The Steps to Keeping Your House in a Divorce

Depending on the circumstances of your personal life and finances, you might wish to keep your house following a divorce. If you owned the house prior to your marriage, this is simple—the home is considered a non-marital asset and thus is not subject to the asset distribution process. However, if you and your spouse jointly owned the premises, there are some additional steps you’ll need to take if you are to maintain ownership after the divorce.

Usually, this means negotiating a buy-out with your spouse. To do this, you’ll need to determine the amount of equity you each have in the home so your spouse can be compensated for their share of the property during the divorce.

Here’s an overview of the steps you can take to accomplish this.

• Determine the home value: Have your home professionally appraised so you can see exactly how much the property is worth, and then determine how much equity each of you have in the property,
• Negotiate the buy-out price: There are some strategies you can use to lower the buy-out price for the home. For example, if you were going to be entitled to receive alimony payments, you might consider exchanging some future payments to lower the price of your buy-out.
• Conduct the sale: You probably will not have enough cash on hand to buy off your spouse’s share immediately. So what you will need to do is refinance the loan, borrowing enough to pay off the total amount you owed together and also to pay off the equity you owe to your spouse. Your ex will then sign their share of the deed over to you.

To learn more about the processes you’ll need to go through to keep your home after a divorce, contact an experienced Long Island divorce lawyer at Bryan L. Salamone & Associates.