Episode 302: Do You Need a Prenup? & Other Legal Considerations Before Marriage
01:07:45 Share

Hi everyone, it's Janet here from ABG. The Asian Bosco podcast is on hiatus, but I will be coming back with my own show, now titled Living Well or Trying To with Janet, relaunching in May. A couple of new things, the show will now be on video, but tempered expectations please, because I am now a one-woman team, but I will continue doing my best to bring you quality, and most importantly, personable content. The

The show will continue to be a combination of solo and guest conversations. I talk more about this in the first episode dropping May 6th. So please go search Living Well or Trying To with Janet on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Or if you're on YouTube, look up Janet W. That's Janet, the word double and the letter U. Please follow and subscribe and tune in for all the episodes to come. Right now, The Home Depot has spring deals under twenty dollars.

So no matter what you're working on, the deals are blooming at the Home Depot with savings on plants, flowers, soil, and more. Then light up your outdoor space with Hampton Bay String Lights. Was $34.97, now only $19.99. And get the grill going with two 16-pound bags of Kingsford Charcoal. Was $19.98, now only $17.88. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at the Home Depot. Subject to availability, valid on select items only.

Welcome to ABG, Asian Boss Girl, a podcast for the modern-day Asian American woman. I'm Janet. I'm Helen. I'm Alex. Today, we are going to be talking about divorce. In America, the divorce rate for marriages that are first marriages is 43%. When we get to second marriages, that stack goes up to 60%.

And third marriages, it rises to 73%. So divorce really is something that could happen to anyone. And the dismantling of a legal union between two people who have so interconnected their lives has such heavy emotional but also legal repercussions. And though divorce is often regarded as taboo in Asian culture, just looking at the stats,

You probably know someone who's gone through a divorce or you yourself are going through a divorce. So we think it's really an important topic to dig into and to educate ourselves on. I completely agree. I am in a happy marriage. I feel like I have to say that just because everyone out there. This is not an episode she requested. I know. Y'all know my relationship status and I'm on this episode.

Alex Payne

He is a family law attorney based in Orange County, California, born and raised as the only Chinese American on the French Caribbean island of St. Martin. Alex studied at schools with classes taught only in French, Spanish, and Papiamento, which I learned is a Portuguese-based language. Good pronunciation. Thank you.

He went on to attend Cal Poly SLO for college and earned his JD from George Mason University School of Law. While Alex began his career in civil law litigation, including criminal law, he eventually transitioned to his current focus, family law, to assist real people getting through one of the most trying times of their lives, which is divorce.

Thank you so much for being on our podcast today, Alex. Happy to be here. Awesome. Well, first off, before we get into the lost stuff, the only Chinese-American family, I'm assuming, on the island? I think so.

I think now there's a Chinese restaurant, but at the time, I'm going to make up a number, maybe there was 10,000 people on the island. So very few people were born there. In fact, I'm friends with the only other person I know that was born that month in my hospital. That's wild.

Oh my God, that's crazy. Yeah. So it wasn't until you moved to the U.S. for a school that you were like surrounded by so many other Chinese Americans. Correct. Yeah. I went from St. Martin to Bonaire, which is another island in the Caribbean, then to Costa Rica and then to California. Wow. And would you ever go back? My folks still live in the Caribbean. Oh, wow. So I used to go back every year for an extended period. And then I did my law school internship in St. Martin. Wow.

but it's not a hotbed of legal activity. There's not a big future there for lawyers. Okay. Okay. Well, at some point in your life, you decided that you wanted to become a lawyer.

At what age did you decide that that was going to be the path for you? I think my senior year of college. I was graduating around the housing crisis. So there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity available. And so I thought if I just took on a bunch more debt and went to law school, that that would be the better financial decision. Oh, so it's a financial decision. I had to...

avoid being unemployed and so keep being in school was the only alternative that I could think of. By paying more money to be in school. Exactly. Okay. Why did you decide specifically like family law then and more specifically like divorce law? So in California family law is divorce. So family law encompasses domestic violence, custody, divorce, legal separation. It's everything under the family code. I switched to family law from civil litigation in

Not wanting to do family law, but really disliking aspects of civil litigation. So civil litigation is you never really know your client. You represent insurance companies, big corporations. Most of them see you as a nuisance. Like if you get a car accident and I represent an insurance company, the insurance company doesn't care if I do a good job, a bad job, indifferent. Nothing ever goes to trial.

So if you like litigation and you like, you know, winning, there is no winning. You're just doing discovery. You're sitting in an office. You're doing document review and you do that forever. So most civil litigators have very few trials because very few cases go to trial. It's just the churn of discovery and sitting in an office.

I switched to family law because I didn't like those two things. Family law matters. They all settle, 99%. But the ones that don't settle obviously go to a trial or a hearing. Even in cases that do settle, you'll have maybe a very small hearing, one day, three hours. So you do get a lot more inside the courtroom experience. It's also fun to meet

people, right? I'm no longer representing Acme Insurance Company. I'm representing the guy down the street, the woman across the street. Usually they have some sort of business. They work for a company that I'm interested in. So you get to meet a lot of people. And if you do a good job, they'll refer you a lot of cases. I'm still friends with a lot of my clients. That's something that doesn't exist in civil litigation.

Oh, wow. A lot of insight here. That's amazing. And it sounds like it's a lot more of a personal relationship now that you kind of have or interaction at least that you have with your clients. You're not just doing like paperwork and... You get really into their life. Large cases, you read all their text messages, all their WhatsApp messages. You go through all their emails. Yeah. So and on custody cases, you learn...

in some custody cases, you learn their entire history from when they were a kid to now, what's causing any parental issues. You get a full psychological workup. So you know them really, really well in that instance. At some point, do you feel like you have to be their therapist? Can't do that. I'm too expensive to be their therapist. But like on the side, you're like, I need to give you some advice here. You try to tell them to go hire a therapist, right? And

It is trying and I feel like a lot of clients want someone to talk to because it is highly technical and they don't want to go talk to their friends about it. Their friends aren't going to understand why a hearing was continued, why something happened. And so they're in this position where no one else really understands what they're going through. But you can't be their therapist because then their bill skyrockets and I'm not really adding value to them. They just want to commiserate and they're going to be far less happy when they see their bill. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Hi everyone! If you're like me, you might find yourself thinking about your place in the world. Lately, I've been reflecting on how grateful I am for the quality education I received growing up in the city of Boston, and how the tools I gained have shaped my life.

Yes, thank you to today's sponsor of the podcast, McDonald's APA Next. McDonald's has been doing incredible work supporting AAPI students in pursuing their academic dreams for over 15 years now. They understand that it's more than just about financial aid. They understand that it's about

It's about giving students the emotional, educational, and wellness support they need to thrive. Their 2024-2025 scholarships include tiers of $20,000 to be distributed over four years, as well as a tier of $5,000 to be distributed in one academic year to help students reach their goals. This year, APA Next is partnering with Cigna Education, who will be instructing workshops on the hidden curriculum of applying to college – finances, scholarships, essays, and more.

The college application process period is such a critical time for a person that can determine the direction of your future, and having support and guidance through the process can make such a big difference. This year, APA Next is also partnering with Yellow Chair Collective to provide mental health support for parents and students navigating the college admissions and application process.

The college application process can be a super stressful time, especially for children of immigrants whose parents did not go to school here and are not familiar with the systems and processes. So this is such an incredible offering. If you or someone you know could benefit from this amazing program, head to APANext.com to learn more.

Well, when a couple decides that they want to further their relationship into a legal partnership like a marriage, what are some legal considerations that they should take? For example, right, like if you think about finances, I know a lot of people give this advice that, oh, you should have your own personal bank accounts and then also have like a joint bank account for the joint expenses. Is that, and I've heard that before, but I don't know if that's like best practice. It depends. So everything in the law, it depends. So nothing I say is legal advice, just a general recommendation.

If you're going to get married or you want to get married, you should at least know the rules around marriage. So everything you acquired during marriage, absent a prenup, or if it comes from something you had prior to marriage, is presumptively going to be shared, whether it's your name on it or both names on it. So if you have a joint account or a single account, if it's income you're earning during marriage, it's both of your income. So you want to be...

very knowledgeable or at least have some conversation with someone explaining how those rules work. You don't want to go into marriage with an understanding that, well, if I put my name on it, it's mine. And then 10 years later, you find out, well, wait a minute, none of that is accurate. Yeah. Is that only in the state of California or basically everywhere? I believe that's every state. Oh, okay.

California is a community property state, but most states operate under that presumption. So if you come into marriage, say you're getting married tomorrow, you have $100,000 in your account and maybe your husband has a house, that $100,000 will remain yours, but money is fungible. So if you put it into an account and then other money goes into it and you spend and you get divorced in five years, it's very unlikely that you still have your $100,000. Mm-hmm.

If you then combine that account, it's almost impossible to untangle, even if your name is the only one on the account. For a house and real estate, it's a little easier because we know that you own that house. It's the same house. But people refinance, they switch houses, they rent houses, they do a lot of stuff that makes the accounting very difficult. So you want to have at least an understanding of the rules around tracing, community property, and...

particularly spousal support. I think that's the hardest one that people... So is your suggestion then to always get a prenup whenever you decide to go into a legal partnership? I usually tell people that you don't need a prenup. You just need to understand the rules. Marriage is one thing where you're going to potentially sign half your life away. And in any other circumstance, you would likely read the fine print for that sort of transaction.

If you're buying a house, you're like, how much does the house cost? Right? What's my monthly payment? What are taxes? These are normal questions people ask. For some reason in a divorce, people just get married and they say, we'll figure it out later. Right? And if you're someone that's coming in with a large estate or different expectations, you should at least just know the rules.

even if you get a prenup that just says, hey, we're going to follow California law, at least you know what California law is when you sign that document. I see. But no one really wants to talk about it during like at the marriage. Yeah. Sometimes it feels like it's like very like, oh, like I don't have faith in the union or things like that. They mix the emotional part with like,

the legal practical part. It can be positive. I mean, for instance, I think you said you had separate accounts or some people have separate accounts. I recommend as non-legal advice that if you're getting married, everything should go into one account and there shouldn't be any secrets. I see couples all the time where I ask them, you know, what does your wife do for a living? What does your husband do for a living? Don't know.

You guys have been married 15 years. How do you not know, right? How much does your husband make? How much does your wife make? Don't know, don't know. And it's unsurprising to me sitting in my seat that those people are getting divorced. But I think a symptom of that is people that don't share everything.

What about like Christmas presents though? You know, you want to like get it out of, you know, you don't want to pay for Christmas presents from a joint account. You can put it on a credit card and then later, later pay off the credit card. As long as you have, I would say cash accounts, savings, everybody's aware of their retirement. But if you start having secret accounts, I wouldn't recommend that, but that's not a legal, that's not legal advice just generally for the divorces that I see. People,

get worried when there's a lack of transparency. Okay. So how do you protect your assets then? Sort of like before, during, and after a divorce? Depends on the asset. Yeah. So if you have a house, that one's easy. You can say, I had this house, here's the monthly payment, and the house will be yours. But if you spend community dollars on it during marriage, the community is going to get reimbursed for that money.

So you'll still get the house, but there'll be money owed to the community. Community as in the two-part partnership. Correct. It's actually somewhat of a complicated math formula, but let's say you have a mortgage on your house. During marriage, you're paying down the principal. At divorce, the community is going to get back what they paid on the principal plus the growth on that principal. So it's a little investment for the community. Okay.

For a securities account, let's say you have $100,000 of Apple stock, it may grow, it may decrease in value, may issue dividends, that stays yours. But people don't generally just hold stock, they trade and they add new money to the account. Yeah.

then you have the obligation to trace what happened to your original shares of stock. That is pretty expensive. So if you want to keep that as yours, keep that account separate. Don't add new money to it. Just keep it by itself. Everything else falls in between those two poles. Man, I can see how that's going to get really complicated and why you need a lawyer. Accountant. You really need an accountant. An accountant, yeah.

When we think about businesses like Aloe or Allbirds or Skims that are selling through the roof, sure, you think about the great product, a cool brand, and brilliant marketing. But the often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making selling and for shoppers buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.

You've heard us talk about them before. Shopify is one of ABG's longest standing business partners. Nobody does selling better than them. Home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret secret with shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less cards going abandoned and way more sales going...

If you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that ABG, Allo, and Skims uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash abg, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash abg to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash a b g.

Before you spoke about kind of like seeing in your work the challenges when couples are like not honest with each other or they're like hiding secrets or things like that, from all of the cases that you've worked on, what are some of the more common reasons for divorce? So everybody thinks that it's infidelity, domestic violence, child abuse or drug abuse. That is a large part of the practice, unfortunately.

I do think, however, overwhelmingly, it boils down to communication, especially in Orange County. We have a lot of people that move from somewhere else to Orange County, either because they started business, they became successful, or they went up the corporate ladder. Now they work for one of the big companies in Orange County. And so when they were together, they were, you know, really struggling. And now they made it and they live in Orange County.

Or somebody, you know, which is common with people in their 30s and 40s, their career really takes off. And especially in Orange County, you have, you know, dual income folks and they start doing things differently and they don't communicate about different expectations. And so all the time you see people lament, hey, we used to do these things. We used to do this together. And now she's always working on her business and he's always traveling. Right. And there's this unalignment on what people are doing. And that just gets larger over time.

It's very rarely where you see somebody come in and they're just having an affair with the neighbor and like, "Oh my gosh." I mean, that happens, but that's a very small part of the practice. I would say you have to communicate and then everybody, you can tell in discovery and the litigation that if they just would have been more communicative, a lot of the issues they have now, the trust issues wouldn't exist in litigation. So a lot of times we'll say, "Oh my gosh, he or she was spending on the person they were dating on the side." They have no evidence.

that they were dating on the side, but they'll say, I got his bank statements now for the very first time. And I went through and I don't recognize any of these charges, right? He's shopping at these high-end stores. He's doing this. That wasn't for me. It could have been for him. It could have been for her, but they are so suspicious and so worried that they're really reliving the last three or five years of their relationship. Or if you were just more communicative in that period,

you would make the divorce process easier and you might have avoided divorce. I see. So often, I mean, sometimes there are these like one big event that happened or some big event, but oftentimes what you're seeing is that it's over time and it's just people may be growing apart and not staying aligned. Correct. It'd be surprising like if you were dating someone and the next day they were addicted to some narcotic

You probably had some lead up to that where you would know. Some people do struggle with addiction and you see that. People work on that. But that, again, that's such a small portion of the practice. Let's pretend that someone out there is thinking about a divorce right now. Hopefully, hopefully not. But I mean, what is it like? What is it? 50% of Americans get a divorce? That's kind of wild. Sad, but also a reality. And also give him business. Yeah.

But what are some of those like first steps that you would take with when you're thinking about a divorce? Is it usually both parties have to confirm like, okay, we're both going through it? Or is it just one person that comes to you and says, hey, I think I want a divorce and this person doesn't want, you know, to divorce me. A divorce is a lawsuit in California. So you have to file a petition.

and then serve that petition on the other side. - Oh, I see, okay. - With the process server. Some people duck service. That's rare, but some people do. Once you file, the family code has deadlines you have to make to get your divorce completed. You have to do financial disclosures within a certain amount of time. The other side has to do the same. And then you can submit a settlement in the form of a divorce judgment.

The process can happen very quickly and it can be expedient. I mean, if people are willing to get divorced and they already have an idea of what they want to do, you can do that in a day. Oh, I didn't know that. I thought it was like always a drawn out. No, sometimes, I mean, even low asset cases, high asset cases, if people have an agreement that they want to get done, a lot of times people come in with an agreement or one side says, hey, I want to retain you, but I just want you to do this. And they'll already have an idea done and that week they're done. Hmm.

Other times you have one issue lingering, so they'll do 99% of it and they say, we just can't really agree on a holiday schedule or what we're going to charge for the house, something like that. After that, anything you want to be litigated, unfortunately in California can be litigated. So if one person comes in and says, I want everything, I'm going to tell that person that's not going to happen. But other attorneys don't tell clients that. And so oftentimes you'll have cases where you're

you're fighting tooth and nail just to get to the finish line. Okay. So we're talking about like the different instances that happen when two individuals decide on going into the divorce. And you shared a little bit how it can be drawn out if one party wants it, the other doesn't. Are there cases where clients have come to you and you recommended that they not get a divorce? All the time. Oh, talk about that. Some people come in and they want to prove a point, right? And they actually want- Like one big argument and they just want-

I'm going to go down to divorce attorney. It's like a thing I hear people talk about in relationships sometimes. So they'll go down and they'll charge one of their joint credit cards for our consult fee so they can show the spouse. Other times they'll want to start the paperwork as to, you know, show them I'm serious this time. Ultimately, in those cases, those people don't.

later get divorced. I mean, I don't know what the percentage is, but probably 95%. But they may not be ready at that time to do it. And there might be valid reasons, right? A lot of times people do come in and their kids in their last year of high school, or they're in eighth grade. And what they want to do would really jeopardize their kids best interests. Sometimes people come in and say, Oh, I want to move to such and such place.

you tell them, look, that process is a two-year process, a three-year process. It's going to cost you this much. How badly do you want to do that? And sometimes it's,

better to not do that and stay married. But I can't give relationship advice. It's just that, hey, the alternative is this. Are you really sure you want to go through with this alternative? And this alternative is risky. Just because you want these things doesn't mean it's going to happen. What percentage of people that come to you would you say you actually recommend to not go through with it? Or it's like a threat and it's like kind of an empty? Very few. I would say for other attorneys, it might be a little higher. But most of the people that I represent are

They're more interested in the most efficient way they can get the process completed. Okay. How much does all of this cost on average? Most divorce attorneys are hourly. Okay. And there's different hourly rates. Paralegals and associates and partners, everybody charges a different rate. It can get prohibitively expensive. It's really important to research who you retain. Okay.

There are some folks that do flat fee divorces, which I never recommend because you can imagine how hard someone's going to work on your case if it's a flat fee. It also sort of pigeonholes you. Things come up in litigation all the time that you can't expect and you're basically a la carte on all of those.

But for some people, you know, that's a fine option if you just want one thing done, one hearing, one filing, I get it. But it's really important to research the firm or the attorney that you hire. What's a ballpark number? It's like buying a car. So you can go buy a used car for $1,000 down the street. You can go buy a million dollar Bugatti if you want. It's really how much you want to spend, unfortunately. So a lot of times we get cases where it doesn't

doesn't matter if they have a lot of money or not a lot of money, you're just dividing by two. Like they have nothing complex. There's no secrets. Maybe they're retired and just need to split everything in two. If the other side is vindictive, you're responding to them. So they file requests, they file emergency requests. They just litter you with work, even though it's not necessary. It's litigation. So you have to respond. Even if you don't disagree, you don't want to oppose it. They drag you along for the process and they can make billable events every day. So

So all the time, if you have somebody that just wants to make the other side miserable, it's a lawsuit. It's going to be miserable, right? So it's really easy to spend money if you just want to spend money. Dang. I love the holidays. Getting to spend time with family and friends, seeing all the decorations, Christmas music, the list goes on. But it can also be a stressful time trying to shop for everyone on our gift list.

Well, let me help you out. This year, gift everyone extreme comfort and style with Skims. Their cozy robe and soft lounge sleep set is perfect for sisters, moms, girlfriends, you name it. My sister is in the thick of it with a newborn, so I'm gifting her the soft lounge sleep set from the Skims Holiday Shop, and I know she's going to love it.

Their sets are so comfortable and also great for those cute family photos. Or if you're looking for stocking stuffers, their fits everybody cheeky briefs and scoop bralettes come gift wrapped in the cutest boxes ready to go. If you're still on the lookout for gifts, I definitely recommend checking out Skims. They've got robes, many different types of pajama sets from long sleeve tees and loose pants to camis and boxers, knit sets to hoodies and more. Shop Skims holiday shop at Skims.com. Available in styles for women, men, kids, and even pets.

If you haven't yet, be sure to let them know that we sent you after you place your order, select podcast in the survey and select our show in the dropdown menu that follows. If someone has decided that they're going to get a divorce or they want to file for a divorce, what are some of the key considerations that they should be thinking about when they're looking for a divorce lawyer? I've heard this term of an aggressive versus a strategic divorce attorney. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So just a second ago, I was talking about how some people just want to spend money. That would be an aggressive divorce attorney. Just because you're aggressive doesn't mean you're moving the ball forward. You're working towards resolution. I think you always want to hire a strategic attorney. You want your case done. You want whatever your goals are. You want that accomplished. You have to be strategic about it. You can't just be aggressive. Aggressive is just going to result in hurting your pocket.

So in terms of what people should consider, you want to get your documents, tax returns, things

so that when you talk to an attorney, you can knowledgeably go through those things. But you have to decide what's important to you. It might be custody. It might be a restraining order. It might be staying in the house. It might be your retirement. You can't win all of those issues. I mean, the default is going to be 50-50 for all the assets for custody. You're going to have to pick what's most important and then set that as your goal and then work with your attorney or find an attorney who can get you to that goal

in the best way, not the most aggressive way. So for instance, if you say, look, my biggest issue is I want spousal support, right? Whatever I can do to get 10 years of non-modifiable spousal support, you're gonna have to sacrifice other things to get to that likely settlement.

And so if you have an aggressive attorney that's running up the costs, unless the other side just capitulates because they want to stop spending on their own attorney, you're not going to make that goal just because you're aggressive. You're going to have to negotiate somehow where what you get is the non-modifiable spousal support. The other side has to get something in return. So it's really important to get your priorities in line.

Mm-hmm.

And this happens on little things in litigation that just don't make a difference to the litigants. If the other side wants a one-day extension, fine, right? You're not going to extract some big money payout because they need an extra 24 hours to send you a letter. But those types of things, when you talk to your attorney, you can say, hey, look, this is what I would like to accomplish. What do I need to do to accomplish that goal? Don't just go in there and start the process and then figure it out as you go along. Otherwise, you'll be caught up in that litigation cycle. Okay.

Okay. So your advice is always go strategic, over assertive, and then before even going into the meeting, know what your priorities are, like what the key thing that you value is. Yeah. I often see people come in for a consult just to have an understanding of a 30,000 foot view of how divorce works. And they're often surprised about California's default rules for custody, for support, and then they can realign what their goals are.

A lot of problems I have are when somebody files and they don't have a plan the other side. And so they're just going through the motions. And a lot of the work is unnecessary, right? If you don't want to keep the house and both sides want to sell the house, why are we getting it appraised? Yeah.

Right. If the other side doesn't want maybe 50-50 custody, maybe they want you to have the kids 80% of the time. Why are we doing discovery on this? Why are we taking depositions? But if you have an aggressive attorney, they're all going to go through the same motions and your bill is going to be enormous. Some attorneys settle nothing.

And their goal is to make the judge make every single decision. I mean, it's an impossible standard. If you want to pick your kids up at three o'clock versus 315, they won't agree. We're gonna let the judge decide. Wow. Okay. Actually, yeah, going back to what you said earlier, what's the default California rule on custody? California would like each parent to have a substantial period of time with the children.

Substantial is undefined, but at least in my county, which may be different than other counties, the general inclination is toward equal time. So unless there's a material reason why one parent can't exercise time, or if they don't want it, they're not going to get it. But if they can't, it's likely going to head towards some variation of equal time. There's two contrary provisions. One's courts like status quo.

but they also like equal time. So a lot of times if you have somebody that works, maybe travels a lot, they can't really exercise custody because they're a traveling salesperson. So Monday through Friday, they're out of town. Even then the court is conflicted because that person has a right to have the equal time and maybe they need a babysitter for that time. They don't want to penalize somebody for working. So a lot of people come in, they say, "I've been the primary parent for the last five years. I should have all the time."

it's extremely unlikely even the situation I described where that person is going to continue to have 80% now there may be circumstances like if the other person has drug or alcohol problems or the travel is so excessive like they're overseas for two weeks but even then courts are trying to get the working person time and does that change like is that revisited every year the custody like time percentage you can file a request to change the schedule whenever you want of

Of course, you don't want to do that every year. You're trying to get a schedule that works for a few years. Kids change every year. So in theory, if your son becomes a junior Olympian, the schedule is going to change because you need to accommodate that. But most of the time, that's

That's not going to happen. And you can forecast that. You can only change the schedule. You can't really change legal custody from Seoul to join or vice versa unless you meet an additional hurdle. We don't have to get into that, but you can change the schedule every time. Wow. So it's like permanent, basically. Or is it more difficult to change in the future? It's just more difficult. It's not permanent. Anything with children can be changed anytime in the best interest of the kids. Okay.

So you always want people to act like parents, regardless of whether they're in a divorce or not. And so, you know, from eighth grade to high school, you guys got to pick a high school. You don't want to go to court for every single decision. Some parents unfortunately do. You still want to work together, but otherwise you have to go to court and say, I want this

this high school and the other parent will say I want this high school. I wonder if anyone listening to this episode is going to be like I'm not going to get married. It's so complicated. I've done many trials on just school choice. Wow. Or you have to bring it and you have to bring in it's Orange County is a little different than LA but Orange County you have to bring in

So you bring an expert on this school, an expert on that school, and what works for this child. Not just children generally, right? This could be a great school, but if it doesn't have a football program and this child is a football player, it doesn't matter. And you run into a lot of evidentiary issues. So most school choice proceedings, I think every single one I've had is at least three days. Wow. Does a child ever have a choice or is it only until they're 18 that they can?

They can express a preference in some instances, either directly to the court or through an intermediary like a therapist or minors council. But it's just a preference. The court ultimately makes the decision and kids,

you know, they want what kids want. So they're not really, yeah, exactly. And that's a big factor, right? If all your friends are going to one high school, sometimes that's the controlling issue, right? If it's a feeder school, you don't want to upset the apple cart. That would be the status quo. But other times you're going to say, well, it's in this kid's best interest to do X, Y, or Z. Hi, ABGs. Do you ever find yourself wanting to listen to an audio book or podcast, but not knowing which one to choose? There is just so much out there nowadays. It can be hard to pick.

Luckily, Audible has released their Best of 2024 picks. You can discover the year's top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals in all your favorite genres. They have memoirs and sci-fi, mysteries and thrillers, romance and well-being, and fiction. Audible's carefully curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's Best of the Year in audio entertainment.

Personally, I'm excited to check out Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg, which is under their well-being category. Others on their list are the unbelievably star-studded production of George Orwell's 1984, which both honors and reinvigorates the terrifying classic, or romance that hits the spot like Emily Henry's funny story. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com slash abg and discover all the year's best waiting just for you.

I mean, I think switching up the topic a little bit, we live in a world where social media is everywhere. Everyone's always on their phone connected to something. So I'm curious how that plays a role when it comes to divorce. Have you seen in your experience social media either worsening or strengthening someone's case? Depends on what side of the case you're on. And I would love to talk about specific cases because I have a lot of cases where you're bringing in Facebook posts, Instagram messages.

messages. It often happens in three or four circumstances. One would be custody.

because the social media provides great evidence. It's a historical summary of all the things that you've done generally. People post tons of pictures or even worse, tweet things. It also happens in domestic violence because it provides a record of where people were and maybe provides corroborating evidence. The one that maybe the only one that's maybe fun is a data separation trial.

So in California, when you separate is not when you file. It's not when your divorce is over with. It's when you two are no longer together. And that may be because you caught someone cheating and you say, we're done. You're separated at that point. Or it could be when you move out.

could be a lot of things. Data separation has a big impact in some cases on finances because community property stops at that time. So if after that date somebody gets a bonus or somebody wins the lottery, maybe that's going to be all theirs depending on when that date is. So for data separation, people always argue when they separate for that purpose. And a lot of times if people start dating again, they do post those photos.

and they'll post selfies and they'll message people on social media. The

Those are fun. I mean, there's... So those are all fair game for you to reference? Yes, we get everything. So if you get divorced, all your social media, all your personal messages, in theory, you want to give to your attorney so they can assess your case. You don't want to go to, and I've had this happen, you don't want to go to court and say, hey, we were separated on June 1st. And then the other side bring in a post of the couple on a vacation on June 20th.

Oh, you were separated, but here's you two in Santorini. You look bad. Even worse, you can say, oh, we were still together on June 1st. And then on May 1st, the other party is at a nightclub in Vegas with people. That's not a good look.

Oh my gosh. I feel like the extent of what my experience of this, it's like when you watch love is blind and then it's like, everyone's doing the deep dive, like research, like, Oh, he was with this person. And that's, um, but that's your job. I think a lot of, uh, a lot of attorneys at our firm enjoy that aspect of it. If you represent a lot of well-known people, there's a lot of blogs about them or message boards. And so you can do some research there. And usually those have, uh,

a lot of data in it. You can't use the message boards posting, but it leads you down a rabbit hole so you can get information. What are some like common pitfalls or smoking guns, for example, like deleted messages or emails or texts that can really jeopardize a person's case? It depends on what your case is about. So for instance, on custody cases, if you're a habitual drug user, most likely that's going to come up somewhere in your messages or somewhere in your social media.

If you're a business owner trying to lower the value of your business or you want a low value so you don't have to pay your spouse the higher value, most of the time they're bragging about how great their business is on their website, on their social media. And so you say, oh, you know, my business isn't worth that much. You just post it on LinkedIn. You just landed a big client, right? Whether true or not makes that person less believable.

So it depends on where your case is going. But social media goes both ways. Yeah. But I'm assuming a lot of people do delete everything before they hand it over to you. They do. But you run the risk if somebody screenshotted it. I have a case where a woman was live streaming just her friend. Wasn't my case at the time. But live streaming just her friend and somebody just saw the live stream. And it was just one person. And that became a crucial issue in their case. Wow. No one's getting married and no one's going on social media after this. Yeah.

Well, so we talked a little bit already about how things can get tricky when kids are involved. But I want to dig a little bit deeper into child custody. What are some of the things that a court system generally considers in that aspect of a divorce? And can you help us understand the two types of child custody where there's legal custody and physical custody? Because those are different, right? Yes. So...

simply legal custody is the right to make legal decisions. So doctor's appointments, therapists, things like that. Those are legal decisions. They want both parents generally to have a say in that. You don't want one parent to say, I'm picking this school, we're picking this doctor. You don't get any say. So the default is almost always going to be joint legal custody. If you have sole legal custody, you can have it for all purposes, meaning all the things I just went over, or you can have sole legal custody as to one issue. So sole legal as to medical issues.

or so legal as a school choice. Very common that people litigate those things. But 90% of cases are going to be joint.

Physical custody just means how much time you're spending with the child or the children. So the default generally is equal time, but you can have any schedule you guys agree to. It can be 80/20. It could be 100/0 if you want. That one wouldn't be joint physical, obviously, because the time is so small. There's a lot of interplay between the two that I don't think you guys want to get into, but that's what legal and joint means.

The code, the family code is sort of vague on what the court is to consider. The code says health, safety, welfare, number one. So if there's a danger to the child, that's the most important concern. So if there's child abuse or anything like that, you get court time immediately and the court's going to address it, whether with investigations or court appointed folks, that's the most important.

Beyond that, though, it just says best interest. And best interest is intentionally vague, in my opinion, because for every child, it's going to be different, right? If you have a kid that's a junior Olympian, you have somebody that has special needs. I don't know that the legislature could say this is exactly what you need to consider. It just has to be best interest. And that's where a lot of cases, they're so fact specific. Because if you have any child, it's your child and it's, you know, their best interest.

what that child wants, who their friends are. It's unique to them. And so custody litigation is often the most difficult because it's so fact intensive. And you're presenting this information to one person. It's a bench trial. There's no jury. And so this person is taking the information you're giving them with very limited framework, best interest in making a decision. And it's hard to say, you know, I want a 2-5 schedule or week on week off. It's hard to say what evidence supports that.

Oh, they have 10 friends versus five friends. That means I get two days and then they get three days. It doesn't make any sense, right? So it's hard to have any connectivity between the evidence you need and what's in somebody's best interest. Is there ever a priority given to what the kid wants? Like, do they ask the child? On occasions. The code says at 14, the child is presumptively able to give a preference. But younger than that, it's not necessarily... It's not presumptive. You can still ask for any child to give a preference.

the court may or may not take that preference into account or consider it because again, a five-year-old's preference on a,

custodial arrangement, how would the five-year-old know how custody works? At the same time, though, if you have a 12-year-old that's had maybe a week on week off for five years and says, look, I'd like to see mom every two days. I'd like to see dad every two days. The court might take that into account, but it is fact specific. And especially in divorce, parents, whether intentionally or otherwise, are influencing their children, right? Even if you say, look, I'm happy with a two-five schedule, kids pick up on everything.

So the likelihood that a 10-year-old or an 8-year-old is going to come in and not be biased based on things they're picking up, it's very small. And so courts can take their preference, but it gets such little weight in some instances because of the bias. Okay. Children aside, I feel like nowadays a lot of people also share pets. How are pets usually treated in a divorce? So historically, they were property. Recently, there was a law change where now they are treated like children. Oh, okay.

So you, in theory, all the things that I said about children may apply to pets. It's a little vague because the law just changed, but you could have a trial on possession of your cat. Is that only in California or everywhere? As far as I know, other states may have other rules, but California, this is brand new. Oh, wow. Wow. Now I'd like to ask a little bit about the different categories.

context for divorce. So sometimes people get a divorce when they're in a younger marriage, and sometimes it happens when they're, maybe if they are staying together for the kids, they wait for the kids to go to college, or maybe their life direction changes. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between like senior divorces versus, I guess, like young middle-aged divorce? So senior divorce is typically easier.

Because if they're over a certain age, they're unlikely to be working. So if you take that out of the equation, you're just splitting up property. You do run into issues where...

seniors have a succession plan in mind and they have children they want to leave stuff to or friends. You also run into a cost issue where they're not getting any more income, maybe social security, maybe a pension. But if they're going to litigate it, you know, you're just taking money out of their family. And in those cases, you might say, do you really want to get divorced? Does it really make a difference at age 95?

whether you're single or not single. On the other hand, if you are super contentious and maybe it is a second or third marriage and they have different children, right? I want to leave all my stuff to my kids. You leave it to your kids. You may want to get a divorce because if you guys don't resolve that issue, you will now have your heirs litigating that in a different court.

So it's really important to have what the purpose in mind is. If you just don't love your spouse anymore and don't want to live with them, you can do that without going through a very expensive divorce. If you have certain assets you want left, maybe try working it out with your spouse first rather than going through litigation. It makes no sense. And we unfortunately see this where people are in their 80s or 90s and they spend half a million dollars litigating issues that just don't matter. Right.

But you're stuck in litigation and you're telling them, look, if the only issue here is who, which child gets what asset, work that out rather than, you know, spend thousands of dollars fighting it in a divorce. And I have plenty of cases where even after the divorce, they still live together.

So for whatever reason, you know, one party just wanted it to stay single and that's what they thought about. And now they're still living in the same house. They're still taking vacations. It's hard not being 80 years old and seeing maybe their perspective on it. But from a financial perspective, that makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 80, 90, 90 year olds aside, I feel like I can observe this myself amongst like Asian families where there are a lot of like...

like Asian parents who are just unhappy in their marriages, but they stay together. Maybe it's because it's, you know, divorce is so taboo within our culture, or it's just that I feel like they don't want to involve like a third party into the messiness of their business. You know, like Asian people don't want to go to doctors or, you know, get lawyers involved and pay all the money involved to get a lawyer, right? And because of that, a lot of, you know, people will stay separated, but not legally divorced. Yeah.

What do you see as some of the ramifications there for these people who are sort of either living together or maybe in separate houses but not legally divorced?

Super common and not just with elderly, but a lot of people will have a 10 or 20 year marriage. They're in their 40s and one person will move out and that's it. But they don't ever start the process. The problem arises if one person ever does start the process. It is an accounting nightmare if you want to go through a typical divorce process. So if somebody just moves out, they go buy another house.

they live there for 10 years and then if one party says, okay, now time to get a divorce, that house may belong to both of them because they use money that was earned during marriage. If you're the support recipient, say that person has been supporting you these last 10 years and now they went, I want a divorce, I don't wanna support you anymore. You may not be entitled to support 'cause you've already been separated for 10 years, right? So your length of marriage is 10 years shorter than it otherwise would have been if you separated right there.

It just depends on how much people want to litigate. A lot of times too, if you wait to file, you know, 10, 15 years and live separate, you do run into the same problem with your heirs or your heir parents. Is that now, hey, it's been 15 years. I want this one to go to my daughter. I want this one to go to my son. And then there's a disagreement.

And now because you haven't been communicating, you're fighting a divorce, not really because you want a divorce and not really because you need the money, but because you're fighting for this child or fighting for whatever disposition that you think is important. Had you just had that conversation or had started the process 15 years earlier, you wouldn't be in this predicament. But I understand a lot of people say, look, I'm out of the house. I don't care if I'm going to get remarried ever again. It doesn't matter to me. But at some point it may matter. Yeah. Yeah.

Working in Orange County, I feel like there is a large Asian population. Are a lot of your clients Asian? Yes. Yeah. I would say the majority. Do you have a pretty high percentage of like these kind of more senior divorce cases? I have more than I thought I would. What often happens, at least in the cases that I have seen, they came from Asia, usually maybe Korea, Taiwan, China, China.

and they have a family here, and then for whatever reason they separate. They maybe have been successful or successful later, and then 10 years down the road after they've separated, they start the process. And it could be unrelated to issues between them. Again, it's usually children, and the reason they delay the process is usually because there's been a disagreement with their children, usually adult children. Mm-hmm.

Before we were recording, I think you had mentioned like there's a distinction between like more Korean families versus like Taiwanese. Like, can you speak to that a little bit? So I deal with a lot of Korean Americans and then Chinese Americans. So I'll say maybe mainland Chinese is the, in my experience, the larger distinction because of maybe assets in China. It makes Chinese American divorces very difficult if they have a company in China or a lot of money in China.

I can't really do a lot of discovery on those assets because of the geopolitical reasons between the two countries.

I also have an issue with Korea because they're a non-HAG signatory for child abduction. So both those unique aspects make those cases a little more complex. And then when Chinese Americans with assets in China, their property division or settlement is sort of colored by what happens in China is a little different. And so in those settlements all the time, very rarely are those litigated because of the difficulties with litigation. The expectation increases

in those cases, um, is very, very family focused. And so they are holding whatever they're holding almost exclusively for the benefit of their children. So in cases where I have assets in China, because they're Chinese American, we're not really litigating the current issue, which is between the husband and wife. We're litigating what's going to happen for the children. For the Korean American divorces I have, um,

I think because of when immigration happened, it's a little different. A lot of it has to do with not sharing assets. So I see, I volunteer a lot for Korean legal clinics and,

And there is a misunderstanding of how divorce law works here versus how it works in Korea. And so I'm not an expert in Korean law, but there's a large or very big gap between how Korean divorces are handled in Korea and how they're handled here. So a lot of times their expectations for settlement and litigation are framed by what the Korean rules are.

So there's a lot of education. So if you allow your client to make decisions, uneducated decisions here, Korean divorces are unique because their default is how things are happening in Korea. What was the thing that you mentioned earlier? A non-sig haze? If you're a hague signatory, a hague convention, which is a tree

treaty between a lot of countries. If you abduct a child and take them to say, the Hague, take them to Netherlands. If you get an order here in the United States to return the child, that country will enforce the return of the child. However, some countries are not signatories to this convention. So South Korea is an outlier because the other non-signatories I think are like Iran, North Korea,

countries that you might expect to not sign a treaty with the United States. South Korea is a non-signatory for whatever reason. And so if you have a Korean custody case, there's always a risk. So you have to take special precautions with the passport. Oh, interesting. Meaning like one parent could take the child to Korea and then it would be different. Correct. Nothing I can do. Right, right. To some extent, that's true in China. Yeah.

But in my cases, I haven't had that issue with it. There's things you can do to address that. A lot of times for travel, you can have the other parent post bond.

meaning to take somebody overseas and give them the passport because there's a risk they might not come back. You might say there's a custody bomb posted of a million dollars, meaning if you don't bring the kid back, the other parent gets a million dollars. That's a very expensive process. And also, to some extent, if you're okay with that, you're saying I'd rather have the million dollars than my child. So it's not really a real safe measure if somebody's really just going to abduct a child.

So do these cases ever settle then if there are all these complications? They have to settle because of the complications. If you litigate them, there's not much the court can do. Court's jurisdiction is pretty limited. So if you have unusual circumstances involving countries like Korea, China, Iran, you have to settle those cases. And that's where it becomes problematic where if two people want the same thing, you see this with property in Iran or property in China, you

It's impossible for an American court in Orange County to even understand where these places are, how much they're worth. The records that we get, I can't tell you whether they're authentic. I got to hire like four experts. Culturally in China, I've had matters where, you know, Chinese use stamps, not signatures.

you have to educate a US judge who maybe has never even had Chinese food about that process. And so that in of itself may take three hours. And that's true culturally for why certain people do certain things. Here, it might look that a person's being dishonest, right? With Chinese speakers, a lot of the times on question and answer for testimony, they will answer the question with an explanation because that's how the question is translated.

But when it's translated to English, it sounds dishonest because they're going beyond the scope of the question. So this is just a cultural issue or a language issue that you have to prep your client for. Hey, look, if you're going to litigate this, be aware you're likely not speaking to a Chinese-American judge. You're speaking to probably somebody born and raised in Orange County. So how does that impact how you advise your clients? You have to give them a more realistic cost estimate.

And you have to tell them, look, you're going to be your own star witness 90% of the time. So you might be the world's most honest person, but it's really how you present. And if the other side, you know, candidly is a native English speaker and you're a native Mandarin speaker, that might become a huge issue, right? You have to go through a translator. Your documents will all need to be translated from Chinese characters to English. And then you might disagree on the translation.

I've had cases where the translator was maybe Cantonese focused rather than Mandarin or Taiwanese. Every little phrase makes a little difference, right? And the listener, the judge and the court reporter

It creates a lot of issues cost-wise. So you talked a little bit about how sometimes divorces can be drawn out and take a while. Are there like best practices in like how the couple should be or should not be communicating before it's finalized? Always be nice. In fact, for some of the applications that courts recommend, Talking Parents or Our Family Wizard, one of them has a feature where if you type something to the other parent, it redoes it so it's nicer. Oh.

So if it says, hey, pick up kid at eight, they'll say, would you please? Something like that. I always recommend that people be as nice as possible. The goal is to settle as amicably and quickly as possible. If you're a jerk to the other side, why would they do anything that you want or why would they make your life easier?

So you should always be amicable. If you have kids, you should still act like that child's parent, regardless of whether you're getting a divorce. So if your son or daughter says, hey, I'd like you at my practice, you should go. You should not go because, well, you know, dad's going to be there. Right. For your child, you're both still the parents. So you want to keep communicating and you want to be, you know, as friendly as possible so that it doesn't have a detrimental impact on your kids.

On the other hand, you don't want to lie to your kids and say you guys are still together, right? You often see parents do a nesting agreement where the kid will stay in one house and the parents will come in two days and then the other parent will come in. A lot of literature says that's confusing for children. Some children that might be appropriate, others less so. But you want to be as nice as possible. In terms of communications, however, don't say anything that's going to impact your case, right? And if you talk about the judge or the other person's attorney, right?

Don't do that because while things might be going great now, you're chatting and friendly, they could just as easily turn and then they're going to give their lawyer and say, hey, look what they said about you. Hey, look what they said about the judge. And the next time you're in a hearing, you're going to get questioned on and say, isn't it true? You said the judge was an idiot.

It might not impact your case, but it might impact your case. So just be pleasant. What was that app that you had changed? I feel like there's other use cases. I feel like everyone should be using this. The world would be a happier place. There's two. There's Our Family Wizard, OFW, and the other one is Talking Parents. Oh, interesting. I did have a question for you. At what age do you think it's appropriate to tell a child that?

that their parents are going through a divorce? - It is kid specific and every family is different. I mean, if the child has a therapist, consult with a therapist. I mean, I am not a child expert, so it's whatever's right for your family. - Good non-answer answer. What is an experience where you've seen like this was such a well handled, like positive divorce?

Our firm has a general philosophy that you should try to settle immediately. And you don't want to strong arm the other side because then you're just encouraging them to litigate, right? If you give them a take or leave an offer, you're basically saying I'll see you in court. So earlier I said, you know, you should have a plan, be strategic about it and have some goals. So if you were to go to your divorce attorney and say, hey, the most important thing is, you know, I don't want to have the kids go through this ridiculous process of talking to investigators and so forth, right? Right.

So in that instance, we'd say, here's what we'll do. We'll file, when we'll file, we'll complete your disclosures and then we'll send the other side a full agreement, right? So they'll have everything that we have and they can assess our offer. They might disagree with all of it. They might disagree with some of it, but as long as we give them a middle of the road offer and all the data they need to assess that offer, you might get a response, a very positive response in a week.

And at least at that point, you'll know where the disagreements are. You should always try to settle right away. Some cases can't be settled, right? It's an either or and the amount of money or something happening to the children is so extreme that that's not possible. But you should generally try to settle with your goal right away and let the other side have everything. Don't hide the ball. Don't pretend you don't have something. You want them to feel comfortable with the information and comfortable with the offer that you've given them.

For anyone who is maybe going through a divorce currently or is about to enter that process, you've given a lot of really great advice about how to be prepared, how to think through what's important to you, hiring a strategic divorce attorney. What are some other resources that you'd recommend that this person would check out? Don't talk to friends. I know that's not quite your question, but a lot of times people don't have a network where they know a lot of lawyers.

which is usually a good thing. And so people will say, hey, who was your divorce attorney? And they'll say so-and-so.

Most litigants, because most divorce attorneys I don't think are that great, don't really know whether their lawyer did a good job. Even if they did do a good job, it might be because the other side gave up. It might be the other side had a terrible attorney. You don't know, right? If I asked you, you know, what's your favorite restaurant? I don't know what kind of food you like, right? I don't know what the price point is, but that's just one piece of information. And a lot of times people go to their, you know, their friend group and they say, oh, so-and-so used this divorce attorney, got a great deal. How would you know? Mm-hmm.

Right? How would they know? They don't know how divorce works. Their attorney might not have educated them. So you can use online resources. A lot of online resources like...

There's like super lawyers and AVO. Things like that are helpful, but you should really interview your attorney and see if their values align with your values. You should ask how the process works within their firm, right? Are you handling my case? Are you going to give it to somebody else? How does billing work? I would always ask for detailed billing. A lot of lawyers generally, because it varies from place to place, will just say work on case five hours. I have no idea what you did. Right?

If you break it down, our firm breaks it down, I think, to .05 fractions of an hour. And so you have to say, if you write letter to client, you got to say letter to client regarding custody this weekend. Or if you say, you can't say work on case unless you say work on case preparing for trial on these five items. You have to have some transparency. Otherwise, you would know. I don't know anything about cars. If I took my car to the mechanic and I said, hey, fix it. I don't really care how he fixes it. I don't even

I don't even know parts of a car. I just want it to work at the end. Divorce isn't like that. I don't say, hey, go fix my divorce, right? There's a series of goals that you want accomplished. You might say your lawyer did a good job, but if your goals are so easy, right? Hey, I just want a divorce. Oh, I can do that. And $500,000 later, here you go. I did it, right? Could that have been done for maybe $5,000? Those are things that you need to speak with your attorney about and interview them and see their process. I would always encourage them to ask what their plan would be.

I think that's lost. A lot of attorneys will say, okay, we'll get started. We'll look at your documents and then we'll make an assessment. That's fair. But then have that assessment right away, right? Hey, now that you've seen everything, what are we going to do? I find the happiest clients are ones that are the most well-informed and can be involved in their case because a lot of people just don't know. And the fear of the unknown, am I going to have enough money? Am I going to have my kids? Right? If you just educate them and say, hey, these are the options and this is what we consider, that goes a long way.

But if you go to a firm or an attorney that just passes you off to someone else, you're saying the same thing 10 different times, getting 10 different opinions. You need to have an alignment on what you want to accomplish with the attorney that you select. Those are great tips. Great tips. Great tips. Second to last question to ask you today. So obviously based on your position, you have a lot of people coming to you and sharing sort of their negative stories and all of the bad sides of marriage. But

I feel like you're almost a marriage expert also because you can kind of infer what leads to a positive marriage if they don't do what these people do that leads to a divorce, right? So what are some secrets that you've sort of picked up through the years of how to have a happy marriage? Well, high level, don't abuse your kids. Don't do drugs. Don't have a substance abuse problem. Those are the big picture items. But going back, I think, again, communication. Yeah.

If you got to have an open marriage financially, you have to be open about your expectations. If you're the earning spouse and you want to take a new job, you go talk to your spouse about that. And you talk to them about what impact that's going to have on custody. I had

you know, one client where they didn't know what their spouse did for a living. They didn't even know how much they earned. They felt joint tax returns had no idea. And they weren't tremendously well off and they had a second child right before divorce. And I said, well, when you were having discussions about the budget for your second child, what were those discussions? Because we never talked about the budget. Hmm.

And I said, that's a major, right, having another child is a major decision. Can we even afford this as a major decision? And they never had that conversation. It's not surprising to me that that couple ultimately got a divorce three months later, especially with the stress of custody and everything else that goes with it.

So communication is the biggest thing. And it would also make it easier, again, if you start the divorce process, if you just told somebody, hey, I just don't want to be here because of X, Y, or Z, it takes the mystery out of it. If you just file and serve someone and say, see you later, that person's reassessing the last three to 10 years of their life saying, well, you know, what happened?

And divorce, unlike other litigation, is a process where new information or new events occur during the process. So if you get in a car accident, that car accident is frozen in time and the lawsuit happens later.

With custody, kids do something new every day during the case, right? Your kid gets expelled. Your kid, you know, wins an award. That's going to change how your case goes. And if you guys aren't communicating and don't have an understanding about that, it's going to be much more expensive. Every little thing might turn into a big thing because you just don't have the information. And so for couples that I see, their communication skills are never good.

I've never met a couple like, wow, you guys communicate so well. I can't believe you're getting a divorce. No, they're always terrible at communicating. Wow.

Wow. The key to a happy marriage is communication. Well, the key to not getting a divorce in Orange County. Which maybe is different than a happy marriage. And budgeting and transparency. Maybe different in LA. Well, Alex, thank you so much for being here with us and going through. I feel like I've learned so much. Of all the stuff that we've covered, what is like one takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with? Work on your marriage. Yeah.

Divorce is often not a fun process and people don't realize that. So when you hit a rocky patch in your marriage, you know, I know,

we live in a time where everything is instant and they say okay i'm over it and you really should think about it the cost it's not just the financial cost it's the emotional cost your life is on pause basically for the duration of the divorce you can't really go buy a new house you can't really move you can't really do any of those things so while i don't want people staying in unhappy marriages and being miserable we live in a time where people want instant gratification and

And while it might be great for that week, I filed fantastic. I have a lot of people that I think regret the filing, right? And the grass isn't always greener. And so really consider that toll. The emotional toll is,

is heavy. If you have a custody dispute, your whole life is opened up. You got to tell your attorney, court investigators, the judge, your friends might be involved. I mean, your whole life now focuses around being this perfect litigant where everybody is looking at you because if you do something wrong, I'm going to bring it up in court. And that is a very hard process to go through. And so if you're just maybe unhappy this month in your marriage, really consider whether you want to lose minimum half your stuff. Hmm.

pay an attorney and then go with the emotional toll of having your life on pause for some cases that are like 12 years long.

Wow. Jeez Louise. Wow. Okay. Well, those are some very wise words that were shared. And I felt like that was a really good summary is, yeah, that divorce is, it can be a very long drawn out process. So to be aware of that. It can also be a week. I have plenty of cases that are done. Or a day. You said a day earlier. It really depends on your spouse. Yes. Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much for being here with us today, Alex.

I feel like we all learned a good amount and hopefully our listeners also found this to be super valuable. You know, hopefully you don't have to put this information into action, but based on the stats, I think it's good to know and to be aware. For sure, for sure. And where can people find you if they need a divorce lawyer? I'm at Minyard Morris in Newport Beach. Okay. Minyard Morris, Newport Beach. All right. Hopefully you don't need to find them, but if you do, you know where to find them. And with that, we will catch you all on the next episode. Bye. Bye.

We would like to send a quick shout out to our ABG bestie for this episode, Connie Chen from San Dimas. Thanks for following along, Connie. Thanks for being a bestie. Yay.

Hi everyone, it's Janet here from ABG. The Asian Bosco podcast is on hiatus, but I will be coming back with my own show, now titled Living Well or Trying To with Janet, relaunching in May. A couple of new things, the show will now be on video, but tempered expectations please, because I am now a one-woman team, but I will continue doing my best to bring you quality, most importantly, personable content.

The show will continue to be a combination of solo and guest conversations. I talk more about this in the first episode dropping May 6th. So please go search Living Well or Trying To with Janet on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Or if you're on YouTube, look up Janet W. That's Janet, the word double and the letter U. Please follow and subscribe and tune in for all the episodes to come.