Episode 11: Divorce in Motion: Understanding the Legal and Financial Process

What actually happens after the first call to a divorce attorney?

Once the decision has been made and legal proceedings begin, individuals enter a structured process that can involve filings, financial disclosures, mediation, and sometimes, a trial. For many people, the uncertainty surrounding timelines, legal requirements, and financial decisions can make an already difficult transition feel even more overwhelming.

In this second half of the conversation with family law attorney Linda Weiksnar, we continue the discussion on divorce by walking through what actually happens once the process begins. Drawing on decades of experience guiding clients through family law matters, Linda explains the real-world mechanics of divorce, from petitions and mandatory financial disclosures to mediation, settlement negotiations, and court proceedings.

Listen in as she outlines the stages of divorce and explains how courts approach property division, spousal support, and parenting plans. You’ll get practical insights that can help anyone move through the process with clearer expectations and greater confidence.

What You’ll Learn:

• The first legal steps that officially begin a divorce case.

• Why financial affidavits and mandatory disclosure are essential to the process.

• How equitable distribution works when dividing property, accounts, and debts.

• What courts consider when determining spousal support.

• Why mediation is required before most divorce cases go to trial.

• How parenting plans and time-sharing arrangements are structured.

• What happens during a divorce trial if a settlement cannot be reached.

• Why preparation and patience are critical throughout the process.

Ideas Worth Sharing:

• “The judge is going to tell you the same thing I'm going to tell you right now: I can't fix your heartache.” - Linda Weiksnar

• “You can be more creative in mediation. You can be the captain of your own ship in mediation.” - Linda Weiksnar

• “Listen to your attorney because your attorney does want what's best for you, but has to get you there within what the law allows.” – Linda Weiksnar

Resources:

• Linda Weiksnar: LinkedIn

• Genevieve George: Website | LinkedIn

• Crary Buchanan

• Rule 12.285. MANDATORY DISCLOSURE

About Our Guest:

Linda Weiksnar is a trial lawyer specializing in family law with a background that includes earning million-dollar verdicts at a nationally recognized firm. A cum laude graduate of Duke University and holder of dual degrees from Georgetown University (J.D. and M.S. in Foreign Service), Linda has practiced in Martin County since 1994. She is a four-time Paul Harris Fellow Rotarian, the 2020 Soroptimist International Woman of Distinction, and brings both sharp litigation skills and genuine compassion to one of life's most difficult transitions.

Connect with Us:

If you're ready to stop avoiding your finances and start building the future you deserve, schedule a free call with me at pelicanfinancialplanning.com and let’s create your personalized financial plan together.

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Read the Transcript:

Linda Weiksnar: The judge is going to tell you the same thing I'm going to tell you right now: I can't fix your heartache. That's just something I don't have the capacity to do. All I can do is dissolve your marriage as though it were a business deal that didn't work out. Divide your stuff between you, including your money and your children, and then wish you the best of luck.

Welcome to The Wealth Development Studio. I'm your host, Genevieve George, Senior Financial Advisor and Founder of Pelican Financial Planning & Wealth. Our goal for this episode is to provide clarity about today's financial topic, inspire you to be brave with your questions, and gain confidence in your financial future. So take a deep breath, grab your favorite cup of coffee, and step into the studio. Your dose of financial empowerment begins now.

Genevieve George: In our last episode, we talked about what someone can do before calling a family law attorney, both technically and emotionally. Today, we're continuing the conversation by walking through what the divorce process itself looks like. From timelines and costs to emotional highs and lows, we’ll talk about what to realistically expect once things are underway and how having the right team and information can make the process more manageable and more intentional.

Today's guest is Linda Weiksnar, a seasoned family law attorney and shareholder at Crary Buchanan in Stewart, Florida, where she has built a distinguished career guiding clients through complex divorce, custody, mediation, and family law matters with practical insight and compassionate clarity. Thank you so much for being here.

I'm excited to continue this conversation. Maybe let's just start with the big picture. What does that process really look like? How do things get started? 

Linda Weiksnar: For a lot of folks, it is more of a bang than a wimber. There's something big happen. Somebody discovers something, somebody makes something up, somebody thinks something.

It could be true, it could be not true, but people come in here to see what their options are. One of the very first questions that we ask, many of the good practitioners ask, considered to be part of our job, is to make sure that people are not just coming in because they're angry about something that's fixable.

We like to make sure that this is really the end of the marriage because one of the questions that we have to ask, jumping all the way and head to the end, one of the questions that is asked at a final hearing is “Is your marriage irretrievably broken?” And that's the grounds in Florida, in other states, sometimes, they still have ground like abandonment or abuse or things like that.

But we have no fault divorce here in Florida, as do many other states. And people are, it's interesting to see because the states that still have grounds are moving toward no fault. And the states that have had no fault, many of them are moving back or thinking, talking about moving back to a more difficult process.

This process is difficult enough without somebody having to prove that something happened like adultery, abuse, or abandonment. So no fault means the only thing you have to say to the judge is that my marriage is irretrievably broken. By which I mean there's nothing the court can do to fix it. And a lot of the judges even phrase the question just exactly that way.

There's nothing the court can do to help you fix your marriage. So that's part of the first conversation that I ever have with a client who comes in. There are a number of steps, so we can walk through those a little bit. I tell people all the time, we have a language of our own and family, and it is normal to us.

It's natural, it's every day, but the words don't always mean the same thing to the lay person that they do to us. So I tell people all the time, if I use a word that doesn't like fit the scenario, “Stop me, interrupt me, ask me what, what is that before we go on?” Because I literally had people say, I get to the end and I say, “Any questions?” and they say, “You lost me at equitable distribution.”

And that's usually one of the first words I say. So I learned that was a good lesson to learn to start with the don't wait until the end to ask your questions, because it's a huge transfer of information. And I also tell people, and I think we talked about this a little bit the last time, that when I do a consult, there's this big, big transfer of information.

People are allowed to take notes. I encourage that, and I tell them to ask questions, and I also remind them that their brain is not gonna remember everything. And so because your brain doesn't like to not remember everything, it tends to fill in those blanks with things that people have seen in the movies or on TV, or their friends have told them.

And those things are invariably wrong. Also, one of the very first things that I tell people, and I can't stress how important this is, you have to be patient through the process. It's never ever, ever gonna move as quickly as you think it should. It's not like Judge Judy where everything's neatly wrapped up in 15 minutes.

Two people get divorced per half hour. It's not like that. There's a lot that goes on, and there's reasons for that. So one of the first things that people have to do is we file what's called a petition. So that's just the first person who files is the petitioner, the other person is the respondent.

To make it easier for us as practitioners, even though the caption up top says petitioner, respondent, we generally just refer to people as husband and wife. Or if it's a same sex marriage, we'll use their names so that it's less confusing because people always have to look back to see who's the petitioner, who's the respondent, and when I say to a client, you're the petitioner, maybe I have to remind them what exactly that means 10 times, which is fine.

We answer the same question a lot here. I'd rather have people ask me the same question 10 times and think something else. We get calls all the time where people will say, “Well, Linda said..” and something like completely not correct comes across the line and my paralegal will say, “Are you sure that's what Linda said?” We try to gently remind them that other people have probably weighed in, and it might be an amalgamation of a bunch of things they've heard.

So we encourage people, please, ask us a lot of stuff. We do a lot of stuff by email for that reason, so that they can look back at whatever we wrote back to them and say, “Oh, Linda did answer this question.” Here's the answer straight from the attorney. I don't have to ask, oh my bartender, what happened?

And tell me again what happened in your divorce? So those people always are well-meaning, but most likely not correct in how it works. So in the petition, for Florida, in the petition, we call it bare bones pleading. You don't have to lay bare all of your drama. You just have to say basically, this is who I am, this is who married to, or marriage is irretrievably broken.

At least one of us has lived in Florida for six months prior to the date of filing. That is a hard deadline. If you are here 5 months and 29 days, that's not long enough. And if you don't have something to prove it like a driver's license or a deed or a lease or something that shows you've been here all that time, then we need a corroborating witness.

We can circle back around to that later if we remember. It's very bare bones. “Do you have kids? Are they minors? If they are, we need names and dates of birth.” I do not like putting children's full names and dates of birth in these documents, but the judges require them to be in three documents. The petition, the UCCJEA affidavit—I’ll talk about that again in a second—and the final judgment, and that's so that the judges can keep track of the children that they have jurisdiction of.

Even if a divorce is ongoing and a child turns 18 and the court loses jurisdiction of the child. So they always wanna know. The UCCJEA affidavit, its full name is the uniform Child custody jurisdiction and enforcement affidavit.

So you can see why we don't call it that every time. And that is a document that says, “Here’s who I am, here are any minor children of the marriage where they have lived for the last five years, every address, and who has lived there with them in that timeframe.”And then it asks some other questions and the court wants to have that so that the judge knows I'm not entering an order that might conflict with an order that's been entered in Tampa or in Tallahassee or wherever, somebody, or South Carolina, wherever else somebody might have lived before they live here. So that's part of the initial packet.

So we have to put the kids' names in, then we just say what we want. And this is something that we always talk about beforehand, “Is it an alimony case?” So we had a recent change in Florida in the alimony law. There is zero alimony for a marriage who less than three years, from three to 10, it's 50% the length of the marriage. From 10 to 20, it's 60% the length of the marriage. And then 20 and up, it's 75% the length of the marriage. And that's just a qualifier.

Then there's another qualifier. That is the person who needs alimony has to show that they need it. And the person who is supposed to pay the alimony, the person who's asking has to prove that the other spouse has the ability to pay it. So we see a lot of financial affidavits where one spouse definitely shows the need, but the other spouse doesn't have a surplus. When all the bills are paid, there's no surplus, so there's no ability to pay.

If there's real property, we say that they have real property, and here's the address. So the court is aware of that, and at the end of the petition, we tell the court what we want the court to do. Please divorce us, restore us to the status of being single, make a parenting plan for us if we can't make it ourselves, divide our stuff equitably, which usually means equally but not always, and that retain jurisdiction of the matter in case we have problems down the road.

And things that go along with the petition that are supposed to be filed at the same time. Notice of social security number, which the court will look for before it enters a final judgment cover sheet, which just says this is a, there's 18 different things you could be doing in family law. This is the one we're doing.

If you have a lawyer, your lawyer files a notice of appearance and what we call a notice of email designation. The email designation is required for lawyers. It is not required for lay people, but a lay person can say, “Here’s my email where you can contact me” because the court serves things through what we call the ePortal.

A lot of doctors have the portals now so people can at least know what, a reference point. We file everything through the ePortal. So the days when I could take my happy self over to the courthouse and say, “Here I'd like to file Joe Schmoe's divorce case…”

Genevieve George: And get out of the office for a minute.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. Joe Schmo can go in if he doesn't have the ability to scan stuff and file it through the portal, and the clerks there won't give him legal advice, but they will say, this is something we use. So if you think there's gonna be a lot of documentation, you might wanna figure out how to scan a lot of phones now have a scanning option.

So that's a way to do that as well. And that is the way that the clerks contact us. If the person on the other side of a case from me file something, I get it through the ePortal. Lay people have signed in that way. And then there are some who say I just, I'm older or I'm not very tech savvy. I don't really wanna have to do all that and figure it all out on top of the trauma I'm going through.

And those people, we can just mail them stuff or we can send it via a regular email and it doesn't have to go through the portal. 

If people have property that they wanna sell real property, one of them can ask for what we call partition, and that's a separate count petition, and it just says, I'm an owner of the property, so I have a right to sell it. Here's the address.

Sometimes if there's one of those long old-timey legal descriptions that says, take 15 strides from the well in the corner of Mo's Cow Pasture.

Genevieve George: It's an extremely long description of what is your mailing address.

Linda Weiksnar: Yes. So we'll just attach the deed because if you make an error in those things, it's, two people have to sit here and read through one's reading it on the screen and one's reading it from the deed.

So a lot of times we just attach the deed when they're like that. And the other side can say, no, I don't want you to sell the home. And that's part of the negotiation process. So that person, when they answer, just would not include a partition count. They would, it would just be a response. And then usually people file what we call a counter petition.

So in that situation, the person who the petitioner the first time around is now the counter respondent. And the respondent is the counter-petitioner. So again, we just call them husband and wife. Sometimes it's just spouse. And like I said, sometimes it's just names depending on our circumstances. So a bunch of documents get filed, and they get served on the other party.

So if my client is the one who files, we send it out for service. Sometimes we'll say, do you think your spouse would wanna come in the office and pick it up or have it emailed and do a waiver? And the acknowledgement of service and waiver of future service. So sometimes we don't have to have the sheriff come to knock on your door or a private process server, and that's usually an indicator that things are gonna go a little more smoothly.

Of course, if the person is not expecting to receive divorce paperwork, then we don't usually just email it to them. It does go out with a private process server. I will usually give clients the choice between either having a sheriff do it or having a private process server, and telling us where they'd like to have their mate served.

So sometimes they don't want their mate served at home because there might be kids there who don't need to see that. Sometimes they don't want them served at work because it might jeopardize somebody's work arrangement. The difference between a sheriff and a process server is if the sheriff is knocking at your door to serve you and gets the call that there's a burglary nearby, they leave.

Whereas a process server can sit and wait on the property, wait for somebody to come outside to make sure that's the right person. For service to be proper, even if the person's not answering the door, the process server watches Joe Schmoe's wife walk into their house, knows it's her. He can go and knock on the door and if she doesn't come, he can say, “Mrs. Schmo, I'm the process server. I'm here with divorce paperwork. I saw you go in. I know you're there. So I'm leaving it here. Stuck in between your outer front door and your regular front door. Your screen door, and your front door.” And that's good service. 

Genevieve George: That's considered sufficient, is what you're saying.

Linda Weiksnar: That's consider sufficient.

Genevieve George: Because that's considered delivered. 

Linda Weiksnar: Yep. You've tried to do that. And one time we had it where the guy stood at the woman drove her car into the garage and the garage door was going down, so he flung the paper under the garage door and stood outside and yelled in the words he has to yell.

And then he did his affidavit service saying, “This is what it was.” And she said to the judge, “Oh, that's not good service.” And the judge said it, “It is. You are absolutely trying to avoid service. That was obvious.”

Genevieve George: What is the point of trying to avoid it in the first place? Like it's going to get…

Linda Weiksnar: It's gonna happen.

Genevieve George: …communicated no matter what.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. So we learned a lesson in one case a long time ago. The guy was, he said he'd come here, I'll come here and I'll pick it up. He came here, he didn't pick it up. He left after wandering at my available lobby for two hours, debating whether he was gonna take it or not. So we sent the process server out.

He goes to the guy's business and he speaks to the first guy he sees, and he says, oh, I'm looking for this name. And the guy goes, oh, that guy, he just never shows up for work. He's a slacker. I don't know what to tell you. The process server calls us, and he says, “I'm pretty sure I was just talking to the guy, so can you send me a picture?”

He is like, “Yeah, that's the guy.” He was the boss, so he didn't go to work for the next three days 'cause he knew what was coming. His spouse drove the process server over, he followed her over to the house. He could hear the husband and wife talking, and she was like, “Why are you doing this?” And he said, “I don't wanna get divorced.”

And she said, “It's really not up to you. “This is all in the affidavit. So he stood outside, yelled his words, and left with stuff. And that was good served. And those are my two really weird service stories. Mostly, it goes very smoothly. So when a person gets served with a petition for divorce and all the other paperwork that goes with it, they have 20 days to file an answer.

Genevieve George: Okay. 

Linda Weiksnar: And if they get a lawyer on day 19, I get calls a lot that say, “I was just retained by Joe Schmo’s wife. Can I have 10 days?” We are supposed to agree to that. That is part of our rules, procedure and protocol, and part of our ethical duty to behave appropriately and professionally with other attorneys.

And so those people, usually it doesn't take that long to put together a response and counter petition. So usually we get them well within the 10 days. When it comes back, and it comes with this counter or petition, it's mostly the same stuff. You don't wanna be married to me, okay? So I don't wanna be married to you either.

The only time we see a difference is, for example, if my client is the husband and he's not asking for alimony. The wife's counter petition might ask for alimony. And I say husband and wife, and I know that might sound a little sexist, but 90% of my alimony cases are still where the man earns more than the woman.

The other 10, it's flipped. And so alimony is gender neutral. Men have asked for it, men have gotten it. A lot of men say, “I don't want alimony” and that's a pride thing. I find by and large, I'm not reading their mind, but that it's, they're like, no, I'm not gonna take any money from her. I think that will change.

As we know, we have more women going to college and graduating from college and moving up the corporate food chain. So I think it will change a little bit as we have dads who's been staying home, dad and raising kids. We'll see a little bit more of that. So that's like the first thing that if you get served with a counter petition, you have to file a response to that.

There is this big financial disclosure that every time I send people the list, they say, “That's a lot.” And they say it's a little scary. And I say it, “It is, but it isn’t.”

Genevieve George: And you're talking about like the financial affidavit that they have to fill out 20 plus pages, right?

Linda Weiksnar: It's pretty long.

Some are longer than others. Now we're seeing like newer versions where they ask questions like, how much do you spend on just in the general expenses, how much do you spend on liquor? How much do you spend on cigarettes? How much do you spend on vaping? That's unusual. That stuff is usually just covered under household expenses, what you spend for food and food-like items.

But now I see them where it's breaking them out. I think that's very interesting. And a lot of people believe those blank because they don't want to be pinned down to how much they spend on liquor. And for those people, I tell you, please don't worry about it.

Just fill it out. Because the rest of the financial disclosure, I get all that information anyway. People are always surprised when we show up with a spreadsheet, like a wife will say, “Oh, I want alimony because I make this many dollars, but I still need $2,000 to make my basic bills.” When I have a case like that, we get your bank statements, your credit card statements, your retirement accounts.

Genevieve George: Yeah. We're understanding what are those basic bills. We're not just taking your word for it.

Linda Weiksnar: We get everything, and I do a spreadsheet. And I might have a spreadsheet that has a column that says “grocery items,” or it'll say something like Publix or wherever the person appears to be shopping for groceries, food outside the home, gasoline, whatever columns come out to be.

And so I can say I see that you do spend like $3,000 a month on clothes. That's a luxury, not a necessity. Alimony is just for the needs and necessities of life. And we used to say as that need was established during the marriage, we don't say that part anymore because that used to be a super factory.

Seeing the movies, the women say, “He’ll keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed.” We don't say that anymore because it depends entirely on the other party's ability to pay. So you might be accustomed to spending a couple grand on clothes or a couple grand eating out every month. Those are not considered necessities.

Necessities are basic clothes, okay? Shoes—people need shoes. Food, roof, utilities, gas for your car, health insurance if it's affordable. We prefer to be able to provide that, but it is not considered a necessity for a bunch of reasons. One of which is that if I were married, my spouse could take advantage of my health insurance here.

But when we get divorced, the plan won't cover him anymore. And so in a lot of places, the people who are losing their health insurance have to look in the marketplace for that. And if the other party can't afford to pay sufficient alimony to cover the premium in the marketplace, then that person, the person who without insurance has to figure out something else.

So we talked about the financial affidavit and I just say to people, just sit down and do it at the time. I do encourage my clients to go through three or six months worth of their bank statements, their credit cards, however they spend their money, pay their bills to see how they spend their money.

Because I don't wanna know what your FPL bill was in February, and I don't wanna know what your FPL bill was in August. I wanna know what your average 12 month bill is. So in a perfect world, my clients would all go through 12 months. Some of the vendors like SPL and utilities can tell you your 12 month average.

But things like food, gas per your card, they're not nearly to pinpoint. So I said, please go through, because if anybody ever takes your deposition and asks, how did you come up with this vendor? Your financial affidavit, you can say it is a three or a six or a nine month average of my expenditures in the prior year I tried to pick not the money, the months where we spent the most money.

So I say to people, if it's gonna be something, please don't have it be November, December, January. February where people spend more on food, have it be other months or do you know if those are your last three or four months? Do at least six months. So we have two normal months of expenditures in there.

Genevieve George: And how does it work if one spouse maybe doesn't have insight into those accounts and that like they don't get the credit card bills? They don't get the bank statements?

Linda Weiksnar: That's a great question, 'cause it comes up all the time. All the time. So I'll have like a husband who has no idea how much they spend on groceries, or have a wife who has no idea how much the utilities are.

So we estimate what would be a reasonable amount of groceries based on lifestyle. Two grownups, two kids. We have an idea what groceries for a month will cost. You have a pool. Well, then I know your FPL is gonna be higher than mine, and I know your FPL will be higher, your water bill's probably gonna be higher.

So we estimate them based on lifestyle and our experience as attorneys. And then when we get the rest of mandatory disclosure in, we can confirm. What is difficult is when I get a financial affidavit from somebody else, and we are getting close to trial or a mediation, and everything is still estimated.

At that point, it should not be estimated anymore because if we're getting ready to go to mediation, we have already exchanged financial, all the financial disclosure, not just the financial affidavit, but all the bank statement. So it's a list, like 20 things, deed, leases if you have at least one statement for a car loan, 24 months of credit card statements, 12 months of bank statements.

And we will usually, if stuff comes in that says estimated from the other side, then we'll do a spreadsheet for the other side to say your stuff also is estimated. So I went through your stuff and here's what I found. 

Does this seem reasonable?

Genevieve George: So you get that financial affidavit from both sides, right?

Yes. So even if there's a spouse that doesn't have full insight into all the information, we're taking an estimate, but then in theory, the other spouse has the real average information. And you're trying to come to use one side and the other side to come to what is that true…

Linda Weiksnar: And by and large, both sides have access to the things unless like we've got somebody who they put everything on a credit card and it's only in my name, then the credit card company won't give my spouse my credit card statement.

So in that case, my spouse has to wait till the lawyer on the other side gets all of my credit card and my bank statements in mandatory disclosure. And then in theory, a lawyer's supposed to go through, or somebody in the office goes through and does the spreadsheet, or you give it to the client and the client goes through and does a spreadsheet, so that things are no longer estimated.

Because it's very hard for a judge to award alimony based on estimations that we have no idea if they're even close to being accurate. So that is something that I always encourage the clients to do, is to try and figure some of that stuff out beforehand in the gathering process. People can always look on the Supreme Court website has a form for mandatory disclosure.

So if they say, “Gosh, I really wish I had that form, and I knew what kinds of things I had to gather,” you can find it online. It is just called Mandatory Disclosure. It's Rule 12.285. People can look at it. There's a form, and it will tell you.

Genevieve George: When somebody comes to me and says, “I think we're gonna end divorce,” I will pull the template and share that with them too. Because that's a part of what they need to gather for you.

Linda Weiksnar: For you.

Genevieve George: Yeah. So I guess I'm attesting to the fact that you can easily find it online. 

Linda Weiksnar: It looks overwhelming to people. And I say, look, there's 20 categories. So start with the first category, three years of tax returns that maybe takes you 10 minutes. It's done.

Do the next one or look for another easy one.

Genevieve George: To sit down and do it all at once, is what you're saying.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. The next day, do a harder category, but for most people now, in terms of getting your bank statements or your credit card statements, if you bank online, you can get everything you need online.

The one thing that I ask and that most lawyers will ask, if your statements are locked, unlock them and send them to us that way it's not cost effective for us to have to unlock them for you. We do all the redacting. Please don't redact stuff 'cause we have a specific way we have to do it here, but do it.

Don't wait. It's due to the other side 45 days after the respondent is served. Both parties exchange at the 45 day point. 

Genevieve George: Okay. So don't wait until day 44 to give it to your attorney.

Linda Weiksnar: Correct. And if the lawyer says, or if we need a couple more days, both attorneys will be like, you're supposed to call.

There are some attorneys who are, if you call, absolutely they'll give you an extension, but if you don't call, if you just say, “Eh, they're not ready either,” they will file a motion to compel your mandatory disclosure and it will be entered. And that's never how I want my client's case to start. 

So we say to people, while it would be much better for us to get it all at once, if the only way you can face doing this project is to get part one and two and send me that. And then the next day, send us your bank statements and then your credit card statements, if that's the only way you can face doing it, let us know, but get us the stuff sooner rather than later so that we can do what we have to do and get it ready. And then I review everything before it goes out. 

Genevieve George: Okay.

Linda Weiksnar: I don't want there to be any surprises. So I review a client's financial affidavit. I highlight areas where I have questions like some people…

Genevieve George: 'Cause if have questions, there's gonna be questions on both sides. So we gotta get our ducks in a row for the other side to not question us.

Linda Weiksnar: And even when they have clients who insist, for example, “Oh no, I really do spend $2,000 a month on groceries.” And they say that even in these days, that's a lot of groceries.

I'm asking you because I know that's what the judge is gonna spot and say. “That seems odd.”

We had a guy who testified that he, I may have told you this, that he worked remotely nine out of 10 days in a two week period. One day in the two week period, he would drive 40 miles to his office and 40 miles back.

And that's all the driving he did. Other than that, he biked around or he walked and I said, then why is your gasoline $600 a month? That's not in line with what you just—And he said, fumbled with an answer. And finally the judge said, “Oh, I'm cutting it down to what I think is an appropriate gas amount.”

But people think every person who fills out a financial affidavit with the intention to put one over on his own lawyer, the other lawyer, a judge, we have seen all of these things. You are not the first person to think of that. And we know exactly where people try to fudge. And as does the judge and as lawyers, we know exactly what numbers the judge is gonna look at to see if you've inflated your bills.

I go through my clients because your financial affidavit is really the first thing that the judge looks at the beginning of your trial. And that's your first shot at credibility or lack of credibility with a judge. This is why we tell our folks to go through and do a couple a month average. And if I have a client like I did have the one who insisted $2,000 a month, that would be exactly the thing the judge asked her about.

And even though we had talked about it beforehand, she did not have a great answer for that, and it colored the rest of the trial. So I want my clients to know ahead of time, it's not a game, it's not getting one over on the other side, we know the tricks, we know the things to look for, as does the judge. So let's avoid that problem altogether.

So once we get all of this stuff, again, because I do love a spreadsheet, I will put together what we call the equitable distribution spreadsheet. So anytime. I'm just gonna tell you, anytime I say the judge is gonna do this, we approach it the same way before we get to trial because it's just easier to go through this way.

Genevieve George: And if you don't end up at trial, right, it's less costly to have just done it this way from the beginning.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. So that is the goal. My goal is always to try and get your case settled without any major evidentiary hearings, because those are expensive without having to go to trial.

Because just trial, if we just say trial, so trial in front of the judge is six hours, usually three in the morning, three in the afternoon. Give him half an hour to wrap up and pronounce if he's made a decision. But for me, it's more like a 10-hour day because I do stuff in the morning before we get to trial.

When we break for lunch, I will usually send my client off to lunch with whoever has come to support them. We come back to the office, we look for case law to see if something came up in the morning that we need case law to talk about or…

Genevieve George: Yeah. You're not taking a break, is what you're saying.

Linda Weiksnar: Right.

Genevieve George: Yeah.

Linda Weiksnar: So I always think it's funny when a client will say to me, “That trial day was not eight hours.” And I say, “Not for you.” But for us, eight to 10 is not unusual. Six to eight the day before, not unusual.

Typically, judges will presume that however long the trial is, twice as long is appropriate for preparation. And we know that because it comes out of hearings where people say, “Well, I want to get my attorney’s paid” or somebody like the husband really has the ability to pay and the wife really doesn't then the husband is supposed to contribute to the wife's attorney's fees.

And so that's where we learn these things that the judges think are appropriate. So I try to spare my clients as much as possible because trial is I get to do stuff. You just have to sit there all day and look like a nice person so the judge doesn't catch you rolling your eyes or making a sour face because they are human too.

And those things impact them and, by and large, they're very good at compartmentalizing, but I always want my clients to know ahead of time. You may never know when the judge is looking at you. So don't be shooting daggers at your spouse.

Genevieve George: Flipping him the bird behind a notebook or something.

Linda Weiksnar: Exactly. Exactly. Many people, men and women, cry during divorce, especially in trial because it's emotional and you have to talk about stuff you don't wanna talk about.

And sometimes the attorney on the other side will ask a very pointed question, and even if I've prepared you for that very pointed question, it still hits, you're thinking about your kids and how long the two of you have to co-parent before your children are adults, and are you gonna be able to sit in the same room at graduations and weddings? And so I do try to remind.

Genevieve George: It’s a very emotional process. 

Linda Weiksnar: It is, and I try to remind people of that all the way through, because some people rareally want their pounded flesh. So then I get to, be Shakespeare and say, but remember only the flesh, no blood, so you can't draw blood. So let's rethink our process here.

Because if you can't draw blood, then you don’t really want your pound of flesh either. Let's try and make it so that your kids are still okay with both of you, which is, that's sometimes that's really hard for people, and I get that. So I will also often say to people, I could probably at this point counsel you through this, not in the legal sense, but it is so much more cost-effective to have somebody who's trained to counsel you in the therapeutic sense than me do it because I'm gonna charge you my regular hourly rate.

And a therapeutic counselor is a lot less expensive than a lawyer and completely worth it. Even if it's only like 6 months, 6 weeks, whatever it is, to have that neutral third party to talk to about stuff.

So when we go to mediation, I have my spreadsheet that says here's what the equitable distribution. And when we do equitable distribution, if for example if somebody wants to keep the house, then they get the entire net value of the house in their column because then that person also has to take the mortgage. 

Then we'll have vehicles, retirement accounts, if there are collectibles, if there are antiques, whatever there may be, we put all of these things in the spreadsheet. And because for equitable distribution, for certain things we have to do, like 401ks, we have to do a qualified domestic relations order. So it goes from your qualified account to another qualified account.

What we try to do is, for example, if I have, let's say I have a million dollars in my 401k and my spouse has half a million dollars, well, we're going to want to equalize those. So rather than him rolling half into mine and me rolling half into his, we'll just roll from mine into his. So there's only one QDRO, qualified domestic relations order. There's only one QDRO because those are costly, not as costly as the rest of the divorce, but still a pile of money.

Genevieve George: Yeah, probably like a couple thousand dollars in time.

Linda Weiksnar: So if you get somebody who does them by bulk, I don't typically do them.

I refer them out to somebody. There are now, when I first started here, there was one guy in Florida who did nothing but these qualified orders, and other people were like, that's what a great little cottage industry. I can just do as a lawyer. I can just do these orders. I can get to know the employers in the area, what their patterns look like, and then I can do them in bulk.

That's my entire practice. So now there's maybe a dozen who do them. So maybe it's like a thousand dollars depending, 

If it's somebody that I refer a lot of work to, they might give my client a discount, but it would not be unusual for it to be between $,1000 and $1,500 for just one QDRO.

So we try to minimize the number of those. We try to match pre-tax dollars with pre-tax dollars and post-tax dollars with post-tax dollars because otherwise we are not dividing apples to apples. If the qualified money is oranges, oranges to oranges, and if the post-tax dollars, then we can do apples to apples.

Genevieve George: And if it's not something that you can get there perfectly, do you adjust those for the spouse that ended up with more tax-deferred dollars versus taxable dollars?

Linda Weiksnar: If it becomes an issue, there are some people who will say, “I don't care. I just wanna be done.”

And there's some people who say, “It’s fine because I know over the next 10 years I will earn more than my spouse. So it won't be as big a hit to me.” But by and large, we can get pretty close to even.

Genevieve George: Okay. 

Linda Weiksnar: We might write something as granular as if you have split this and you've split all of the shares exactly 50/50 so that somebody doesn't get a really high dividend stock and somebody just a growth, there's never any dividend.

We split all of those shares and if there's a 0.7 share because you've done dividend investment, sell it and split the money. So sometimes it's very granular and sometimes it's just $250,000 worth of investment out and into the other. And sometimes people say, “No, I really wanna keep this stock. And here's the list of stocks. I don't mind this one because it's my company, I wanna keep it.”

Or maybe the company has a, you can't sell it, it's restricted for some reason until you retire. 

Genevieve George: All of that information that's on the equitable distribution spreadsheet, that all initially came from that financial affidavit. Correct?

Essentially, in addition to their regular living expenses, their net worth statement is on there in detail. To say, here are all our assets, here are all our liabilities, including properties. And then you're taking all of that information that the parties have already agreed to, and you're saying, “Okay, here's how we propose that we share them.”

Linda Weiksnar: Right, and we'll have some people who say, “I only have a statement from two years ago.” Okay, well, first of all, I know that you can call the person who runs your plan and point, click, ship, and I get an updated bill. And I know that you get your mortgage statement monthly, so update me. And if your process takes a long time, some of them do for a variety of reasons, get me an updated mortgage statement before we do your final equitable distribution.

Because in those two years, you've paid down your mortgage and so we want to know what the real numbers are. We do look, even in mediation, I will pull up somebody's bank statement, somebody's mortgage statement, somebody's car loan and say, “Well, here's what Kelly Blue Book says about the car, but here's what the loan statement says is still owed. So net value of the car is not 38,000, which is its book value it's $20,000 because we still owe 18 on it.

I like to say it's not rocket science, and I said, but there's a little rocket science because there is some math involved. For financial affidavits, I will ask you questions if I think you're spending too much on something or if you have miscellaneous $500. I'm gonna need a little more information about what miscellaneous is.

Genevieve George: That’s my hair and nails.

Linda Weiksnar: There's a section for grooming and it should come as no surprise that many women like to just say, if they get the, let's say they get their highlights done, every or their hair done every six to eight weeks, they will just put the full cost of it in as one month.

Genevieve George: But we're not going monthly, so then…

Linda Weiksnar: Right. And so I have to say, $200 is a lot per month because that would be $400 per salon trip. And they say, “Oh, right.” I think most people, it's innocent. They don't think about it. But definitely there are people who say, I'll just put it in, and nobody will know.

We know. We can figure these things out. And that's part of my job for not just my client, but obviously for the other side.

Genevieve George: But also not coming forth with making those little fudges or little guesses that makes the process longer, which just like from an emotional standpoint is hard.

You're just making it longer. But then from a financial standpoint, that's more and more time that both parties are spending with their attorneys to work through these things.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. So I don't know how other attorneys run consults. Mine usually run longer than an hour because I try to tell people this stuff, and I try to reassure them that the financial affidavit is not the monster it looks like.

And the mandatory disclosure is not as awful as it feels like at the beginning. And also, those are usually the two hardest things that people have to do other than making the decision, it's time for a divorce.

Sometimes, no. I will say those are the two hardest things sometimes determining what is gonna happen with kids.

But from my perspective, that's different than at least getting us to the starting line. Getting us to the starting line. It is, get me your financial affidavit, get me the financial documents that I need. And once we have figured out, and this is why we do it in an order, equitable distribution, then spousal support, then parenting plan, which we used to call child custody or time sharing, and then we do child support.

And there's a reason that it goes in that order. So if we're doing equitable distribution and somebody gets an income-producing asset or a business or something like that in equitable distribution, then whatever stems from that goes towards that person's ability to pay for their own expenses.

And for the more moneyed spouse, it goes to the ability to pay spousal support. So we wanna see, here's where we know what everybody's income is and we know who can pay for what. Then we look at spousal support. When a client fills out a financial affidavit, they get to a point where it says, “What's your net monthly income? Now tell me what your expenses are. Consequently, do you have a surplus or do you have a deficit or exactly zero?”

So when we have what, what looks like it might be an alimony case, that's the first place we look. And so, see, for example, if the husband, I'm just gonna call him the husband because by and large that's still the more moneyed spouse.

If the husband has a surplus of a thousand dollars and the wife's need is $5,000, she's likely to get $1,000 a month, and then she's got to figure out how to meet that gap. So if my client is not the husband, I will look through again for places that might be inflated, trying to get him to a bigger surplus.

If the husband has a zero, he doesn't have any ability to pay at all. Obviously, he has a deficit, he doesn't have any ability to pay. Many, many cases, I have gotten a spouse out of a deficit just by doing the spreadsheet and saying, “Okay, but you don't pay that.” You have included all of the expenses that you charge on your charge card and your charge card bill, but those are the same expenses, so now you're in the positive.

Now, if the spouse has a need, the wife usually has a need for $1,000 and the husband has a surplus of $5,000, the wife's going to get the $1,000 because that's her need. And when we deal with areas like I have a $500 surplus, some judges will look at that and say, “$500 is $500.” $500 alimony, and some will look at that and say, “Well, that's a flat tire.”

That's one emergency that makes it so you can't pay that. So to some degree, depends on who you're in front of. And what we see in Florida is that different counties are known for whether or not the judges are generous in terms of spousal support or not so generous.

Up here in the 19th Circuit, we have a lot of judges who think people can work, and they can help pay for themselves, and nobody's getting to sit home while somebody else pays the bills.

In some other counties like Palm Beach County is more well known for being an alimony-friendly county, but again, it's going to all come down to numbers.

Genevieve George: And do people get to select which county they get divorced in?

Linda Weiksnar: Typically, no. 

Genevieve George: Okay. If I live in Palm Beach County, I can't just elect to get divorced in Martin County. That doesn't make sense. 

Linda Weiksnar: If parties agree that they can get divorced in a different county for a good reason. So if you're a prominent person in your county, the two of you might agree to go, for example, to Brevard County or St. John's County because it's unlikely that people who are trying to get into your business are going to look that far up the coast or in the panhandle or something. People do that for their privacy.

Genevieve George: Just because they're looking for more favorable alimony judges.

Linda Weiksnar: Correct. So let's say you're a St. Lucie County person and you say, “I'm going to file in Palm Beach because I know that the judges there are more alimony friendly,” the judge is going to ask, why are you here?

And the judge has the option to transfer it back to the proper county. So and then you have to pay the filing fee for the transfer. So it really only works if both parties agree on it. Sometimes we have people like we have a funny little enclave in the back of Martin County that's technically St. Lucie County.

But the courthouse is an hour plus away from that. So they file in Martin County and nobody gets upset about it because people agree to do that. So when we have all your financial stuff, then we set mediation. And I try to set mediation, especially if I knew who the attorney is on the other side. I will call right after I find out who they are and I will say, who do you want to use to mediate this case?

Because we must go to mediation before we can get into court. Who do you want to use? Because the mediators that we like to use are booked months in advance and we know we need at least 60-ish days to make sure we've got all of your mandatory disclosure and we're ready to go. And I have a premediation meeting with my client and so if I have to wait till I have all of that stuff done, now I'm another three months out until I can get in front of a good mediator.

So we try to book somebody, I do know an attorney. He books days for the mediator that he likes, book an extra day in each month because he says it's totally worth it for me. Even if I have to pay to cancel that date, I always have a date available with that mediator, which is a great idea if you are a person who had, is floating the money to pay the mediator on a cancellation.

But at least three times, in cases I've done with that guy, we've gotten to mediation because he has had a day saved. It's really not a terrible idea. So we try to figure out who the mediator's gonna be early. We try to get our dates set so that we are not just sitting here waiting for mediation to come.

And nowadays we do a lot of mediation just like this by Zoom, where my client and I are in one Zoom breakout room, and the other party and lawyer are in the other room, and the mediator goes back and forth. The mediator will say, if you want me to leave so you can talk to your lawyer, go. And so a lot of my clients like that because they can be at home.

So if they don't necessarily have to come to my office, they don't necessarily have to get dressed up. If they're hungry, they can get something to eat. If they need a comfort break, they can go. We can get mediators. I've had like one of my favorite mediators has mediated from her—if she goes somewhere with her husband who's big in some organization.

She'll mediate from the hotel room, and it works out very well. It's also really great for people who are bitter and angry. There's no chance that they're gonna see each other. Whereas if we did it here in my office, there's a solid chance that somebody be in the board room, somebody be in a conference room, and then there's just this tiny little conference room in between us and they run into each other all the time.

In the olden days, people always used to start together. They would do opening statements together, and when I came in, like one of my first mediations, the lawyer on the other side said something so inflammatory that it really took me like the next hour to calm my client back down so that they'd be in a state of mind to mediate.

From then on, I just said, “Mediator, just do your opening in both rooms. We'll do our openings privately, so nobody's angry. We're not wasting time trying to get back to healthy blood pressure.” And so for me, that has always worked very well. And then if it goes well, when we did it in person, we would bring everybody together to sign and if we settled but it wasn't everybody's happy, we would just leave them in their separate rows to sign.

Now we just send it out through DocuSign or Adobe Sign or something like that. Everybody signs and then the mediator typically sends it off to the judge and so people say, “Oh, the mediator's just a middleman.” The mediator is not just a middleman. The mediator's gotta have some psychology background, has to be able to read both rooms.

Genevieve George: They have to understand the laws, right? 

Linda Weiksnar: Correct. Correct. So for example, you could go to mediation school and be a mediator if you wanted to be, but you might not get as many lawyers calling you to mediate because they can't rely on you to know if the lawyer in the other room is giving good legal advice.

Now, the mediators, this is why anybody can be a mediator. You're not supposed to give legal advice.

It sure does help if they know. And so some mediators, if they're not lawyers per se. If they haven't been in front of the judges, they will say, “Linda, what do you think Judge McNichols is gonna do with this? Or Judge Ein or whoever may be the judge?”

Because then I am the one telling my client, this is how I think the judge is gonna react. That way the mediator knows that the client has heard how the judge is gonna react. And that gives them a hint the client is being stubborn for a particular reason. Let me try to drill down and see if I can pinpoint what the holdup is.

And then same in the other room. Mediators have to be able to, one of my favorite mediators once they'll let somebody go on for a little bit and then they say, “Okay, but that's the past.” So looking forward, let's see what we can do to get you guys to yes and get this settled. Which is a great, to me, it's a great tool because the person feels heard, they’ve let out some of their steam, and now they've been redirected to a more positive pathway.

Then I'm just gonna sit here and complain about my spouse and how terrible he or she is. Mediators work really hard. Lawyers in the room with the clients work really hard at mediation. We try very hard to keep our clients on track, keep our clients forward facing as opposed to, I remember this one time, no.

Okay, you had your five minutes to do that. Now we have to look forward because we've got these four categories we have to try and get through today. So mediation is a great tool. Most judges will order you back to mediation again, if you're approaching trial and you haven't mediated in the last 60 days, they'll send you back.

But they send you back after they hold what's called a case management conference, and the clients have to come to the case management conference. That's usually where we get our trial date and our pretrial order, and they don't really need me there. They need the client there, the two clients to hear the judge say, “I don't know you. I don't know your kids. When I divide stuff up, I can only do so many things. Those are my options. I can only do what the statute tells me.”

You can be more creative in mediation. You can be the captain of your own ship in mediation. Try to make good decisions because it's not gonna be fun for you to sit here all day while the lawyers and I talk about stuff.

So I'm sending you back to mediation, and when oftentimes after we've had case management and people have heard what the judge has said, and if it's a case with kids, the judges will usually say, “I assume your lawyers have told you. I don't know, but I assume they've told you that we have a presumption of 50/50.”

And you know that it's a pretty high heel decline to get over that presumption. So choose wisely because you two, they'll always look and say, “You two have 16 more years to co-parent, or 12 more years to co-parent.” If we're dealing with teenagers, they'll say, “Try to remember that your teenagers are supposed to be separating from you and they don't wanna spend time with you anyway,” so maybe don't fight so hard on the number of overnights because they're not gonna sit with you anyway.

And then, the only time we really see the court deviate from that 50/50 is if it's a modification. So that's a post-trial something where the kids have already developed a schedule that's not 50/50, or if somebody has their job schedule cannot do a 50/50, we try to figure things out. Or if there have been allegations of abuse or inappropriate behavior, then we've gotta try and figure out what kind of time sharing is that parent getting at all. Those are the hardest cases.

So at mediation, if we finish everything at mediation, then we sign the agreement. The mediator sends it to the judge, and then the judge knows, “Oh, in the next couple of days, if it's a complete settlement in the next couple of days, I will hear from the parties about a final hearing,” and then you're done.

But sometimes we can't get to everything. Sometimes it takes us all day to do the equitable distribution, again, for a bunch of reasons. The attorney on the other side may not have explained equitable distribution to the client. So now the mediator has to educate without sounding like it's legal advice, has to go through the spreadsheet with them, talk about things.

Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, somebody's really set on keeping a particular asset, whether it's a house or the classic car collection, or in one case, it was a Ronald Reagan, a flag that flew over the Ronald Reagan White House and an old timey schoolhouse desk. And that's what we spent hours fighting over those two things, which that was a lot of money for an old-timey, an antique schoolhouse desk and an American flag that somebody had embroidered on the edge, White House, and the date.

So those are my examples that I say to people all the time, let's not be fighting over the Ronald Reagan White House flag.

Genevieve George: And that's where the emotions are just like getting in the way, right?

'Cause they’re really not fighting about the flag, but they're just fighting to fight. And the flag is the tool.

Linda Weiksnar: Exactly. Because, sometimes people are not really finished with each other. Whatever was the issue that drove them apart hasn't really been resolved by the dividing of the things and the numbers of nights of timesharing.

And so they're just fighting to fight because they're emotionally not ready to let go. And sometimes I see that as a two-way street. Sometimes it's, “Oh, and she got a new boyfriend right away.” And I said, “What do you care? You're the one who filed for divorce.” Again, you also have a girlfriend, so why are we talking about her boyfriend?

It's funny, the things people get hung up on, but they do. And so we have to remind people, the judge is going to tell you the same thing I'm going to tell you right now: I can't fix your heartache. That's just something I don't have the capacity to do. All I can do is dissolve your marriage as though it were a business deal that didn't work out.

Divide your stuff between you, including your money and your children, and then wish you the best of luck. 

Because that's the judge's ability. So sometimes we end up in mediation with a partial agreement. After you and I finish today, I'm sending a partial agreement to a lady because I know we're not gonna be able to agree on the stuff relating to the child, but we ought to be able to agree to all the other stuff.

Genevieve George: So that limits what piece has to be decided by the judge in trial, right?

Linda Weiksnar: Right. Right. And so for people I say, if you can narrow down the issues, that's always better because if you can have a half day trial instead of a full day trial, that's going to save you probably five grand and probably more because prepping for a half-day trial is not as much as prepping for a full-day trial.

If somebody were to hire me and we had a 10-hour trial day, that in and of itself would be almost $5,000 just for the day. So I always encourage people to let's settle what we can. If you don't care about Great Aunt Tilly's sterling silver tea set, let's give it. If you're a person who doesn't care about stuff, you know if I really want a Great Aunt Tilly's tea set, that's what eBay is for. That's what the flea market is for.

If you don't like the car you have, let's talk about that. Do you want to give it to the other side, and you go get a new car, and they take both cars and the debt associated with them, and then you go somewhere else? So we talk about we can be really, really creative in mediation in a way that we cannot be in court unless the parties agree while we're standing in the courtroom and say to the judge on the record, “Yes, we agree to that.” But they're much more black and white in the courtroom than we are.

So if we get a partial mediation agreement, then I will usually suggest that while we have the mediator there with us, let's pick another mediation date. So then everybody's agreeing to the date. We're not unreasonably delayed because somebody has to leave to check their whatever.

The mediator says, “How about this date?” The lawyers say, “I'm good. I'm good. Or I'm not good.” And we go through mediator dates till we find a date that works. Otherwise, here's how it works. I call you and I say, Hey, Gen, we're going to use Babette for mediation. And you say, okay. I say, I'll get dates and send you dates. So I send you three dates. And you say, “Well, I'm in trial on two of those dates and I'm on vacation one of those dates.”

I go back I get three more dates, and we go like that until we find a date when you and I are both available. Usually we do not tell the clients that they have a choice, but I tell my clients ahead of time if you're going to be away on vacation or if there's something you don't want to get a day that you cannot mediate on, let me know and we won't commit to that date. But otherwise this is our date for mediation and we're mediating because it's hard enough to coordinate mediator to lawyers.

Genevieve George: Yeah, might as well do it while we're all together. 

Linda Weiksnar: We just pick it, we pick a date, and then we know when we're coming back. We know how long the people have to, if they need to get more information, this is how long you have to get this information. If we don't need more information, but we kind of need a cooling-off period, this is how long you have to cool off. And when you come back, we are doing time sharing or the parenting plan.

So once we've gotten past the equitable distribution and the spousal support, and that really is just a numbers game, we look at what we call time sharing. It used to be called visitation. We don't call it that anymore because nobody's visiting anybody. Parents are raising kids. So we put together a parenting plan. 

Parenting plan is a document required by statute and the statute will tell you what has to be in there. It's going to say in there when you have time sharing, what's the holiday time sharing look like? What's the summer time sharing look like? Are parents having a shared parental responsibility, which means we have to talk over everything and agree before it can happen?

Or are we having sole parental responsibility, meaning that the other side doesn't have any say in it and that's usually because the other side has made bad decisions in the past or has proven to be a barrier to getting things done for the kids. And sometimes we have shared parental responsibility with what we call ultimate decision-making authority.

So I could say to you, okay, Gen, are you okay with having ultimate decision-making authority with regard to non-emergency medical stuff? Yes, okay. And why do you want that? “Well, I want it because my spouse is not really so great. It has never made a doctor's appointment, has never taken the kids to the doctors. The one time we really had an emergency, he fell apart. So I want to be able to just make those decisions.” And then we can present that to the other side. Sometimes people say, “I want to be able to make the decisions about extracurriculars because the other side will never agree.”

Genevieve George: Because it's hard to fight over, you know, we're gonna do this sport or...

Linda Weiksnar: It's really hard, and some parents say, “Well, I really want them to play soccer.” And the other parent says, “Ugh, soccer is the worst. I want them to play football.” “I don't want them to play American football because head injuries.” “Well, I don't want them to play soccer because I don't know anything about soccer.”

So what we'll say is, for example, somebody can have ultimate decision making authority, but you must fully discuss it with the other party before you make decisions. Or we'll say, we'll put something in the parenting plan that says, if you and the other parent can't agree on an extracurricular, for example, then you may not sign your child up for an extracurricular that takes place on the other parent's time sharing.

In which case, it makes a huge difference how we set up overnights. So for little, little kids, I recommend that parents, and that's usually, for me that's usually like under five.

We say do a 2-2-3-3 so the kids are never away from either parent for more than three overnights. And then when the kids get to like maybe second or third grade, if they seem to be OK with that, then we'll go to what we call a 2-2-5-5. So instead of me in week one having Monday and Tuesday and then in week two I have Wednesday and Thursday. Now I'll have every Monday and Tuesday, and you'll have every Wednesday and Thursday and we alternate weekends so we always have a five-day period where we have the children with us.

And then we really don't recommend week on week off until your kids are like teenagers or at least you know sort of out of middle school and going to high school. That works a little bit better. They're typically a little bit better about making sure they've taken everything they need with them for the week to the other parent's house.

Some parents have been very creative about that because they don't want to miss an entire week of their kids school so they'll change like on a Wednesday instead of on Friday.

When my kids were ready to do 50-50, we changed on Friday afternoon so that the grownups were fresh for the weekend. And then we had the whole week of school after that. And then by the time we were kind of running low on energy single parenting, the other parent took over for the next week.

But that's a situation where really you've got to be able to put your kids' best interest first. Because if your second grader calls you and has left his project that's due tomorrow at your house, you've got to be willing to take it over because most schools don't want you showing up with your kids’ homework.

So you've got to be willing to take it over and pleasantly say to your former spouse, “Here I have little Bobby's dinosaur diorama for tomorrow morning.” And sometimes people are like, no, it does come down to that sometimes, and it's hard. It takes a while to get into a rhythm.

Genevieve George: For those people that are going through the divorce, they’re not seeing that in that process. Like you can speak to that from your experience working with other clients, but they're thinking, “Oh no, it’s gonna be different.”

Linda Weiksnar: Either they think, I'm never going to have to see that dirty, rotten so-and-so ever again once my divorce is final, or they think, we're going to do Christmases together. And the truth really is somewhere in between that because most post-dissolution families do not do Christmas or Thanksgiving together.

So what I really try to advocate for in that situation is again, looking out for the kids, Christmas is just a day. It's just a day that somewhere in our ancient history, people plucked that out of all of the days on the calendar and said, “This is the day we're gonna celebrate Christmas.” Same thing with like every other holiday, it's just a day.

So for years my family had Thanksgiving on Fridays because Thursdays, the way our calendar worked out, Thursdays were Dad's Day for a long time, like until my kids were almost teenagers. So we just adapted.

And when the kids were little, we did one Christmas where we split the day. It was really hard for the kids. And it turned out being kind of like, haha, that was completely unanticipated for the parents because I took my kids over to their dad's house, and they were like, “Mom, stay here while we open all our presents here. And mom, look what I got. And dad, invite mom to stay for lunch.”

You can't really explain to your two and your four-year-old.

Genevieve George: That's not gonna work for me.

Linda Weiksnar: Right, so he graciously invited me to stay for lunch, but we decided after that that we would do, I could have a whole day with my family. He could have a whole day with his family.

It was very limiting because my parents didn't get to see them on Christmas Day. That was hard. So I say to people, “It's just a day.” Mom and dad, your birthdays are just a day. Your kids’ birthday are just a day.

Genevieve George: Yeah. I'm in my 40s, and I still have Christmas Eve with my dad and Christmas day with my mom.

I don't know what kind of disaster would happen if my husband and I got divorced and we'd had to figure out multiple families internally and externally.

Linda Weiksnar: Right, and it's hard, and your kids think about that stuff. Parents are like, “They won't think about it.” They think about it, and they rarely come to the correct conclusion. Kids will usually come to the conclusion that they did something, that the kids did something wrong, which of course they didn’t.

So parents really have to think about how are the kids going to perceive this? Gone are the days when we think kids don't remember stuff from when they're very young. We know that they can suffer early, early childhood trauma, and it will impact their lives. And we know now that even if they can't articulate it, they hear the arguing and it teaches them something. I just try to say please remember, and by the way when your kid's 12, not going to want to spend your birthday with you.

And not going to want to spend their own birthday with you. They're going to want you to plan something and then you go sit in the car while they and their friends play flying panda or whatever. So I really encourage parents to think about. And some parents really are just stuck on it. “No, we have to alternate the kids birthdays.” I say, “I promise you, your kids will not be upset that they have a party at mom's house and a party at dad's house.” And by the way, since mostly even though their birthdays will mostly not be on the weekends. You're mostly going to celebrate them on the weekends.

Genevieve George: So it's not on the actual day anyways.

Linda Weiksnar: It really is something that you should not spend a lot of money arguing on. Or you need to be creative and you need to be thinking for, you also need to think about what if I get married again and we had more kids, or there's a blended family?

You've gotta be on good enough terms with your former spouse that you can work those things. I've had parents call me, “My ex-wife won't let my kids come to my wedding.” I said, “Did you plan it on your weekend?” “No.” I said, “Why? Why did you not plan it on your own weekend, and why did you not ask your spouse months ago if you could have the kids this particular weekend?”

And they say, “Well, should I move my wedding?” I say, “Do you want your kids there?” Don't expect that your spouse is going to eagerly give up their time because you have something special happening on a particular day. 

But again, like you said, people in the middle of it are not thinking that or ahead, they're stuck in the middle of it. So if we can finalize, if we go back to mediation, we can finalize everything. Typically, we can have a final hearing within the next week or so. And if that happens, here's what your final hearing looks like. We walk in, we walk up in front of the judge. The judge says, “Are you Genevieve George?” And you say, “Yes.”

Raise your hand. And then I ask you a bunch of questions. And here's what I ask you. To whom are you currently married? Is your marriage your tree of a bleed broken? Do you have minor children? Have you and your spouse entered into a marital settlement agreement that takes care of all of the issues, including timesharing, child support, equitable distribution?

And then every single woman gets asked, are you currently pregnant? So my 80-year-old client, when the judge asked her if she was currently pregnant, she looked at and she said, “I'm not Sarah.” And he looked at me, and he was like, “Sarah?” I said,

Genevieve George: From the Bible?

Linda Weiksnar: Abraham's wife from the Bible. And he was like, “Oh.” He's he explained, “No ma’am, we have to ask.”

And she left, and she said, “That’s silly.” And he left because it is. The next time it came up, the woman was not quite 80, but she was really nasty about the judge asking. And he said, “Ma'am, I'm required by law to ask you that question. Don't get Snoopy with me.” She was not my client, so I really had to, bite my lip to not respond in any way.

And he said, but what we are seeing now is that there's a lot of biomedical engineering that can assist older parents. So I have to ask. And so then she said, oh, I'm sorry, I was sniffy judge, but everybody gets asked that question so the proper answer is no, or if they are, I've had women who have been pregnant at the final hearing and they have to testify that it is not a child of the marriage, that their husband is not the father.

It helps if they bring the father with them who can say, yes, I'm taking responsibility for this child. Because the reason we ask is we wanna make sure all children of the marriage are taken care of, and accounted for in the plan. So people still think they're like, that is a sexist thing. I'm like, women are the only one who can carry babies right now.

So not intentionally sexist, but, and then, the judge will say, “After I ask all these questions for women,” will, the judge will ask, “do you want to be restored to a prior name in the olden days?” By which I mean like the late eighties and nineties, people just picked names outta the phone, book names, last names.

They always thought they might like to have. Not anymore. Now you have to go back to a former name. And so then they'll, they ask, there's some additional questions related to that. Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Have you ever part declare bankruptcy? Stuff like that. And then here's typically what the judge will say.

“Okay. I find that I have jurisdiction of the parties, the subject matter of the children. I find the marriage to be irretrievably broken. I'm going to enter an order that approves your marital settlement agreement, restores you to the status of being single.” The parties are ordered to comply with the mediation agreement and the parenting plan, and I reserve jurisdiction for any further matters that might need to come before me.

So that's when everything is settled. If we had to go to trial, we spend a lot of the time going through basic facts at the beginning. The five questions I just asked you, I will usually ask them right off the bat in a trial so that part's out of the way. And then we just go through putting on the testimony and it's not like you see on TV.

It's not like I say, “And this is the deed of for the house that you purchased with your stolen money,” right? No. It's called Laying the Foundation. So it's really not interesting for the client. There's very rarely a Matlock moment or a Columbo, “Just one more thing.” But sometimes there's something a little shocking comes out.

But typically they have to say, have you seen this document before? What is it? Oh, this is your bank statement, right? And you produce this because we have to lay the foundation. Then we have to go through, and one, we had to go through some guy's bank statement for every time. He said I have consistently paid child support this whole procedure.

So we went through his bank statements to say you didn't pay it this week or this week. He was paid legally. He's supposed to pay. He didn't, you didn't pay it here. You didn't pay the full amount here. And he is maybe I didn't pay it as consistently as I thought I did. But we have to go through to prove those things.

And sometimes it is boring. 

Linda Weiksnar: Sometimes it's rarely interesting for the client. The client sits there while I ask questions of the spouse. And then when my client's in the witness box, I ask questions nicely. The other side sometimes not so nicely. And people really kind of want to fight with their spouse's lawyers. So I have to say all the time.

Genevieve George: And again, right to what you shared before, early in our conversation, it doesn't matter what got us here. These questions are not about the infidelity or anything like that. It's about what we're trying to settle, what should have been settled in mediation, trying to get that finalized. It doesn't matter why we're getting divorced at that point in time.

Linda Weiksnar: Exactly. So for some people going to trial is a requirement because maybe there's a legitimate reason why it shouldn't be 50-50. But the other parent doesn't see it as a legitimate reason. 

And a lot of times in those cases I have some idea based on my experience with my judge, that the judge is gonna see it as a legitimate reason for not 50-50, but getting the other side to recognize that maybe the fact that you have a weird work schedule that is not conducive or maybe you live 75 miles away and it's not fair to child to have to get up two hours earlier in the morning to drive down to school.

So if those people just have to go to trial, and if we can in those cases, we really try to limit it to the only issue that needs to be in front of the judge, because otherwise there's just room for the whole thing to blow up. People say stuff that they shouldn't have said, or somebody calls in a witness who, I had one case where the husband called the wife's mother, who gave devastating testimony against the wife, but mostly it was because she wanted the children to be back in the state where she, where the mother of the wife and the husband lived. She didn't want the grandchildren to be here in Florida.

So she gives this devastating testimony. I have to now try and show her bias, my client's crying. The mother in the witness stand is crying or yelling. That's hard. So we really try to avoid those circumstances, but they happen. 

Genevieve George: And then in theory, that day in trial, the judge makes a final… like you had the opportunity to figure out a more flexible plan in mediation. But now we're in trial, whatever happens and you're bound to that?

Linda Weiksnar: Yes. And so sometimes the judge will announce it right away. “Here's what I'm gonna do. And he'll usually pick a lawyer then to say, Mr. So-and-So, your client is the petitioner, so I'm gonna have you draft this order.” And sometimes, depending if the judge knows that the petitioner's lawyer doesn't always get the order correct.

They'll ask the other lawyer to do it. Sometimes the judge can just say it all at the end. Like I had one recently, it came out in bits and pieces so that the transcript doesn't help. I need the transcript of the whole day. Sometimes it's just the last 10 minutes and the judge can say it all there.

We get that transcript and then we know we've got what it's supposed to say. And then the lawyers have to share it. And if they don't agree that's what it says, so then what we typically do then is we say, okay, we're gonna submit the transcript that we have, or if we don't have a transcript, we'll submit both orders and the judge can be cut and paste because we have to submit them in words so that they can do exactly that.

So they edit it or they can add something that they they didn't think about at the time, but became evident later in like in a motion for something. If we thought, if he said, I didn't have any testimony about retirement accounts, for example, then the two attorneys could get together and say there was testimony about the retirement accounts, it occurred about here and here are the retirement accounts and our recollection of what the testimony was.

So then the judge can edit the order then to make it all good. And then that's your order. What always surprises me is that people forget what's in their order and what's in their parenting plan and they fall into this pattern that works for them. And then one will say, wait, you didn't do what's in the parenting plan.

I'm gonna hold you in contempt. And I said, but didn't he agree to that? Haven't you guys been doing that like for two years? And if that's the case, then the judge is not gonna find somebody in contempt for what you both agreed to do. Whatever's in your order, you can always do better. You can always be more generous. You just can't be worse. 

So if it's supposed to be my five-day weekend, but my former spouse gets this opportunity to take the kids to Hawaii, I can say, “Yes, of course you can take the kids to Hawaii and we'll either swap the following weekend or I'll say it's fine because you're having such this great adventure. I don't need makeup time.”

And that's again, where we really encourage parents to focus on your kids' needs and not your own needs. Your kids are gonna grow up and they're gonna figure out which parent put them first, or that both parents put them first and that's how they're gonna develop their grownup relationships.

Genevieve George: Yeah. Wow. This was so helpful to build these realistic expectations for what that process looks like, both on the emotional side and the actual procedural side. What do you have as a closing piece of advice that you'd want people to leave with that are maybe about to go through this? 

Linda Weiksnar: Yes. Listen to your attorney because your attorney does want what's best for you, but has to get you there within what the law allows. So if your attorney says that's not something that's realistic…

Genevieve George: Then they mean it.

Linda Weiksnar: Ask them why and ask all the questions you want to ask. That is what your attorney is there for.

So people probably say the same thing to you. “Oh, I have a dumb question.” To me, if you ask me a question, it's not dumb. You need the information. You need to be equipped with everything that I can equip you with to make your best informed decisions. 

Genevieve George: What I say to people when they say that to me, “I have a dumb question.” I say, like, “No, no, like these are your life savings or your financial plan. You need to understand the ins and the outs every little bit about it.” And if I'm not explaining it correctly, I need to explain it differently. And that applies in this situation, too, right? Like if this is their life, their divorce, their next X years of co-parenting, like they should 100% feel like they know what they're getting into.

Linda Weiksnar: Right. And I do have clients who come in and say, “Oh, it’s fine, whatever he wants, because I'll just go back and get it modified later.” It is so much harder to get something modified later as it pertains to your kids than it is to get it right the first time.

Genevieve George: Yeah, wow, that's terrible. And how can people find you if they would like to work with you or inquire about working with you?

Linda Weiksnar: They can Google me. My name is right there at the bottom of the screen. I'm at Crary Buchanan in downtown Stewart. We have been here almost 100 years and we're actively planning for the next 100. So it's an exciting year for us and that's how you find me.

Genevieve George: Excellent. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Linda. I appreciate you sharing your expertise with us and hopefully the people that listen to it that are about to go through this are better equipped with reasonable expectations for the process.

Linda Weiksnar: Thank you for your great questions and for keeping me on track and for letting me share so much because it's so important for people to have this intel before they go somewhere.

Genevieve George: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

That's it for today's episode of The Wealth Development Studio. Remember, financial clarity is powerful. Do you need help with your financial plan? Go to pelicanfinancialplanning.com to schedule a call with me. Until next time.