Barri Payne is a Board Certified Specialist in Family Law.
She has vast experience helping clients to take a careful and planned approach to dividing their marital property and debts. Her experience as a certified family financial mediator has provided considerable extra benefit to her clients in considering how to split marital assets and debts.
In North Carolina, the legal term for property settlement in divorce is "equitable distribution." The first step in an E.D action, as it is called, is to identify what are all the marital assets and marital debts? In general, these are assets and debts acquired during the marriage and not before, and not the result of a specific inheritance or gift to one party.
Then there are the steps of valuation (i.e. what is the value of each asset?) and ultimately distribution of the assets, (i.e. who will receive each asset?). Marital assets can be so intertwined as to feel inseparable and breaking assets and debts down to bare numbers can leave families feeling financially vulnerable.