Once you got married, you may not have done a diligent job in keeping your assets separate from your spouse’s. This may lead to many of your significant assets becoming commingled. You may have thought nothing of it until you faced the unfortunate reality of a divorce. Now, you may be worried about how your property division will pan out in your upcoming divorce proceedings. If this is your current situation, please continue reading to learn how your commingled assets will be handled in a divorce and how an experienced Morristown property distribution lawyer at Graves Andrews, LLC can help you get what is rightfully yours at the end of all this.
What are examples of commingled assets?
In general, commingled assets are assets that were individually yours or your spouse’s before your marriage but have been inevitably combined during the marriage. It is extremely difficult to avoid combining these separate assets, especially if you are part of a long-lasting marriage where children are shared. Nonetheless, below are specific examples of how your separate assets might have gotten commingled in the course of your marriage:
- You or your spouse solely owned a home before marriage but then used the funds from its sale to purchase your new family home titled in both your names.
- Your family home may only be titled in your or your spouse’s name but you used a joint bank account to make monthly mortgage payments.
- You or your spouse may have exclusively received an inheritance but used the funds to purchase an automobile titled in both of your names.
- You or your spouse may have independently contributed to an investment account before marriage but then contributed together as a unit.
In what ways can commingled assets affect my divorce?
Overall, commingled assets may make the property distribution portion of your divorce proceedings all the more difficult to navigate. This is because the New Jersey Family Court needs to recognize equitable distribution law. With this law, marital assets must be split fairly and justly while separate assets must go to their rightful owners. This is to say that such commingling may make it difficult for the court to decipher between what’s what. Ultimately, this may have you run the risk of losing assets that have always belonged to you.
To help the court with this, you may want to give them plenty of financial records from your separate, joint, and investment bank accounts that exhibit their transaction histories. Hopefully, you also have a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement that discloses which assets belong to you and those that are supposed to be under your spouse’s ownership.
At any rate, please contact a skilled Morristown family law attorney today. We, at Graves Andrews, LLC, look forward to your phone call.
