People sometimes ask, “What information is gonna be most useful to you?” or conversely they come in with a folder filled with pictures that they’ve taken of their spouse at someone else’s house or their car in someone else’s driveway.  Don’t waste your time.  Don’t waste your money.  What’s useful is to bring in things like bank account records, brokerage account records, tax returns, and one of the most valuable things are Quicken records.  If someone keeps their books, pays their bills on Quicken or some program like that, it gives us in a nutshell the family’s lifestyle.  It saves a lot of money in attorney’s  fees and in accountant’s fees, and it enables us to give the judge a picture of exactly how the family lived, so that is probably the single most valuable piece of data that someone can bring to me.  

If you don’t have that data, checking account records, canceled checks, credit card records for the last three or four or even five years, again, among the most useful things.  Another thing that’s very useful are mortgage and loan application records, because people who aren’t so candid about their income tend to puff about it when they’re seeking to have a financial institution give them a loan, so we try to get those kinds of things, ‘cause when someone says “I only make $35,000.00 a year” and they’ve then given a bank an application that says they earn $150,000.00 a year, even if both are wrong, it certainly blows the $35,000.00 figure out of the water from a judge’s perspective.  So loan applications are great.  And I don’t mean credit card applications.  I really do mean home equity lines, sometimes car loan applications.  Mortgage applications are very, very helpful.  

Before you see a lawyer, go through the house and take the financial records that you can find, because although we’re entitled to get them in discovery, sometimes that is a long and costly process, and the more you can bring to your lawyer to begin with, the better off you are and the less expensive your overall divorce is gonna be.