Hi! My name is Tim Blankenship, owner of Divorce661.com. We’re a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service and we specialize in the divorce process.
Today, I want to answer the question of how much does a divorce cost. While this is a difficult question to answer, I did do a little bit of research to see if we could come up with some averages and I’m going to share that with you today.
When people call me, I always ask them “why are you using a paralegal types of service as oppose to hiring a law firm?”, and most of the time the answer comes down to cost.
Many of the clients that end up using my services have gone out and spoke with attorneys found out the high cost of just getting a consultation and then find out how much the cost is just to walk through the door. So I want to share some sites with you and show you some of the research that I found as far as the cost of getting a divorce in California and in the United States.
I got an article here written by a Rachel Small and this is probably one of the most recent articles I’ve found, dated September 6, 2012 and she estimates that divorce in the Unites States is reported to be approximately $15,000 on average. Now it doesn’t say whether that is per person or per divorce in total. But here it says $15,000 where an attorney’s fees can range anywhere up you know as $500 an hour.
Another article, this gentleman in a justia.com article, answered the question of how much it cost for divorce is in California and here he estimates the cost to be $15,000 to $20,000 per person.
Another website here using a US Census Bureau Statistics of average income, household and children and so forth said that the on the low end could be $53,000 and as high as $180,000 to divorce.
Now we’ll see the $15,000 to $20,000 average per person. We can see how they came to the $50,000 low end and that could be for both sides.
One more slide I found here is on bankrate.com, which is interesting, but they were saying that divorce is a $28 billion year industry with an average cost of about $20,000.
So I think it’s safe to say that if you’re looking at about $20,000 to go to the divorce process if you hire an attorney and that may be per side.
Now to tell you, I’ve worked for law firms, I’ve seen folks spend lots more money than that going through a divorce process. So I will leave you with this thought—you need an attorney in two circumstances, to be represented in court and to get legal advice. Outside of that, going through the divorce process is a matter of filling out forms and filing them with the court appropriately and that’s what we do here at SCV Legal Doc Assist.
We specialize in the divorce process and we get you through the entire process, start to finish, at one affordable flat rate.
If you like more information on our services, please give us a call or visit our website for more information. I would be happy to help you out and answer any questions you may have.
