Dissipation of Marital Assets

Allegations of mishandling of marital monies or marital assets is common in divorce. Sometimes, spending customary during the marriage, such as money used to support extended family members, can be used as a channel for diminishing a marital estate. Dissipation is also an issue in cases where one spouse spends marital monies to foster an extramarital affair. Dissipation matters can be discovered through the discovery process, as many spouses are unaware of the intentional mishandling of marital monies until it is too late. An experienced attorney can evaluate your case and determine how much you are entitled to recover due to one spouse’s dissipation of marital assets.

Having an experienced attorney prepared to present your case for dissipation is imperative to ensure that your spouse’s extravagant spending does not end up diminishing your half of the marital estate. One way of recovering your portion of dissipated money is to seek an unequal distribution of marital assets or debts.

Seeking Unequal Distribution of Marital Assets or Debts

To determine whether or not a party has engaged in the dissipation of assets, you must examine whether or not the conduct was “intentional”. Proving that someone’s conduct was intentional requires skill because mere disapproval of spending or mismanagement of investments is insufficient to establish a dissipation claim. Once you have established through a solid foundation of evidence that dissipation has occurred, then you can request that the court award you an unequal distribution of the martial assets to make up for the monies or assets that are no longer available to the martial estate, as a result of the actions of the other party.

At Patricia Mesa, P.A., we are familiar with the strategies available to prove your case for dissipation.

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