Property division is one of the most important aspects of any divorce process, and probably the most important in marriages without children. Consequently, it leads to a lot of people wondering about how things get divided. All too often, people ask that question of how courts divide property before they ask a more fundamental question: “What does the court divide?” At a high level, the answer to that is simple. Marital property gets divided, and spouses get to keep their non-marital property for themselves. Answering the question of which property is marital and which property is not can become a bit more complicated.

What Is and Is Not Marital Property

The easiest place to start when discussing marital versus non-marital property is with a definition of marital property. Illinois law defines marital property as “all property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage.” This means that things the spouses bring into the marriage are non-marital property and things they get afterward are marital property.

A divorce can have ripple effects that last after it ends, especially in the realm of retirement. Married couples engage in long-term financial planning together, so a split can often push those plans off track, unless people take care to keep them intact during the divorce. One particular way that divorce can impact retirement is through the division of pensions. Now the Illinois Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about how pension division interacts with Social Security, which has its own special rules for divorcing couples.

Social Security in Divorce

Social Security is different from the majority of pensions and retirement plans. Most of these plans qualify as marital property that the court will deal with during the property division. Conversely, Illinois courts do not divide Social Security. This difference stems from the fact that Social Security is a special plan regulated by the government. This means that it already has contingencies in place to deal with divorce, so courts do not need to divide it.

Proving paternity can be a complex thing to do, and a difficult one to discuss with your spouse. However, it can also be important for your child's future. Before people had access to things like DNA testing, there were a variety of laws in place that created presumptions about who was a child's father. Many of these laws are still around, though they have been modified in recent years to account for the changing technology available to actually make determinations about paternity. The key question for paternity laws asks whether the parents of the child are married.

Married Parents

Married parents ordinarily present the simplest case for establishing paternity. If two people are married when the child is conceived or born, then the Illinois Parentage Act of 1984 creates a presumption that the husband is the child's father. However, the father can dispute this presumption.

Some people can be tempted to start focusing on the short-term issues during a divorce. This is an understandable impulse since a divorce causes many immediate changes in a person's life. However, it is also important to keep one eye on the long view throughout the process. One of these issues is retirement planning.

Spouses plan to spend their lives together, and those plans can often start well in advance. This means that retirement plans are an important part of the divorce conversation. This is especially true now that gray divorce, divorces among people over 50, is becoming more of a trend. Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies people can use to help make sure that their divorce does not derail their golden years.

Think Long-Term

The prevalence of substance abuse in America is an unfortunate reality. In fact, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration's research, tens of millions of Americans experience problems with alcoholism or drug abuse. Naturally, these problems can place a strain on a marriage, and many people report that substance abuse was one of the main causes of their separation. Many people who are divorcing a spouse with substance abuse issues wonder about the special considerations that those issues need. As it happens, substance abuse can have both legal and practical effects on the divorce process.

Legal Effects of Substance Abuse

The two main legal effects of substance abuse on divorce are as grounds for divorce and during the child custody proceedings. Substance abuse can be grounds for divorce in Illinois, meaning it forms the actual reason for the divorce, but this is less important than it once was. Illinois has a “no-fault” divorce law now, so spouses can get divorced based on irreconcilable differences. However, having grounds for the divorce may be able to speed the process up since there is a required six-month separation period in no-fault divorces.