Attorney Jeremy Levy Speaks on Divorce
Transcript On Divorce
Good morning my name is Jeremy Levy and I’m an attorney in Toledo Ohio practicing in the areas of criminal defense civil litigation and domestic relations today. I’m going to be talking about divorce Law. All divorces have five common issues that need to be dealt with. The first three include dividing up assets, allocating debts and dealing with spousal support. The last to deal with children, custody and visitation which I put into one category and child support is the five. Those are the five issues that you need to consider when dealing with the divorce in Ohio.
This is a community property state and that means that anything acquired during the marriage is considered marital property. This is also an equitable division state which means that the courts want to divide it fairly and equitably. All assets that you had going into the marriage or premarital with the exception of certain gifts and inheritances, anything else acquired during the marriage assets and debts our marital.
Spousal support deals with keeping the person who received the lesser amount of income at a standard of living that they’ve become accustomed to there is no equation for determining an amount of spousal support thou courts will often look at disparage disparity between incomes as well as the length of the marriage. A general rule of thumb is that spousal support will last for approximately one-third of the length of the marriage. Spousal support is not factored into very short-term marriages and the idea of the amount of spousal support depends on the difference between the two parties’ incomes. The court just wants to make sure that one party isn’t living in a mansion while the other party is living in a trailer. They want to keep the parties as equal as possible and give the less earning income party an opportunity to get some training and education to raise their income so that they can remain at the standard of living they become accustomed to.
Now when dealing with custody and visitation there are three options; custody to mom, custody to Dad or shared parenting plan. A shared parenting plan simply means when the children with mom mon is the custodial parent and when the children are with dad dad is the custodial parent. Courts do ask that you determine who is the residential parent for school purposes meaning the parents whose address determines the school district the kids go to school in and also who’s the residential parent for medical purposes. This includes all non-emergency medical decisions if the kids are with you and there’s an emergency no one cares who’s the residential parent is but if we’re talking about non-emergency decisions likely children’s pediatrician is or whether or not they get braces or not that will fall as the responsibility of the residential parent for medical purposes.
Finally on child support; child support is paid to the custodial parent by the non-custodial parent. Child support is often determined by looking at the child support guidelines which is usually determined by plugging in numbers of income and expenses in a software program which determines a reasonable amount of child support. There are reasons to deviate upward or downward from that number and those factors are listed in the Ohio revised, code some examples might be that the non-custodial parent has a 50-50 time split or encounters additional expenses not included in the child support guidelines. These could be reasons why we would deviate on the child support numbers.
If you are anticipating going through a divorce please feel free to call my office at (419) 243-8989 and schedule a free initial consultation or visit my website at https://toledo-attorney.com/for more information on me what I do and the law. I hope this was valuable to you if you have any questions feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email through the website and remember if you need an attorney : called Jeremy Levy Attorney at Law. Thank You