knowing that you found them other than on the internet on their website.

My name is Tim Blankenship. We are a small business here in Santa Clarita. We help people get through the divorce for a flat fee. If you ever need our service, you can reach us at 661-281-0266 or at divorce661.com.

How To Terminate Income Withholding Order For California Divorce

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How To Terminate Income Withholding Order For California Divorce

This week we’ve been talking about income withholding orders. This is for child support and spousal support.

This is an order you can get from the court that can be served on an employer for purposes of withholding support so that can be paid directly to the person receiving support.

We’ve talked about on how to fill that out in previous videos, now we’re talking about how to cancel an order. How to terminate an order for either child support or spousal support and why it’s important.

Just as you would in filling out a new income withholding order for support, you will do the same thing on it and you will mark the box that says terminate the income withholding order. And you would go through the same process and I’ll go over that quickly here.

Fill out the income withholding order, mark the appropriate boxes, mark you’re terminating support, file it with the court, get the order from the judge, and then serve it on the employer by certified mail.

That’s the way you would terminate the support.

Now, when are you going to want to do this?

If you have let’s say, obviously an existing order and your employer is paying out either every income and that’s going to be changed, there’s a modification or spousal support terminated or let’s say the kids turn eighteen and you’re paying child support.

You have to keep in mind that those orders and the withholding order does not automatically just terminate when it’s eighteen. You have to go back to court, get a new order and then you have to go in and re-serve that on your employer.

Now, keep in mind, you can get the judges sign an income withholding order terminating support without a modification done.

That means you’re going to have to file a motion with the court and get the paperwork in to show the court, “hey my kids are eighteen” for instance. Get him to change the order to zero, and then you have to fill out a new income withholding order terminating support, and then get that ordered by the court and then submit it to your employer.

Now, the issue with this is that the time frames are not going to work really well because the judges aren’t going to sign an income withholding order terminating child support until the kids turn eighteen and you can’t file that until the kids turn eighteen.

So you’re going to end up having some amount of over payment in child support because of the time as processing the paperwork with the court. Getting a new order, getting it served on your employer before they stop pulling out the child support.

It happens every time. We do this a lot. We can help you fill out the income withholding order, we can help you get your motion in to modify in support or child support.

But you want to get that in as quickly as possible, trying to time your hearing when the kids are actually turn eighteen.

My name is Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. We do help with California divorce cases everywhere in California so feel free to give me a call. My number is 661-281-0266.

How To Prepare Your California Divorce Judgment Forms

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How To Prepare Your California Divorce Judgment Forms

Today we’re talking about how to prepare your divorce judgment in California and specifically how to submit your divorce judgment.

First I want to just comment. I had a client come in recently and they went down to the self-help center, if you’re trying to prepare your own divorce, you may have gotten to this point where you filed the papers, you serve the papers, you’ve been to court a dozen times and you’ve hopefully done everything right up to this point and now you’ve gotten to the judgment phase.

Judgment is basically the agreement, the stipulation. It’s known by a couple different terms.

I had a client come in who had attempted to do their own divorce and this happens very frequently, people will call us at various stages. The very beginning, somewhere in the middle, at the end, when they’ve done everything and failed, they’ll call us.

This client came in and they brought the documents from the court, I don’t know if you can see this but this is probably forty, fifty pages. I should have counted them. This is the judgment and this is just one step and hopefully the last step of your divorce but this is probably a good forty – fifty pages and this just represents the last step of the divorce.

There have been many, many things you would have had to do to get to this point. So, the client got this package and just basically threw it down to our desk and said “I can’t deal with this anymore, can you help us?”

The first thing I want to talk about is, if you’re doing your own divorce, it’s going to be very difficult. This is again a fifty page judgment and it’s the last phase, you would have had to gone through a lot of issue up to this point.

We always tell people to call our service so we can help them in advance but you’re going to get to a certain point and it’s going to be different for everyone. How far are you willing to go before you reach out for help? When that happens give us a call.

But, if you’re going to ignore me, which is fine and you’re going to submit your judgment on your own, there’s a certain way you need to do it.

We’re going to go through these steps on how to prepare. Because a lot of people just mail it in and think they’re done. So, I want to at least help those folks who perhaps have more time than money and don’t want to use our service to do it on their own.

First of all, you’re going to need four copies of everything. Every document that’s in here, you’re going to need four copies.

You have an original and four copies of everything. It’s just easier to you that way. Some are three, some are two but if you just made four copies of everything you’re going to be much better off.

When you submit your judgment, you’re going to need to have three sets of envelopes addressed from the court. Now, you are going to have to do this, addressed from the court to you and the other party. We have now three sets.

First of all, for the judgment itself you’re going to have to have two envelopes from the court and these are going to be the nine by twelve, like the large envelope so they can mail unfolded because the judge uses the thicker part.

You’re going to have to have two 9 x 12. I think that’s the right size. Envelopes to fit these legal forms in so that court can mail them back to you.

Again, addressed from the court to you and with the proper postage. You’re going to have to actually weigh the documents or put on an extra amount of postage to get it back to you.

The second set is going to be a regular envelope and you’re just going to need a single stamp, first class stamp and that’s going to be for the notice of entry of judgment. It’s a separate form, it’s a single page and that is also mailed to you separate from the judgment. That’s the second set.

The third set, let me see if I can remember here. If you have a default case and a default is a request to enter default. FL-165. If you’re submitting a default case you’re going to have this form and that also requires a separate envelope. Again, addressed from the court to you with postage already attached.

So, you’re going to have those sets of envelopes with all of your copies submitted to the court.

I hope that is helpful. I’m actually going to scan this and I’m going to put it in a slide share so I can make this available to those people who are looking to do this on their own, and then if you get stuck, call us. We’d love to help you out.

If you’re watching this video on YouTube, click the link below and I will send you right to the article that will have the slide share where you can go to these documents and see all the forms, you can probably even print them out.

Divorce661.com is our website. My name is Tim Blankenship. We’d love to help you with your divorce in California if you’re looking for professional service. 661-281-0266.

Anywhere in California we can help you with your divorce. Feel free to give me a call.