Splitting up without Signing Off
Video Transcribed: What is legal separation in Oklahoma? Hi, I’m OKC lawyer Ty Smith with Wirth Law.
We get this question sometimes. I say we, I get this question sometime because we have people who aren’t quite sure if they want to divorce their significant other, or whether they just want to maybe spend some time apart and legally separate. And so they ask me, what are the advantages? What’s the difference between legal separation and divorce? Well, let’s tackle that in this brief video.
I like to call legal separation, divorce light, or divorce for beginners. Okay? Because in a lot of ways, legal separation is a precursor to divorce. Most often, at least in my experience, if you go through legal separation, the next step is probably divorce. A lot of people do it for logistical purposes. It allows you to kind of divide up property, divide up custody of children if that’s an issue, and kind of gives you a preview of what is divorce going to look like. It’s for people who aren’t a hundred percent sure if they want to go through with this. Most of the time it’s from a logistical standpoint though. I mean, if you’re considering a legal separation, the love in your marriage is probably gone, and now it’s just a question of, well, do we just want to stay married because it’s easier. So that’s why I call it divorce light.
Legal separation’s a little different from divorce. You can file it in the county where you all live. There’s no residency requirement like in divorce. You have to wait to live for a certain amount of time. And you don’t have to have a good reason. You don’t have to state any reason. You just want to legally separate because you’re not divorced yet.
And there are some pros to this. As I said, it gives you kind of a chance to preview what divorce would look like logistically, but there are some cons of course. The big one being you can’t remarry, so you can’t see anyone else during this period of legal separation because that would be infidelity, which is still, that’s still a crime here in Oklahoma. So technically you can be convicted of that, but it’s not very often prosecuted. You can’t sell the marital property because by definition, yeah, you’ve divided it up, but it’s not officially been split like it’s not actually been decreed what is whose property yet. You’ve not actually split it up, you’ve just kind of divided up living arrangements and whatnot.
Another big one is you can’t cash out on retirement because your spouse is entitled to a certain amount of that. So if you would like to ask more questions about legal separation or if you are maybe looking to move past your current legal separation and into full-body divorce, to continue the drinking metaphor, I’d be glad to speak with you about it. Once more, I’m Ty Smith, a divorce attorney in Oklahoma with Wirth Law Office. You can find me at theoklahomacityattorney.com. You can also call my office at (405) 888-5400 and I’d be glad to speak with you about this matter. I thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.
