Experienced Minnesota family law attorneys who have spent years working closely with diverse clients in divorce matters know intimately well from their long-tenured work that divorcing couples don’t routinely act in a dispassionate and rational manner.
Put another way: Although many individuals do follow the guideposts of logic and basic civility as they go through the divorce process, feelings of persistent anger, greed, and a desire to punish predominate for some others.
What might a divorcing wife or husband reasonably think when viewing recent joint credit card statements that show a dramatic and sudden shift in a spouse’s spending behavior? Is there cause for concern upon spotting major expenditures that were unilaterally engaged in by a partner without discussion? What if savings accounts are rapidly dwindling, with scant or no evidence regarding what spending was earmarked for?
Obviously, those should sound alarm bells for any divorcing spouse, as noted in one national divorce-related forum spotlighting the so-called dissolution of assets by a spiteful soon-to-be ex.
In some divorces, one partner’s vindictive impulses are clearly — or, sometimes, a bit more subtly — on display, evidencing a willingness to quickly and materially waste marital assets for the sole purpose of hurting a spouse.
As noted in the above-cited Forbes article, that is clearly “no laughing matter” if the party who is being victimized by such behavior — in effect, being denied an equitable distribution of marital wealth — has less earning power than the bad-faith partner post-divorce.
For obvious reasons, it is important for any party suspecting that a spouse is purposefully wasting wealth to promptly communicate that concern with a divorce attorney, especially one who routinely works with clients in high-asset divorces featuring complex assets and property-distribution concerns.
There are strategies and related steps to take to combat asset dissipation. Forbes stresses that proven legal counsel “can help with the analysis.”
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