Divorce Lawyer Joliet

Divorce can leave even the heartiest among us rattled. If you are facing divorce, the emotional component alone can require all of your available energy, which can leave your financial and parental rights in jeopardy. By reaching out to an experienced divorce lawyer in Joliet today, you can help ensure that you move through the divorce process more efficiently while protecting your rights throughout. 

Protecting Your Financial Rights

The divorce terms that affect your financial rights most directly include:

• The Division of Your Marital Property – In Illinois, that property that you and your spouse acquire together is considered marital property, which must be divided equitably (or fairly in consideration of the circumstances involved) upon divorce.
• Alimony – Alimony is also called spousal support, and it is only invoked if one spouse endures a financial hardship (relative to his or her married lifestyle) upon divorce that the other spouse has the financial means to help assuage. Alimony is typically imposed for a set period of time that is intended to allow the recipient to gain more solid financial footing. 

Your post-divorce financials are critical to your future, which makes it important to get them right.  

Protecting Your Parental Rights

What you probably think of as legal and physical custody are termed parental responsibilities and parenting time in the State of Illinois. Parental responsibilities relate to whether both parents or only one parent will continue making the major decisions related to the children’s upbringing (parental responsibilities can be either sole or joint). These decisions include those related to the following categories:

• Education
• Religious upbringing
• Health care
• Extracurricular activities

Parenting time, on the other hand, references the schedule that lays out when the children live with whom. It is rare for a parent to be completely locked out of parenting time with his or her children (which is considered a parental right), and there must be a compelling reason for doing so. If you and your divorcing spouse can negotiate a parenting time schedule that works for you – in relation to your schedules, your children’s schedules and needs, and the details of your lives – the court will almost assuredly sign off on your decision. If you are unable to do so, you’ll need to have the court assign parenting time on your behalf. 

Child support is usually calculated according to state guidelines that dictate payment amounts. Child support is a payment system that is intended to help balance both parents’ financial responsibilities to their children, and it is based on each parent’s relative ability to pay. As such, the higher earner typically owes more to the children’s support and, thus, is usually the parent who makes child support payments.  

Turn to an Experienced Divorce Lawyer in Joliet Today

The trusted divorce lawyers at Sabuco Beck, P.C. in Joliet take great pride in zealously protecting the financial and parental rights of clients like you. To learn more about how we can help you specifically, please don’t wait to contact us today.