Premarital Assets | Phoenix Divorce Lawyers

Are you contemplating divorce but are worried about protecting your premarital assets? Schedule a free consultation with our Phoenix divorce lawyers to learn how to protect your property.

Oftentimes, we see clients that come in for counsel regarding a dissolution of marriage and as it relates to that marriage, one party, or both parties, had property, be it through an inheritance, or they won the lottery or they were just well off before they got married, it’s property that they accumulated prior to the marriage; that’s their persona property. Then they’re married for whatever period of time and then they go through a divorce. While they’re married obviously they have some community property; their job, they may buy another marital residence, a house, a boat, motorcycle or whatnot. The question becomes when one party states a claim against, or claims to have some interest, if you will, in the personal property of the other party that was owned by them prior to the marriage.

The broad rule is that your personal property prior to the marriage remains your personal property, unless it was transmuted into community property and it was based on that understanding. That’s the broad rule. Obviously, sometimes there’s co-mingling of the personal property and the community property. This is why I encourage people early on to make sure they trace the property. If the co-mingled property can be traced back to personal property, then broadly it would be separated out and remain personal property. It’s without controversy in this jurisdiction that what’s community property remains community property.

You would want to list out and your lawyer will sit down with you, give you a form where you get a chance to list out what is personal, what you believe to be personal property. If there is an interest that the other party claims in something that you deem to be personal property, then the lawyer would look at that and then they would go through tracing process and trace that property back, to see if it was transmuted into community property, or if it in fact remained persona property.

Again that, by all means, requires the skill of a lawyer to look at that and determine whether that remains personal property or if it’s been transmuted to community property. You would want to seek out a skilled family lawyer to help you through that process, to make sure that you don’t lose any interest in property that is actually a personal property and should remain personal property.

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