Affordable Divorce Advice: Separation Agreement Template and More

After making the big decision to get divorced and separate from a marriage, the emotional, logistical, and legal aspects can loom terrifyingly large. What follows is a piece of advice that can save a huge amount of lawyer money and help the whole family, if used effectively.

Before going into the tip, we need some background: First, there is a substantial amount of paperwork needed to file for divorce (hence the article, “Divorce is a Full-Time Job!”) and a central piece is the Separation Agreement, which lays out vital details about sharing child custody, dividing assets, and more.

A lot of people — myself included, when I got divorced several years ago — initially assume that the lawyers will just handle most of that paperwork for you… but the reality is that you actually have to do most of the thinking for the divorce process paperwork yourself (WITH your soon-to-be-former-spouse) because the legal team simply doesn’t have the context to make such major decisions about another person’s life. This leads us to our actionable advice…

Disclaimer: This advice is for divorcing spouses who have at least some capacity to safely talk with each other and to collaborate amicably for the good of everyone involved. For people in unsafe or unbalanced situations, or others for whom this advice is not a fit, please rely instead on responsible legal counsel and wise judgement.

Affordable Divorce Tips:

Want to save a huge amount of money on fees from lawyers who charge $500 an hour or more? Use these tips to do much of the thinking for all of that Separation Agreement paperwork yourself! (Note: This is NOT to say that you shouldn’t talk to your lawyer — please collaborate with your legal counsel closely during this process! Just know that the more legwork you do that’s not on their dime will help everything be faster and more affordable.)

1. Use this checklist to think through what YOU want for all aspects of a Separation Agreement.

Boston Law Collaborative has an incredible Separation Agreement template checklist that lists every possible aspect of a potential Separation agreement, and it can be found by clicking here. It may seem overwhelming, but it’s deeply useful. Copy and paste it into a new document, and really start thinking through.

What do YOU most want for each of those elements? What is an absolute yes or no for you, and what would you be willing to compromise on? As we will see, compromise (within reason) is a vital method for saving money in the long run, because, every time you have to bring in lawyers to go back and forth on disagreements, the expensive bills begin to rack up!

2. Collaborate with your divorcing spouse to agree on as many aspects of the draft as possible.

Ultimately, the Divorce Court judge will agree with most things that the divorcing couple agrees to (as long as it doesn’t cause major inequities or issues for children). Given this, it will hugely help the efficiency and finances of your case to be on the same page as your divorcing spouse on elements of the Separation Agreement.

To do this, my former spouse and I created a shared Google Document with the Separation Agreement checklist in it, and began to annotate it together, each using a different text color for our comments to keep them straight. Once we agreed on something, we changed that text to a third color so it was clear what was complete.

What was amazing was to see was how much we DID agree on. Despite the length of that document (yes, I know it’s daunting!) we were able to zip through large swaths of it fairly quickly. We even came up with our successful 50-50 custody schedule plan with alternating days during that time.

To take pressure off, you don’t need to decide certain aspects of your custody schedule for co-parenting after divorce — like what to do for each holiday — for forever. You can simply put in the Separation Agreement that you will be in contact with each other at the start of each year to decide the holiday custody plan. You just need to create a “floor” that you can agree on that — if things went south — you could go back to court and use as a touchstone.

3. Use a couples counselor (!!!) to help make compromises on contentious parts of the Separation Agreement draft before turning to a mediator.

Ok, so here’s a key secret to saving money on a Separation agreement that most divorce books don’t tell you: To resolve disagreements when creating the Separation Agreement, first use a couples counselor (covered by insurance!) instead of an expensive mediator. Wow!

So many people miss this gem. Couples counselors can be extremely effective in helping divorcing couples get to agreements on aspects of the Separation Agreement such as co-parenting plans and asset division — and often only cost a copay of $20 a session thanks to insurance!!! In contrast, mediators are at least $100 an hour, if not $200 or more. (Note: Counselors are not qualified to do legal work, but what they are perfect for is helping pairs of people get to a place of collaboration versus knee-jerk reaction.)

Yes, we did ultimately use a mediator (who was, incidentally, covered by our workplace — check what yours pays for) to hammer out some of the bigger details of our Separation Agreement such as the house buy-out, and credit cards, but we only had to use that mediator for 2 hours of billable time, because we’d already done so much productive work on our own and with the hours and hours and hours with our (much more affordable) couples counselor. It can be done!

4. Double check everything with your lawyers.

During this whole process, do make sure to be checking in with your lawyer to make sure you’re getting a fair deal in the decisions and compromises you are making. Then, once you have your full Separation Agreement draft that has been vetted by both you, your divorcing spouse, and a mediator, your lawyers will look it over one last time, and then — if everything looks good — file it. Ok!

As explained in “What to Say to Someone Getting Divorced,” the legal process is long, but it doesn’t have to be sad. Working collaboratively and resourcefully, the paperwork can get done efficiently, and help the whole family.

Affordable Divorce Via Collaborative Separation Agreement

I hope these tips about using a couples counselor and collaborative Separation Agreement template and checklist have been useful. If you’ve gone through the process yourself, how was it? If you haven’t, what questions do you have? Do share…

For more, see “A Script to Tell Kids About Divorce,” and the ever-popular (and often highly-fraught) topic for once all that legal paperwork is behind you, “How to Introduce a New Partner After Divorce.”