Posted on June 08, 2018 in Family Law

One of the biggest problems parents often face during the summer is what to do with their children. Childcare options are expensive and often limited. Couples sometimes split shifts — with one parent working days and the other nights in order to make sure that their child is supervised. Single parents hire sitters or pay relatives to watch their children.

At some point, however, you may start wondering if your child could be old enough to stay home alone for a while — and what the laws are on the issue.

In Texas, there is no specific law regarding “how old is old enough” to be left alone. However, that doesn’t mean that a child of any age can simply be left alone. If you don’t use good judgement, leaving a child alone at home for even a short while can result in your arrest and charges of neglect. It could also quickly propel you into a battle for custody with concerned relatives, including ex-spouses or grandparents.

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 Posted on June 04, 2018 in Divorce

Divorced people are at a higher risk for early deaths — but science hasn’t really understood why marital status and mortality were related until recently.

It turns out that there may be a simple underlying cause for the connection: behavioral and lifestyle changes after divorce. In specific, divorced people are more likely to smoke and engage in less physical activity than their married counterparts.

In a study that involved both married and unmarried participants over the course of more than a decade, researchers examined the subjects’ self-reported levels of personal satisfaction, smoking habits and exercise habits. Over time, they discovered that married participants were 46 percent less likely to die than those participants who divorced.

They also discovered that the divorced participants were generally less satisfied with their lives. In turn, they tended to smoke more and exercise less often. While researchers are still speculating why the three issues seem related, one possibility is simply that the divorced participants didn’t feel particularly accountable for their behavior to anyone else significant. That led to poorer life choices — which created a domino-like effect on their habits and health.

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 Posted on May 29, 2018 in Firm News

Ideally, both parents would remain involved in their children’s lives after a divorce. However, as you are aware, sometimes one or both parents are unsuited to care for their children. To protect the children involved, family law courts in Texas must occasionally revoke parental rights.

You may be interested in learning the different reasons for terminating a parent’s rights. According to FindLaw, this is usually done for the children’s physical or emotional well-being. Parental rights are most often revoked in the following situations:

• Physical, verbal, emotional or sexual abuse
• Chronic or severe neglect of the children’s needs
• Abandonment of the children or failure to maintain contact or support
• Drug addiction, alcoholism or substance abuse

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 Posted on May 25, 2018 in Child Custody

If you’re in the middle of a bitter custody fight with an ex that seems like he or she will stop at nothing to win, the fear of a parental abduction has probably crossed your mind a few times.

It’s almost impossible not to think of the possibility. Amber alerts go out all the time across cellphones, televisions and radios due to parental abductions during custody fights.

Is there anything you can do to mitigate the risks? Experts say that it helps to understand the motivations of parents who abduct their own children despite knowing the immense risks and the challenges they’ll face later living on the run:

• They’re simply afraid of losing all custody or visitation of the child
• They believe that the other parent is abusive and dangerous to the child
• They want to punish the other parent for leaving
• They want to try to force the other parent to interact with them or possibly reconcile (so it is a way of getting attention)

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 Posted on May 18, 2018 in Divorce

Texas is one of the “community property” states, which means that marital assets belong equally to both spouses. However, when your marriage ends after just a year or two, it may not seem fair that your spouse who contributed very little to the household finances could end up with half the assets.

Fortunately, he or she probably won’t.

Dividing up the family assets is seldom as simple as splitting everything down the middle. There are a lot of factors that can ultimately affect the financial consequences of a divorce — including the length of the marriage itself.

Community property rules only apply to the assets that are either earned during the marriage or otherwise mingled together. If you owned your house prior to the start of your short marriage, for example, you will likely still own the house after the marriage ends.

In addition, alimony is unlikely to be awarded when a marriage lasts less than a decade. While there are always exceptions, you probably can expect that to be off the table if your marriage was brief — even if your income is significantly higher than your spouse’s.

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 Posted on May 11, 2018 in Family Law

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re going through a divorce. Frankly, there’s a lot to remember and a lot of different things that have to be handled — everything from deciding what to do about the house to splitting up the furniture.

It’s really important, however, that you don’t lose sight of the value of any 401(k) plans or pensions for your future, as a mistake there can cost you in ways you don’t anticipate.

What’s one of the biggest mistakes that someone getting a divorce can make in regards to a pension?

It’s forgetting to get a qualified domestic relations order (QDRO). It happens more often than people realize simply because they think that the judge’s order on their divorce decree is enough to give them access to their ex’s pension funds. But it isn’t.

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 Posted on May 04, 2018 in Child Custody

Teenagers are complicated people. Parents are often troubled by the sudden changes their children experience when they hit their teenage years — particularly when a child that was once very agreeable suddenly asserts his or her independence by disagreeing with just about everything, including the visitation schedule he or she has been following for years.

If you’re the parent whose visitation is being interrupted and you don’t know of any obvious reason your child would suddenly want to stay away, take heart. The odds are good that you’ve done nothing to cause the problem. Nor should you assume that your ex-spouse has suddenly encouraged your child to stop visiting. It’s most likely that your teenager is being…well, nothing more than a teenager.

A lot of teens start to resent having to pack up every weekend to go stay with their noncustodial parent. Even if you’ve always tried to make the weekends enjoyable, your teen may be developing other interests. He or she may start making weekend plans with friends — friends who don’t live as close to your ex-spouse’s home. Or, your child may simply be burdened with a lot of homework, particularly if he or she is in any accelerated-learning programs. Your child may also simply be going through a phase where he or she wants to spend more time alone, so the prospect of hanging with Mom or Dad all weekend just doesn’t sound as enjoyable as it did when he or she was younger.

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 Posted on April 26, 2018 in Divorce

Both parties in a divorce are expected to completely disclose all of their assets when it comes time to divide up the marital property.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that way. A lot of spouses have attempted to hide assets from their warring partners in the past — but the internet age has made it harder to get away with that sort of thing as money trails have become vastly more traceable online.

Then cryptocurrencies like bitcoin hit the market. These forms of wealth are fairly new and they allow people to deposit their wealth in ways that are still exceptionally hard to trace — which was an intentional part of their design. As more people of wealth start to invest in bitcoin and similar currencies, asset valuations in divorces may get increasingly complicated.

Trying to locate a spouse’s hidden fortune has always been a problem for some people — but attorneys who specialize in those sort of things are fairly good at tracking down hidden wealth. However, cryptocurrency is so new that many attorneys haven’t had time to learn much about it.

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 Posted on April 23, 2018 in Blog

If you are like many Americans, using social media may be something you do multiple times every day, but if you are going through a divorce, you might be wise to refrain from visiting and posting on your favorite sites. Nowadays, you need to consider the fact that virtually anything you do publicly and online can come back to haunt you, and when you are in the middle of the divorce, the stakes are especially high.

Just how can your use of social media complicate your divorce?

It can imply infidelity

When you are going through divorce, refrain from making any actions that might make it appear as if you have already moved on to a new romantic interest. For example, never create a profile on any type of dating website before your divorce finalizes, as doing so may indicate potential infidelity. Additionally, avoid posting photos of you and others doing anything that might look like a date or otherwise suggest a romantic relationship.

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 Posted on April 18, 2018 in Divorce

If you’ve been in an unhappy marriage for a long time, it might be tempting to move on with someone new even before your divorce is final. After all, you probably feel like you’ve wasted enough time in your life already.

However, starting a new relationship right now can be a major mistake — for several reasons:

It can affect your rational judgment

The business of divorce is just that — business. While emotions may have led you to this path, you’ll fare best when you keep your emotions in check and let reason be your guide.

If you’re already involved with someone new, it can be a lot harder to keep your emotions from clouding your judgment. That can lead you to agree to things in your settlement that will negatively affect your future for years to come.

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