Scott Adams on Divorce

"Divorce is one of the most expensive, horrible, and wasteful things a person can experience. It is terrible for the kids, terrible for finances, good for lawyers, bad for employers, etc."

What You'll Need (Hardware and Software-wise)

Here is a list of hardware and software and whatnot that I needed and used and wished I would have had during this journey:

• Mac



Most obvious. In my case, an iMac. I am a computer programmer by day and have been typing most days of the week for over thirty years. A lot of typing was involved in this divorce and I was happy to have the full-sized keyboard on my iMac. One doesn't need the latest and greatest computer for this. The work is text, numbers, and scanning some images. My iMac is a 2010 model. No problemo.


• Laser Printer



I suppose an inkjet would have sufficed but I ended up printing a lot and my past experience with inkjets being expensive ink-wise steered me to a Brother HL-2270DW. Basic. Wireless. I did go through toner and paper but that's not the fault of the printer. It performed like a champ.


• Scanner and OCR



Scanning is where I could have done a better job. I got better as I went along so learn from my 20/20 hindsight. I have a basic Epson Perfection V30 scanner. It's a flatbed, single page scanner (no sheet feed). Works great, very happy with it. At first I didn't use it like I should have, which is to scan pretty much everything that you do not generate electronically (bank statements you get online, etc.). All the paperwork you get from the other side. All the court orders. All the discovery you get from the other side. Basically, everything. You need to scan for backups (think of dogs chewing paperwork you got from the other side that you didn't scan--true story).



Where I blew it was not scanning everything at the beginning. The other mistake I made was not getting OCR software. When you scan a typed page, it is just a picture. The scan itself doesn't know about the actual text on the page. OCR scans your scan, figures out the text on the page, and puts it back on the page. That way you can do text searches on your data files and get back results. That means you can do a Spotlight search on your computer for a filing containing the words "support arrears" and you will get back all your scanned documents with that phrase in them. Very useful. I recently purchased PDF Scanner and have been very impressed with it. It will do OCR at scan time as well as after a document has been scanned. I am going through my old scanned documents and OCR-ing them. Even though my case is finished, one never knows...



Although my printer was great, technology has improved and if I could do it over again I would have started out with a muli-function, sheet-fed device like a Brother MFC-L2700DW. Why? Because you can get quite a lot of paper to scan. With a regular flatbed scanner you have to set the paper on the scanner, scan it, remove it, set the next paper on the scanner, etc. With sheet-fed, you pop your stack in the sheet-feeder, start the scaning, and walk away while your pages are scanned. Much more time-efficient. It wasn't that long ago that multi-function devices weren't all that great. They are now.


• Backup Strategy

So you have backups done by Time Machine and you think you have backups taken care of? Wrong!


• Local Backup (Time Machine)



You do have Time Machine backing up your Mac to an external hard drive, right? If not, get either a Time Capsule or an external hard drive now and start doing backups. YOU CANNOT SKIP THIS STEP! Do it. Now. Seriously.


• Off-site Backup (Backblaze)



You have Time Machine backing up your Mac so that you don't even have to think about it. Great. What happens if a burglar steals your computer and your backup drive? What happens if a flood or earthquake destroy your computer and your backup drive? You need an off-site backup to backup your data to the cloud in the event that your local backup isn't good enough. I use Backblaze. I haven't had to use it yet but it just works without me having to think about it and the price is right ($50/year at the time of this writing). I have spot-checked some of my backed up files and all appears to be well. The documents in this process are very important. You want to do all you can to make sure they stick around.


• Cloud Storage (Dropbox)



It's the night before you're supposed to go to court. Time to print your documents. Wait! Your hard drive has crashed! No problem, you have backups on Time Machine, right? Unfortunately, you need to get a new hard drive to get them from Time Machine and all stores are closed. No problem, you have an off-site backup with Backblaze, right? Same problem, you need a hard drive to get to those backups. Something like Dropbox is very handy in this case. At the time my case started, Backblaze did not have an app for my phone but Dropbox did. What I did was have all my divorce-related files in one folder and that folder was in Dropbox. I could access it from my phone (I emailed previously emailed docs to the other side while at the courthouse more than once) and, if necessary, I could have gone to an Apple Store to look at my files or a FedEx Office location to print them. Backblaze now has an iPhone app so maybe you can get away with just that. Give them both a try, if you'd like.


• Word Processor (Pages)



You're going to need a word processor and I don't mean a simple text editor, either. Why? Because of line numbers. Well, you can probably get away with a simple text editor but it would be easier if you had a word processor. California Rules of Court 2.108 says that filing things not on a form need to have line numbers (so they can be referred to by another document, I'm guessing). I used Apple's Pages. It's easy enough to use and gets the job done.

You can also get Pages for the iPhone (comes free on the iPhone 6). This is cool even though you may not see yourself doing any word processing on your phone (me, too). Imagine this: attorney asks you about some document that they say they don't have but that you know you sent to them. No problem!
1. Go to your iPhone and open up Dropbox.
2. Find the document in question.
3. Tap the sharing icon (box with an arrow).
4. Choose "Open in...".
5. Pick pages.
6. Open the doc.
7. Tap the sharing icon again.
8. Choose "Send a Copy".
9. Tap "PDF".
10. Tap Email.
Voila! You've emailed a PDF of the doc. Trust me, it can happen and this is very handy.


• Spreadsheet (Numbers)



You are likely going to need a spreadsheet and Apple's Numbers is cheap, works great, and has an app on the iPhone. You can use spreadsheets for support calculations, division of assets, tracking support payments, and more.


• PDF Editor (Preview)



You already have Preview on the Mac and, for me, this was good enough. Beyond opening documents, I used its annotation features to circle and highlight items in documents, as well as for numbering exhibits (better to number them electronically than to write on the document itself because, believe me, your exhibit numbering can change--more on this later).


• Naming Conventions

How are you going to organize all these electronic documents you will be creating? I'll give a suggestion and you can take it from there. At the very least, start with this and tweak your conventions as you go, rather than starting with no convention. Being disorganized at the start will cost you time later so you might as well start with some organization. Name your files like this:

Year-Month-Day Description

That's it. It keeps things organized chronologically, which worked for me. Examples:

2015-01-02 Order After Hearing
2015-02-14 Request for Order

This goes for folders. For instance, that Request for Order above would be a folder containing the forms for the request, your statement, a scan of your opponent's statement, etc.


• Copier Shop



Even though you have a laser printer, you still may need to use a copier shop. In my case, I needed to use a copier shop on two occasions. The first was discovery. I had to produce a ridiculous amount of bank statements. At the time I had an attorney so once I found them (and saved them as PDFs), I printed up a copy for my attorney then I made another copy for the opposition attorney. If I were to do it again I would have just made a big PDF for everything and printed it all from the copy shop.

The second occasion was trial. I had a number of exhibits and the Court required that I make a copy for the opposition, another for the Court, and another for the Court Reporter (which was never used and was actually returned to me after trial). I could have just done it all on my laser printer but a) I didn't want to risk running out of toner and/or paper while I was doing it, and b) the copier shop would be able to automatically collate my copies, which is a big time saver (in fact, the shop goofed up the collating the first time and re-did the whole job correctly for free). Even if you don't plan on using it, find one so you can have it in your back pocket just in case.

Robin Williams Said It Best...

"Divorce is expensive.... It's ripping your heart out through your wallet."

An Introduction

I'm a father. I work as a computer programmer but I am a father. I'm a good father, too. However, in November 2010 I informed my then-wife that I didn't want to be married anymore. The reasons why are unimportant here. That started a journey that continues to this day, over 3½ years later. The last day of the trial was in March 2014 and things still aren't final.

I started off with an attorney but my well-funded Ex decided she wanted to go to war. At some point I ran out of cash and decided that, rather than burn down what was left of my retirement accounts (which really wasn't much) and hand them over to attorneys, I would take my chances with the Court and represent myself. You know that old saying, that someone who represents themselves at trial has a fool for a client? It's true. It's one thing to know what the law says. It is quite another to know how the law works. That, you can only get with legal experience and that is something non-lawyers don't have (unless they get arrested a lot).

I had hoped to find resources to help someone in my shoes in this Age of the Internet but there really isn't anything. Lawyers want to get paid for their advice. Non-lawyers run the risk of getting in trouble for giving legal advice. There aren't even books on the subject (actually, I did find one but it was terrible). Well, there are lots of books on getting divorced. There are even books on what they call "contested" divorces. However, they all assume that both parties are reasonable and just want to get things done quickly, or, if the divorce is contested, that both parties don't want to spend tons on lawyers and will spend most time outside a courtroom trying to settle things.

That's all well and good and nice but my Ex ended up with legal bills over $100,000 for an estate worth well under $300,000. There is nothing reasonable in that last sentence. That was the situation I found myself in.

First, nothing in this blog should ever be construed as legal advice, not even in California. All I aim to do is relate what happened to me and how I dealt with it (or coped with it). The idea is that you can benefit from my experience. If you take anything here as legal advice, you're an idiot. Don't take anything you read on the internet as legal advice. That is something you can only get from an attorney, and not just any attorney but your attorney.

The Road Ahead

So you are getting, or thinking about getting, divorced and you're thinking about representing yourself to save some bucks. If your spouse is thinking that, too, great! I'm happy for the two of you and hope you can quickly work things out. However, for the rest of you I have one word: don't.

Representing yourself in a contested divorce sucks. A lot. The legal profession has an endless supply of jerks and bullies and people who used to be bullied by jerks and bullies who are now taking revenge on the world. These lawyers, even if they are bad ones, know more about how the law works than you and they will mess with you and you will not know what to do about it. The worst part is that for those jackasses, it's just another day's work. For you, it's personal because this is your life. Lawyers calling you names and lying about you in court is just a job to them. To you, it's personal because this is your life. So, for some non-legal advice I would advise you to not represent yourself. If you can hire an attorney, do it. If you don't have the money for an attorney to handle everything for you, see if you can do a lot of the work yourself. Your attorney does not have to be spending their time copying your bank statements; that's something you can do. Your attorney can help proofread forms you have to fill out but you can fill them out yourself. There are ways to save money if you have to.

Then there's the separation. Since I was the main breadwinner (and the only one since my children were born), I, of course, don't get to see my children as much as I used to. Before I moved out, I woke them up for school each morning, made their breakfast, took one to school, worked all day, came home and made dinner, ate dinner with the family, cleaned up the dinner dishes, checked email, played with my children, watched a TV show with them before bedtime, read them a story, and tucked them into their beds. None of that mattered to the Court, of course. After I moved out I got to see them 24% of the time. It's horrible. I cope by not thinking about it.

The loss of income is fun, too. Divorced poor is different than regular poor. With regular poor, if you make more money you get more money. With divorced poor, if you make more money you get to spend more money on support while still not being able to pay your bills. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem paying child support. If I get a raise, my children should benefit from that. It's just tough going from a big house on land to an apartment while making a lot of money but not being able to afford utility bills. Oh, and if you're a stay-at-home parent, you get to look forward to going (back?) to work...unless your spouse is rich but I doubt anybody rich is reading this.

Divorce sucks, there are no two ways about it, but you're going through it because the alternative sucks even more. A contested divorce sucks more. A contested divorce that goes to trial sucks even more. Doing any of that while representing yourself sucks the most. You are going to be called names, lied about, get depressed, get desperate, not know what to do, and gain new insight into why people in similar situations snap. If you feel that all of that is still better than staying married, then good luck to you.