Preparing for divorce financially, starting with the paper

Whether to file, when, what to ask for, how the taxes fall, and what happens to a house or a retirement account are decisions for a family-law attorney and a financial professional. This page makes none of them.

It covers the work those people will ask you to have done before the first meeting. That work is mostly filing.

Time spent sorting paper in a professional's office is time you pay for. The same hour at your kitchen table costs nothing.

A financial professional will want much of the same material your attorney does, sorted a different way. One clean set of records means you assemble it once.

Start with the documents that exist once. A statement can be downloaded again. A signed original cannot be signed again, at least not by two people who are separating.

For each one, note where it is today and who else could reach it. An agreement in a shared desk drawer is fine in a settled household, but once one of you moves out, nobody can say for certain who last had it or whether every page is still there.

The most useful thing you can bring to a first meeting is a list. Not the documents. The list.

One line per item, kept plain. A spreadsheet works, and so does a legal pad, as long as each line points to a physical place or a login, so that finding the original becomes a trip rather than a search.

Write down what you know and mark what you don't. A gap on the list is information.

A family-law attorney can work with a line that reads 'pension from a job in the 1990s, statements not found.' Nobody can work with silence.

Expect the originals to be scattered: a home office, a bank box, the law firm that drafted one of them, a parent's house.

Law firms merge, close, and retire partners. A firm that drafted your agreement twenty years ago may no longer hold the file. Ask now, while the question is routine.

Keep a printed copy of the list with the originals. A list that lives only on a laptop disappears with the laptop. The full checklist of document types a divorce asks for is on a separate page.

Anything you owned before the wedding, inherited, or received as a gift has its own paper trail. Keep that trail apart from the household files.

Statements from the month before the wedding. The closing file from the condo you owned when you met. The letter from the estate that paid out an inheritance. These get thrown away in a move because they look finished.

Put them in their own folder, labeled by asset and in date order, and mark each one on the list as premarital so that nobody has to rebuild the history from memory later.

Which assets count as separate is a legal question with a state-specific answer, and your attorney gives it. The records that let your attorney answer it are covered in the guide to premarital assets and the paper that dates them.

Household records end up in shared places: a joint email address, a family cloud drive, a password manager, a scanner that files everything into one folder.

List those places and who can reach each one. Download your own statements and copies of documents that are yours. Leave the rest where it is, and put it on the list.

Paper still arrives by mail for some accounts. Note which institutions send paper statements, and to which address.

Do not delete, move, or hide shared records. Ask your attorney before changing access to any account you share, because family law is state law and what is allowed before and after filing is a question for counsel where you live.

Scans are useful. They are not originals. See keeping digital records alongside the paper for how the two fit together.

This work is easiest before anything has been filed, when finding a deed is an errand and not a deadline.

Once a case is open, requests arrive with dates attached, and Florida divorce involves mandatory financial disclosure, so the sorting you finished in the quiet months is sorting you do not have to rush while everything else in your life is also moving. The months before anyone files has more on that stretch of time.

Home is a reasonable place for originals when the household is settled. A separation rarely starts with separate houses.

A vault box gives the originals one address and one signed inventory of what went in. At Florida Intervault, every renter is identified against government-issued photo ID and every access is logged. Valid subpoenas and court orders are honored, and a box and its contents are discoverable. Dated, documented custody is what you want to be able to show.

If you live outside Florida, you can mail your documents in. We place everything in a box for you and mail the key back.

If the two of you already rent a box at a bank, put it on the list along with what is in it. Access to a box two people rent together is its own question, and your attorney should hear about it early.

If what you have is online statements and a lease, you do not need a vault. A folder and a list will do. A box, from $795 a year, makes sense when there are originals that exist once. Call (954) 565-7233 or book a visit.