How to Divide Your Possessions During a Divorce

Video Transcript

"Hello, have you ever wondered how to divide possessions after a divorce, or during a divorce? Well, I'm Dr. Felicia, and I'd like to speak to you about this very sensitive matter. Now chances are if you're going through a divorce, you're already at opposite sides, so you may have your perception, his perception, and then what's fair in between. The items that you want to divide, you don't want to be overly greedy, although many people can be. If you are doing the divorce yourself, you're usually speaking on a more communicative level than the persons who are going through a divorce with an attorney. So if you're doing what they call a pro se divorce, you and he probably sat down to talk about different topics, and who's going to get what. Every so often you're going to have a person who is a little bit more greedy, and takes things that don't necessarily belongs to them, and wants everything in the house. If it gets to the point where you have to get to an attorney, and you're going through attorneys for divorce, you usually make a list of items in the house, and what it is that you're going to keep, and what it is he's going to keep. The other side of that is, every so often there's couples who fight over one particular object, like a special sofa, and they'll go on and on, and drag it on in court for 8 or 10 years. You don't want to get caught up in that kind of spiteful kind of revengeful ongoing fight. Because what happens is, the attorney bills are mounting the whole time you do that, and the only one who really makes out at that is the attorneys. The other thing in social science say, that the longer you fight over a particular object is just one way of holding on and not letting go. So the person who's starting the fight, or initiating the fight over this object, is really the one who has not moved forward. So please don't get caught up in a nasty long term divorce over objects, when in fact your whole life is put on hold. To divide your objects as fairly as possible, hopefully you have a partner who will cooperate, if not, you will have to go the attorney route, and it gets very, very expensive. In the meantime I wish you the best on that, and hopefully you keep the lines of communication between you and your potential ex-spouse, and work it out amicably. I wish you good luck, it's a tough one. God Bless. Dr. Felicia."