Although it certainly doesn’t denote commonplace behavior in most divorces, the actions of a spouse marked by a clear bad-faith impulse to materially hurt a partner financially are far from being aberrational in select marital dissolutions in Massachusetts and nationally.
In fact, and as centrally noted by a divorce contributor in a Forbes family law-focused article, the so-called “dissipation of marital assets” rears its ugly head with sufficient frequency to warrant cautionary flags and an attendant signal to act by an innocent spouse on many occasions.
As to what induces one spouse to engage in behavior geared toward purposefully squandering marital assets leading up to the finalization of a divorce, the answers are often clear and recurrent.
And predictable.
Forbes offers a litany of synonyms relevant to a party’s motivations to essentially burn money that might otherwise be available to a divorcing partner as an equitable distribution of marital assets: spite, anger and greed.
How can such manifestly bad-faith conduct be combated?
For starters, suspicions must be followed through on. That means proactively strategic steps taken by a spouse to identify questionable transactions through close checks of credit card and savings statements, a studied inventory of new assets that a partner has stockpiled, evidence of unilateral spending decisions and so forth.
With asset dissolution, time is often of the essence, obviously. A divorcing spouse with bona-fide concerns might reasonably want to contact a proven divorce attorney with a deep well of experience in divorce-linked property identification, valuation and division without delay for next-step strategies to employ to stop intentional asset wasting and to safeguard marital wealth.
Subscribe To This Blog’s Feed