When dividing your property in your divorce, one item of particular interest is the family home. For many couples, this becomes a key item to win or lose. Yet, this is not the best way to view things.
Instead of treating your marital assets as individual items, it pays to look at their collective worth instead. If you remove the names of each item and replace them with a value, this might help.
For instance, “the family home” will carry significant emotional meaning for you and your spouse. To your spouse, it may represent the children growing up, long lunches with friends and a vegetable garden built up year by year. To you, it might mean a lost career, weekends slaving at a hot stove to entertain guests, and a spouse that was too busy “checking the tomatoes” with Sheila from over the fence to help around the house or spend time with you.
Your home is only worth what someone will pay
No buyer will care about your spouses’ wonderful memories or your traumatic experiences. If you think about the house in terms of its value rather than its memories, it can help you keep it in context.
Is “winning” the house so that you can concrete over the vegetable patch and leach weedkiller under the fence onto Sheila’s tomatoes really worth it? Or would it be better to let your spouse keep it in exchange for an equivalent amount of other hassle-free assets? Or perhaps you could sell it and use your share to buy a new place to create new memories.
Divorce is an emotional time, but emotions can cloud rational thinking. When you reduce property division to math, it makes getting the divorce deal you need more straightforward.