Kennedy Law Associates' Blog

In North Carolina and across the United States, married couples may divorce because they experience unrelenting financial difficulties. A recent study showed that 13% of divorced couples with outstanding student loans blamed the debt for causing their divorces. Furthermore, divorce often means that each spouse must forge their way through life without the benefit of joined funds. In particular, a gray divorce occurring after many years of marriage can lead to devastating financial results, especially for women.

Gray divorces are on the rise. Couples in their 50s are twice as likely to file for divorce than in 1990. The National Center for Health Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau reveal that current divorces triple for married couples who are 65 years of age and older. For an older couple, the end of a marriage involves gathering together financial documents. Each spouse should take the time to update their beneficiary designations on all investments, including mutual fund holdings and savings accounts.

Going through a divorce can present you with many confusing scenarios. Though you likely wish that you could simply sign a piece of paper and have everything settled, that is not how the process works. In fact, you will need to make many decisions during your case, and the court may step in to make some of those decisions.

Because you are a parent, you likely have concerns about child custody in particular. This concern is understandable because you undoubtedly want what is best for your kids and worry that your divorce will negatively affect them. Of course, you want to come to the best arrangement for everyone's post-divorce life, but fully understanding custody is not always easy.

If you are like many in North Carolina, your health is important to you. Even if you don't always make the right diet choices or exercise as much as you should, you know that, once your health declines, your quality of life may never be the same. If the time should come when poor health prevents you from making your own decisions about your medical care, do you know what will happen to you?

You can have more certainty about this if you have a health care power of attorney in place in case you should become incapacitated at some point in your life. Understanding what a health care power of attorney can do for you is the first step to obtaining this peace of mind about your health. The next step, choosing the appropriate agent, may be more difficult.

Dividing assets is a huge part of the process that North Carolina couples go through when getting a divorce, especially if it is a high-asset divorce. It is important to understand the value of an asset before it can be divided fairly. One of the most difficult assets to value is a pension plan. Here are basic principles that apply to dividing pension plans in a divorce.

The first step is determining the type of pension plan a person has. A defined benefit plan guarantees a monthly benefit when a person reaches retirement age. A defined contribution plan is based on the performance of an investment fund.