Overview: Eight Steps To Dividing Assets in Mississippi Divorce

When a judge decrees a divorce, he or she has to divide the assets. In a plain vanilla, garden variety case, the assets are divided up evenly — 50 percent to each spouse. If you have a garden variety case, there’s not much to it.

The bad news is that many divorces are not plain vanilla cases. Here are some examples of when a 50-50 division might not be appropriate:

• Some of the assets are non-marital

• One of the spouses is guilty of significant marital fault

• The assets were acquired solely through the efforts of one spouse, while the other made no contributions to the marriage or the family

• One of the spouses dissipated assets (e.g., gambling or spending money on a paramour)

• The only significant asset cannot be effectively divided (e.g., a house or a business)

• The parties’ respective earnings capacities are significantly disparate

TWO THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

In Mississippi, judges have to work through a process to arrive at a division of assets. What follows is an extremely simplified discussion of how that process works. This discussion is just the tip of the iceberg of how things actually work. For nearly every statement made in this post, there are exceptions, caveats, and outright contradictions. It would take a long, detailed treatise to explore all of the buts and wherefores of how assets are divided in divorce. If you want to know how assets are likely to be divided in your case, there is simply no substitute for going through your situation with a good family law attorney. But for a thumbnail introduction into how it works, this discussion will do.

Secondly, in this discussion we are using the word “assets,” but what we really mean are assets and debts, including contingent assets/debts. A contingent asset/debt is something that might never come into existence. For example, if a wife is a plaintiff in a pending lawsuit, all she has is a claim. Her claim is real enough, but whether her claim will actually ever turn into money is another question. The wife has a contingent asset (the possible money from the lawsuit), while the defendant has a contingent debt (the same money that he might have to pay).

In our discussion of “assets,” we mean the entire universe of everything that is owned/owed and which might be owned/owed.

In the upcoming posts, we’ll take you through each step.