Hoboken Family Law Blog

Prenuptial Agreements in New Jersey and What It Takes to Get One Invalidated by a Court

April 6, 2020 | Frank Marciano

There are lots of stereotypes surrounding prenuptial agreements… some positive and some negative. The reality, however, is that a good prenuptial agreement can potentially benefit both spouses, while a bad one can potentially harm either one. Given just how substantial the impacts of your prenuptial agreement can be, it is essential that you have an experienced Hoboken prenuptial agreement attorney on your side before you sign your agreement.

A recent ruling from the Appellate Division court puts an even brighter spotlight on the vital importance of proceeding cautiously and knowingly before you sign a prenuptial agreement, as getting one of these agreements thrown out is very hard to do. In the case, R.S. was a twice-divorced man preparing for marriage to his third wife. R.S., apparently feeling he’d been “burned” before in divorce, told his bride-to-be that a prenuptial agreement was an absolute must before he’d marry her. Each spouse got independent legal counsel to review the proposed agreement. The wife’s attorney advised against her signing it but, on the eve of the wedding, she signed anyway.

Two decades later, the couple divorced. The wife asked the court to throw out the prenuptial agreement as unenforceable. The wife’s argument was that, if the judge allowed the agreement to stand, she would be left with a post-divorce standard of living that was far below the standard she enjoyed during the marriage. The judge, however, barred any evidence of the couple’s marital lifestyle in the hearing on the agreement’s enforceability.

The Legal Consequences for a New Jersey Resident of a ‘Joke’ Wedding in Las Vegas

April 6, 2020 | Frank Marciano

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Wedding chapel sign in Las Vegas. In the background a false bell tower.

The concept of a “joke” wedding or drunken tying of the knot is often a source for humor, in both music and television. Country music singer Carrie Underwood covered such an event in song in 2009, and Ross and Rachel did it at the end of the fifth season on Friends. Las Vegas chapels today offer the option of a “pretend” wedding, in which there’s no authentic marriage license and no actual marriage. However, if you go through a real Vegas wedding with a genuine marriage license, then you’re legally married. If, after you return home to New Jersey, you realize your Vegas wedding was a case of “Oh no! What have I done?,” then one of your first steps should be to reach out to an experienced Hoboken divorce attorney to discuss your circumstance. Your Vegas wedding has created a legal marriage with real legal consequences, and you will likely need a legal divorce solution to end that marriage.

As noted above, if the wedding you now regret was a pretend one, you can just dispose of the hardcopy and electronic memories and move on. If it wasn’t pretend, it it’s going to take something more, as one woman who recently wrote to NJMoneyHelp.com learned. That woman had married a platonic friend in Las Vegas as a joke. Several years later, the man met another woman whom he desired to marry in sincerity.

Alimony in New Jersey: How It Works in Long-Term Marriages Versus Short-Term Marriages

January 14, 2020 | Frank Marciano

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Alimony is the end result of many divorce actions.

Alimony is one of those legal areas that may inspire a great deal of fear and concern among some divorcing spouses. A spouse from a long-term marriage may fear facing a lifetime of alimony, even after his ex-spouse has begun living with a new partner. A spouse from a short-term marriage may fear that she’ll be paying for just a few years of wedded bliss with many years of alimony payments. This post seeks to alleviate some of those fears, which may be unfounded in your situation. Of course, to get the exact advice that you need for your precise circumstances, be sure to reach out to a skilled Hoboken alimony attorney.

L.R. and R.R. were a pair of ex-spouses whose marriage was an example of a long-term one. The pair divorced in 2013 after 21 years of marriage. The trial court in their case ordered that the husband pay the wife permanent alimony. The couple’s marital settlement agreement said that, if the wife began living with someone “unrelated by blood or marriage” for six months, that was cohabitation and would entitle the husband to revisit the issue of alimony and potentially get his permanent alimony terminated.

My New Jersey Marriage is Falling Apart…What Will Happen If I Move Out Now?

January 14, 2020 | Frank Marciano

Back in 1985, a famous country music performer, Reba McEntire, released a song with the lines, “Somebody should leave…but which one should it be?” Regrettably, failed marriages like this fictional one are a sad reality for many couples in New Jersey. Before you make the decision to be the “somebody” who should leave your marital home, you owe it to yourself to consult a knowledgeable Hoboken divorce attorney. Depending of the specifics of your situation, moving out of the marital home may ultimately be the wrong decision, even if it is the less painful one in the short term.

In New Jersey prior to 2007, you often had to prove that your spouse was “at fault” before a court would give you a divorce. In some foreign countries, you still do. Abandonment is one common way to do that. Back in late November, according to a report in The Tribune, a husband in India won his divorce case after alleging that his wife left for Dubai one day in 2015, taking all her belongings with her, with no “provocation or reason,” and never came back. The judge sided with the husband, ruling that the wife failed to provide “any reasonable cause due to which she had to live separately from the” husband.

Here in New Jersey, getting a divorce in a circumstance like this can be much simpler today. New Jersey law allows spouses to pursue a “no-fault” divorce, which means that you don’t accuse your spouse of some failure, but merely allege irreconcilable differences. However, the law does still allow spouses to pursue an at-fault divorce, and one of the causes available is abandonment or desertion. This fact may give you serious pause if your marital relationship has broken down and you are considering moving out.d

How New Jersey’s Alimony Reform Law Has (and Hasn’t) Changed The Rules for Obtaining Termination Due to Cohabitation

December 10, 2019 | Frank Marciano

The law is ever-changing. This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to have a knowledgeable family law attorney on your side. You may think that you may understand how the law works with regard to alimony or child visitation or property division or some other family law issue, but your understanding may be incomplete or, worse yet, based on an outdated version of the law. Your skilled counsel will be both up to date on the law, and also aware of how to use those changes to your maximum benefit.

One of the areas of the law where changes have been occurring in New Jersey is alimony. In September 2019, New Jersey’s significant alimony reform law turned five years old. The law enacted several important changes to the law surrounding alimony but, as some recent Appellate Division court decisions have highlighted, some aspects of the alimony law that existed prior to the enactment of the reform law continue to be in effect today. A Hoboken alimony lawyer can explain how certain provisions of the law may affect you.

One of the very important pieces of the alimony reform law related to the set of circumstances under which a supporting spouse could get his/her support obligation terminated. Under the old legal rules, courts presumed that alimony should be permanent. In this circumstance, by “presumed,” we mean that the law required judges to give a supported spouse alimony for life unless the supporting spouse had enough evidence to affirmatively prove that there were special circumstances present and those special circumstances dictated the award of something other than permanent alimony.

What’s in a Name? Possibly a Lot if You’re a Parent of a Minor Child in New Jersey

November 19, 2019 | Frank Marciano

If you studied Shakespeare in English class, you may remember the lines from Romeo and Juliet that say “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” If you’ve studied Dale Carnegie, you may have crossed a quote from the famed lecturer that says a “person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Unavoidably, names are important things. After a divorce, you are, of course, free to change your name. However, what options do you have when it comes to your children’s names? Does the law allow you to change their names, too? The answer is “Yes, potentially.” To make sure you have what you need to win this kind of name-change case, you should be sure you have skillful representation from an experienced Hoboken family law attorney to give the court what you need to succeed.

Recently, the Appellate Division court had to address this issue. The couple at odds were ex-spouses who separated after only five months. At the time the couple separated, the wife was four months pregnant. Two weeks after the separation, the couple agreed to a consent order. Paragraph 10 of that order laid out the first, middle and last names to be given to the unborn child.

How is a ‘Mid-Marriage Agreement’ Different from a Prenuptial Agreement in New Jersey, and How Can Each One Help Me?

November 13, 2019 | Frank Marciano

Back in the summer, celebrity gossip site TMZ (along with probably countless other sources) reported on the breakup of the eight-month-long marriage of actor Liam Hemsworth and singer Miley Cyrus. According to the TMZ report, the couple had created and signed a prenuptial agreement before they wed. Additionally, each had kept his/her earnings separate during the duration of the marriage. As a result, “there won’t be a fight over money,” the report indicated.

Even if you’re not a couple of multi-millionaires (or even if you are,) there may be good reasons to create what’s called an “antenuptial agreement,” also sometimes known as a prenuptial agreement or premarital agreement. However, what do you do if you’re already married and didn’t create a prenuptial agreement, but now you realize that you probably would have benefited from one? Are you out of luck because you’re already married? No, there are still options. Contact a knowledgeable Hoboken family law attorney and find more about what tools may be able to help you.

One of the tools that is available to you after you’ve already gotten married is something called the mid-marriage agreement, or intra-marital agreement. Mid-marriage agreements can be a great way to protect your interests in an existing marriage, even though the marriage may be successful and nowhere near being “irretrievably broken.”

What You Need to Win a Grandparent Visitation Case in New Jersey

November 7, 2019 | Frank Marciano

Grandparents are integral members of many families. They provide love, support and an important tie to a child’s ancestry and heritage. Nevertheless, in New Jersey, a grandparent (or great-grandparent) who wants a judge to order visitation, assuming the child’s parents are considered fit by the law, has to clear a fairly high hurdle.

That hurdle is high because the law recognizes that one of the fundamental rights of parents is the right to raise their children in the way that they think is the best. Courts will only force parents to go against their own preferences in very limited circumstances. Opportunities do exist for such a court order in some circumstances so, whether you are the grandparent seeking visitation or a parent who opposes visitation, it is important to consult with a knowledgeable Hoboken child custody attorney about your situation.

A case that was decided by the Appellate Division court recently is a good example of how high this hurdle is. F.S. was a man who had several children, including a daughter with S.P.M., two sons with A.K. and a stepson (A.K.’s son) whom F.S. was in the process of adopting.

What Can You Do if Your Spouse Destroys Important Evidence in Your New Jersey Contested Divorce?

October 29, 2019 | Frank Marciano

Ideally, in a perfect set of circumstances, two spouses going through a divorce will work together collaboratively and maturely to resolve their legal issues in the divorce (such as division of assets, alimony and child issues) in a mutually respectful way. Sometimes, though, that just isn’t “in the cards.” Even if your spouse is approaching your case in a calm and collaborative way, but especially if they’re not, you need to make sure your rights and interests are protected by having an experienced Hoboken family law attorney on your side during every step of the divorce process.

The case of S.G. and F.G. was not one of those “calm and collaborative” cases. Both spouses accused each other of domestic violence. The wife falsely accused the husband of sexually assaulting her. The wife also threatened the husband with a knife.

Additionally, she reportedly destroyed certain computerized financial files of the husband. These computer files weren’t just any financial files, though. They were “spreadsheets and other documents” tracing the husband’s pre-marital assets. When it came time to distribute assets in the divorce, the wife asserted that those assets were actually marital ones and should be divided between the two spouses in the divorce.

Why Adoption Is Still an Important Step for New Jersey LGBTQ Families When One Spouse is a Biological Parent and One Isn’t

October 24, 2019 | Frank Marciano

Recently, a member of the New Jersey Senate proposed a bill that would streamline the legal process for the spouse or civil union partner of a biological parent to adopt his/her spouse/partner’s child. The bill, if passed, would set up a speedier process through which same-sex spouses and same-sex civil union partners could adopt the other’s biological child conceived through assisted reproduction, insidernj.com reported.

At this point, you may be wondering, “well, with marriage equality the law of the land in all 50 states after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015, the need for going through the trouble and expense of adopting my spouse’s child isn’t there anymore, right?” Well… no. As the senator’s bill recognizes, there are still plenty of very important reasons why it could benefit you and your family to go through the adoption process. Contact an experienced Hoboken family law attorney to discuss your specific situation and learn more about the best path for you.

Before the Obergefell ruling, there were some very good reasons for you — if your child was biologically related to your partner but not to you — to go through the legal steps to adopt that child. The law in all states gives legal parents some very strong rights when it comes to their children, including the right to shut out those the parent doesn’t want in the child’s life. If you’re not a legal parent or guardian, you don’t have those rights — which means you are at risk of being the one “on the outside looking in.” Biological parents automatically have that legal status. Non-biological parents, like stepparents, do not have that same level of legal recognition.

Family & Estate Law Blog