Separating from your partner is an emotional experience, and one that often involves a lot of stress. One of the unfortunate realities of stress is that it causes your brain’s survival centres to kick into high gear while the logical decision-making centres take a backseat, limiting your ability to make good decisions at a time when making good decisions is critical. It’s easy to see why separation can generate conflict between you and your partner. Fortunately, you can turn to Collaborative Divorce Waterloo Region professionals to get expert help to minimize conflict and secure the best possible outcome. One of the things we help with is drafting your separation agreement, and in this article, we’ll be going over three things to consider during that process.
- Financial Obligations. One of the things that separation agreements need to cover is your shared financial obligations and how you will be handling them after your marriage has ended. This includes things like your mortgage, shared debts, business valuations, retirement savings and income flow, etc. A feature of a collaborative approach to separation is that you have the option of consulting with a neutral financial expert to help sort it out in a non-adversarial way.
- Living Arrangements. Another big question your separation agreement needs to answer is who will be living where. In many situations, one partner wishes to remain in the marital home with the children, and your Collaborative Divorce Waterloo Region team of experts can help you explore options to make that happen, if possible.
- Parenting Plans. Top of the mind for most parents who are separating is making arrangements to ensure a positive ongoing relationship between the children and each parent, in a way that ensures the best interests of the child(ren) are met. All the members of our Collaborative Divorce Waterloo Region team understand that this is an especially sensitive issue and will work with both parents to come up with an agreement that protects children from conflict while also allowing both parents to be involved in their lives.
We believe collaborative law really is the better way to divorce.