If your spouse files for a divorce, part of the process is making financial disclosures to the court. It is important to gather financial records, such as bank statements, credit card statements and evidence of any electronic transactions.
As you do this, you may see that there have been some changes to your spouse’s spending habits. Perhaps their spending has recently increased. Maybe they have made purchases that they did not tell you about, a form of financial infidelity. These issues could be evidence of the dissipation of marital assets.
Why would someone intentionally spend more?
Dissipating marital assets means wasting them or frivolously spending them. This goes beyond normal spending, which is expected prior to a divorce — and during the months that a divorce case typically takes. Couples still have to pay the bills, so spending money jointly is not expressly prohibited.
But when there are major changes, it could mean that your spouse is intentionally trying to waste assets that you also own. Maybe they are trying to spend as much of the money in a joint bank account as they possibly can before disclosing what they own to the court. They could be doing this so that they benefit from the spending and have to divide fewer assets with you during property division.
If you think this has happened, there are steps you can take to expose this dissipation to the court and recover the assets that you had a right to during property division. But it can be complicated, which is why it is so important to know exactly what legal steps to take.