DIVORCING WITHOUT A LAWYER Anyone Close to Grand Prairie

Getting the paperwork filed in most states is pretty easy.

My concern is that filing the paperwork is often only half of the battle. I did my own divorce many years ago and suffered for not having anyone go over the financials for me. I thought since neither of us had any real money and we owned no property that it was good enough to just walk away. I was wrong. During our separation my ex had run up all of our credit cards and purchased a car without my knowledge or consent. It turns out that even if you don't sign the paperwork you can be left holding the debt bag if he fails to pay for debt incurred while you are married. (How I repossessed and sold that car is another whole story.) There were also pension and insurance issues I had not known needed to be addressed.

I got the divorce part quite simply, the untangling of our finances took me another four years and cost me huge. Consider an atty. Just my own experience.

As long as your divorce is amicable, contact the following-they will do it for around $500 including the filing fee.

They have offices in Ft Worth and Dallas

http://www.altmanandmarx.com/

Correction: http://www.fortworthdivorcelawyer.com

Hi KL,

A very good friend of mine (we're in MI) used the book linked below to great success. Good Luck!

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Own-Divorce-Practical-Divorcin...

S.

I urge you to take your papers to an attorney to check over. You want to be sure that every thing is considered and taken care of now. You don't want to find out in a few months or years that you neglected to take care of something. The two that comes to mind that are important to make clear are child support and parenting rights. Do you both agree and have you put in writing those two issues? Also have you addressed the issues of debt and property?

A one time consult with a divorce attorney will be of minimal cost.

I agree with SHARON E that you can find yourself in a tangled post-divorce web if you're not very, very careful or if you have an ex who will do to you what hers did. The $500 you spend getting a lawyer to review your decree is money well spent, especially if you split it.

I did my own divorce and it was pretty easy for a few reasons:
1) the house was already only in my name and my ex gave up all rights to it (wrote that into the decree).
2) our cars were already only in our own names and were both paid off at the time of the divorce.
3) we had almost zero credit card debt (less than $1000) and we weren't on each other's card.
4) we were in complete written agreement as to how co-parenting was going to work.

That being said, I had some other family law experience when I helped my now ex try to secure more parenting time with his first child, and negotiate adjusted child support due to a job loss, so it wasn't my first, second, or third swim through family court.

I put in quite a few 'checks and balances' into the decree that aren't part of the template you're using (I used the same template). Things like life insurance and college savings. Per our decree, we're both required to keep a certain amount of life insurance in the other person's name as well as contribute monthly to the previously established college fund. These are things we did while married, but had to write them into the decree to maintain those responsibilities.

Hope that helps.

I don't live in the state of Texas but i did get divorce with out an atty in the state of IL. We were in the same situation, no money, no properties and no kids. I prepped all the documenation. I googled all the information even a copy of a fill in the blanks divorce doc and found all the documentation needed to prep it. I copied some of the similitaries from a divorce document that i found on the net. It was simple and fast since we had nothing to argue about. All we paid for was the filing and court fee it was about $280.00 each.

Good luck!

I'm in a very similar situation. When I started researching the divorce process in TX, I intended on us doing everything ourselves based on the paperwork found online. Unfortunately I had a very hard time finding someone in the legal field willing to just review the paperwork at a nominal cost.

I ended up going to the same attorney Mama H recommended: http://www.fortworthdivorcelawyer.com. They are doing my divorce for $650 (uncontested with kids, minimal joint property/assets, etc.) plus the court filing fee (a little over $300 for Dallas County but a few dollars cheper for Tarrant County). They'll ask you to put $100 down and pay the court filing fee to get started. You can do a payment plan and they don't hound you about paying. As long as you have it paid in in full prior to going in front of the judge, you are ok. They have been very timely in getting things rolling and the couple of times I've had to call with a question, they've gotten back to me within about 24 hours.

Good luck to you!

You should never handle a divorce without an attorney. You can either pay a nominal fee upfront or pay a large sum of money once an issue arises to hash out details that were not addressed in your initial divorce decree. Notwithstanding, you can contact Legal Aid of North Texas. In the state of Texas, Legal Aid provides free legal aid for the indigent. You can find their telephone number online and call to see if you qualify. Again, I urge you not to handle this yourself. While the divorce is currently amicable, you need to think about 3-4 years later when there may be other spouses involved and things may not be quite so amicable.

Check with your courthouse to see if they have a family law advisor. Here in CA the courts do. Also, check to see if there is a "Lawyer in the Library" program where you can meet with a lawyer for a few minutes free of charge.

If there are no such programs, you can contact a free lance paralegal who works in family law - they could tell you if you've done the forms correctly.

Bottom line is if you file them and they are not correct, the court will let you know. Sometimes when I can't get a straight answer from the court or anyone else, I just do the best I can knowing that if it's wrong, someone will call me up quick and in a hurry to tell me about it.

It's kind of funny - you call to ask, they have no time or authority to help. But submit something wrong, and they can't wait to call you up and share their wealth of knowledge!