Gordon Shayne outlines what steps you can take to make your divorce go as smoothly as possible.

Are you filing for divorce? Do you need help understanding the law and preparing for filing? Contact a Florida divorce attorney today. 

How can you best prepare for a divorce? Oftentimes, that means that both of the parties should become familiar with their finances. That's probably the number one goal when you're going through a divorce, especially a long-term divorce. In a lot of marriages, one party or the other has total access to bank records, credit card statements, mortgages, debts, signature loans, car payments, things like that. But when you're going through a divorce, both parties need to be on equal footing, so the best way to prepare for a divorce is to know your finances, know what the spreadsheets show of what you own and what you owe.

Make sure that you are familiar with how things are titled. How are the deeds of any property? How's the deed read to your house? What does the mortgage say? On your cars, are the loans for the vehicles in one person's name or the other? What accounts do we have? Do we have IRAs? Do we have retirement accounts? Are there pension accounts? So the best way to prepare for a divorce is to become knowledgeable regarding the finances of the marriage, and paying specific attention to what those end-of-the-year statements show, and the tax return statements, and making sure that you gather those materials, so that you become educated before your embark on this legal process.