Naperville Divorce Attorneys

Divorce represents a difficult crossroads, and while you attempt to cope with the emotional fallout of this challenging experience, you may be at a loss regarding what steps you need to take to protect your financial and parental rights moving forward. Fortunately, an experienced Naperville divorce attorney can help you with that. 

Your Divorce Is Unique

Your marriage didn’t look exactly like anyone else’s, and neither will your divorce. The elements of your divorce, however, remain the same as those of every other divorcing couple and include:

• Parental responsibilities and parenting time
• Child support
• The division of marital property
• Alimony (also called spousal support or maintenance)

Parental Responsibilities and Parenting Time

Parental responsibilities refer to what you may think of as legal custody, and it involves the important decisions that parents are required to make on behalf of their children, including decisions related to matters such as:

• Their health care
• Their schooling
• Their religious upbringing
• Their extracurricular activities

Parents can make these decisions together (one parent, however, may have tie-breaking authority); parents can divide them according to the kind of decisions being made, or one parent can take on sole responsibility. 

Parenting time is what you may think of as visitation, and it is the schedule by which you will divide your time with your shared children. Either one of you will take on the primary custodial role while the other has a parenting time schedule, or you will divide your parenting time more equally. 

Child Support

Child support is based on the state’s straightforward calculation methodology that focuses primarily on the number of overnights each parent has with the children and on each parent’s earnings. All things being more or less equal, however, the parent with the higher income generally bears the child support obligation. 

The Division of Marital Property

Marital property refers to those assets that you and your spouse acquired together over the course of your marriage, and upon divorce, these assets need to be divided equitably, which means fairly (but not necessarily evenly). The division of marital assets has the potential to become quite complicated, and factors that tend to make it more so include:

• High assets
• Generally complicated assets, including considerable separate assets
• Business ownership

Alimony

Alimony is reserved for those divorce situations in which one spouse experiences a financial downturn following divorce, and the other spouse has the financial ability to help. Alimony is generally a temporary fix that is intended to help the recipient find more stable financial footing (often by obtaining the education or training necessary to increase his or her earning potential). 

Turn to an Experienced Naperville Divorce Attorney for the Legal Help You Need

The skilled Naperville divorce attorneys at SLG Family Law have an impressive range of experience helping clients like you obtain divorce terms that not only uphold their parental and financial rights but that also work for them (in their unique situations). To learn more about what we can do to help you, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.