Dividing Your Property: 3 Tips that Could Help
When you’re going through a divorce, one of the things you will need to do is to decide how to divide your property. It’s not always easy to decide on the division, because you may have a different opinion as well as different wants and needs than your spouse.
In Minnesota, assets are considered to be community property. Marital property/community property is divided equally. That means that any assets that you or your spouse obtained during the marriage, as well as any debts or liabilities, will need to be divided equally between you. How can you do this in the easiest way? Here are three ideas.
Get a list of all your property
The first thing to do is to create a list of all your property and liabilities. You need to know what you have before you can determine how you want to divide it.
Find out the value of the property and debts
The next thing to do is to determine the value of your property and the cost of the debts you still have. Since you need to divide your property in half, you will split both debts and assets by their value rather than actually in half.
Start keeping track of what you want
Finally, once you know the value of the assets you’re going to receive, you can start writing down what you’d like to keep. For example, if you have $50,000 in marital assets and zero debts, you may ask for $7,000 in household furniture or appliances, $10,000 in liquid assets and $8,000 for a boat that you shared with your spouse. As long as your half adds up to the $25,000 split, you can seek those assets.
Whether or not you get specific assets or you decide to sell the property to split the profits will depend on what you have and your spouse’s willingness to negotiate.
In the case that they are not willing to negotiate with you, you may find that you need to go to court and allow a judge to determine the division of your property.