What to Do Before You File for Divorce in Tennessee

From The Mid-South Divorce Guide, chapter 2, by William W. Jones
IV, a Memphis family law attorney and Rule 31 Listed Family Mediator
licensed in Tennessee and Mississippi. This guide covers Shelby, Tipton
and Fayette Counties in Tennessee and DeSoto, Tate and Tunica Counties
in Mississippi.

Questions this page answers

• What should I do before filing for divorce?
• What documents do I need for a divorce?
• Can I take money out of a joint account before filing?
• Should I open my own bank account before divorce?

If you are reading this before anything has been filed, you are in
the best position you will be in for the entire case. Use it.

Right now you have something you will not have again at any later
point in this case. You have time that nobody is watching. No filing
deadlines, no opposing counsel reading your mail, no court order telling
you what you may and may not do with your own accounts. From the day a
complaint is filed, your options start narrowing and they never widen
back out.

Most people spend this stretch worrying and then spend the next one
scrambling. Spend this one getting ready instead.

Gather your paper

This is the single most valuable thing you can do, and it costs you
nothing but time.

Get copies of the last three years of tax returns, including all
schedules and W-2s and 1099s. Get the last several months of statements
for every bank account, every credit card, every investment account, and
every retirement account, including the ones in your spouse’s name that
you can lawfully access. Get your most recent pay stubs and your
spouse’s if you have them. Get the mortgage statement, the deed, and any
life insurance policies.

I am telling you to get copies of things you have a right to see.
Joint accounts, joint returns, statements that come to your house. I am
not telling you to guess your spouse’s password. That is a different
chapter and it ends badly. See Chapter 30.

While you are at it, pull your own credit from all three bureaus. Not
your spouse’s. Yours. You need it because it is the only complete roster
anywhere of every creditor carrying your name, and a sworn income and
expense affidavit is going to ask you to list them. Building that list
off memory is how people end up amending a sworn document.

Then put all of it somewhere outside the house. A parent’s place, a
friend’s place, a safe deposit box in your name alone. Not because
anybody is going to shred it. Because the week after service is the week
the filing cabinet gets reorganized, and you do not want to be the one
arguing about what used to be in it.

Everything you
do from here gets read backward

Run every financial decision for the next several months through this
frame.

At some point a lawyer whose job is to make you look bad is going to
sit down with a stack of your statements and go through them line by
line with a highlighter. That lawyer will not be in the room when you
make the decision and will not hear your reason for it. They will see a
date and an amount.

So sort your moves into three piles.

Moves that read fine. Get your mail somewhere else.
A post office box, your mother’s house, anywhere that is not the kitchen
counter. Every letter from my office is going to that address for the
next year and you do not want a conversation about why your spouse
opened one.

Start a log of the schedule you are actually keeping with your
children. Who does the morning. Who does pickup. Who took off work the
last four times somebody ran a fever. Write it down as it happens, with
dates, starting today. In eight months somebody is going to describe
that year in a courtroom, and the parent with the contemporaneous log is
the parent the judge believes.

Open a checking account in your own name if you do not have one and
put something in it every week. Here is the arithmetic nobody does in
advance. A retainer, a deposit and first month somewhere, and a moving
truck will run past what most people have liquid, and having to ask your
spouse for that money is a bad way to start.

And quit adding to joint debt. The bank does not read divorce
decrees. If both names are on that account, the bank can come after both
of you no matter which one of you a judge assigned the balance to, and
the letter you get from the bank two years from now will not mention the
judge at all.

Moves that read badly even when the reason was good.
Large transfers between accounts. Cash withdrawals with no obvious
purpose. Taking your name off of something, or putting your name onto
something. Closing an account. Moving a vehicle title. Every one of
these has an innocent version, and every one of them is going to be a
question you answer under oath, and that question is far easier to
answer when your lawyer knew about it beforehand. So here is the real
rule. You are allowed to touch your own money. Call first.

Moves that read as fraud, because that is what they
are. Emptying the joint account. Parking money with your
brother. Selling the boat to your buddy for a dollar. Somebody has
probably already suggested one of these to you, and once a complaint is filed
there is a court order that specifically forbids all of it. See Chapter 6.

But set the order aside, because the real cost is not the contempt
finding. It is what happens to everything else you say. A judge who
concludes you moved money is a judge who now has to decide how much of
the rest of your testimony to keep, and judges resolve that question the
easy way. Your income becomes a question. Your parenting testimony
becomes a question. The true things become questions, and you spend the
rest of the trial paying for one afternoon at a bank.

Talk to a
lawyer before you do anything dramatic

Do not move out yet. Do not file anything. Do not sign anything your
spouse hands you. Do not send the email you drafted at two in the
morning.

Come see somebody first. A consult is cheap compared to unwinding a
decision you cannot take back.

Queen for a Day

This is an exercise I do with clients, and it is the part of the
planning almost everybody skips.

You get to write the ending. No limits, no lawyers, no judge. Where
do you live. What do you drive. What does a Tuesday afternoon look like
with your kids. What are you doing for work. What does the monthly
number have to be for you to be all right. Write all of it down.

Then price it. What does one month of that life cost, in real
numbers, off real bills.

That step is what turns the page from a wish into information, and it
is the step people skip. Roughly half the pages I have ever been handed
do not survive their own arithmetic. The house on the page costs more
than both incomes will carry even before anybody pays a lawyer. The
schedule on the page needs somebody home at 3:30 and nobody on the page
is home at 3:30. That is not a reason to want less. It is a reason to
find out at your own kitchen table on a Sunday, for free, instead of
discovering it in pieces over eight months at my hourly rate.

And do not use a chatbot as your therapist or your strategist while
you are working any of this out. I mean that literally and there is a
whole chapter on why. Chapter 31.

Download the whole guide. All 35 chapters plus four blank client forms, complimentary, no email required. Download The Mid-South Divorce Guide (PDF)

Questions about your own situation? The Jones Law Firm, 5100 Poplar Ave, Suite 708, Memphis, TN 38137. Call (901) 761-5353.