Stillwater Divorce Attorneys

Stillwater Divorce Attorneys

Divorce is a major life event that can directly affect your parental and financial rights in addition to being exceptionally challenging emotionally. If you are heading toward divorce, having the professional legal counsel of an experienced Stillwater divorce attorney on your side is the best path forward.

Your Parental Rights: Legal Custody

If you and your divorcing spouse share children, the matter of child custody is a primary concern. In Minnesota, child custody is addressed in terms of legal custody, which determines how you and your ex will tackle primary parenting decisions like the following:

• Decisions about your children’s schooling
• Decisions about your children’s healthcare
• Decisions about your children’s religious upbringing
• Decisions about your children’s extracurriculars

You and your children’s other parent can make these decisions by consensus, but one of you may have the authority to make the final decision if your good faith efforts to resolve an issue ultimately stall. Other options include one of you having sole legal custody or dividing the decision-making between you according to the category of decision that needs to be made. 

Your Parental Rights: Physical Custody

Physical custody determines when your children are with you and when they are with their other parent. While you can devise whatever parenting time schedules that work for you – or can expect a standard schedule if you need the court’s intervention on the matter – they all boil down to one of the following two options:

• One parent has the children the majority of the time.
• Both parents share their time with the children more evenly.

Your Financial Rights: Child Support

Both parents are responsible for supporting their children financially, and child support is the tool the state uses to ensure that this support is balanced between both parents – in accordance with their ability to pay. Generally, the higher earner has the child support obligation. 

Your Financial Rights: The Division of Marital Property

The assets that you and your spouse come to own while you are married are considered marital property, and in Minnesota, this marital property must be divided between you fairly in the event of divorce. While any property that either of you owned prior to marriage will remain that spouse’s, its separate nature can be lost if the asset isn’t carefully separated from marital assets.

Your Financial Rights: Alimony 

Alimony is awarded only in those divorces in which one spouse is left without the financial means to support themself while the other is able to help. Alimony is generally intended to allow the recipient to gain the necessary education or job training to become more financially independent.  

An Experienced Stillwater Divorce Attorney Can Help

The trusted Stillwater divorce attorneys at Atticus Family Law recognize the serious nature of your divorce case and are well prepared to help. Learn more about what we can do for you by reaching out and contacting us today.