Just like anything else in life, cost depends on what you order or need. If your car needs new brakes the cost will be minimal. If your car needs a brand-new engine, the cost will be high. A Separation Agreement will cost less than $2,000. Mediation will cost a few thousand dollars to $20,000. A full-blown adversarial trial will range between $20,000 and $200,000. It is important to remember that no one can force your ex to agree. The more agreement there is the less it will cost. The more fighting there is, the more billable hours that are required to…

A separation agreement can be drafted and signed by the client at the same meeting. It then has to be reviewed and signed by the other party on their timeline. In that way the separation agreement is the fastest conclusion. Mediation has to coordinate the calendars of the parties, their lawyers, and the mediator. For that reason, it usually takes months to schedule. But that is not necessarily a bad thing because those months of waiting are usually used to bring the lawyer up to speed on issues such as who paid for what, who worked on what, and where your…

Custody is an old-fashioned term. It remains in the Divorce Act and is available to married people only through the Divorce Act (federal legislation). Common law people fall under the Family Law Act (provincial legislation). Under the Family Law Act, the term “custody” was eliminated under the reasoning that people fight over “custody” so if it is eliminated people won’t have anything to fight over. Only “guardianship” is allowed now. While “custody is only available to married people, guardianship is available to both married and common law people. If the parties were living together when the child was born, they automatically…

The courts try to equalize parenting time. That is the new look of things. Rarely do the courts view the father as a “weekend” dad any longer. The new reality is often week on, week off for each parent. That way each parent has to tolerate the working weekdays of getting kids off to school and doing homework as well as the holiday weekend times where they can go on trips or plan events together. It is important to remember that parenting time has to accommodate work schedules. If one parent works the weekends and the other parent works the weekdays,…

Child maintenance is governed by the Federal Child Support Guidelines. There is a graph (available online) that sets out how much is to be paid on an income of the payor parent. If a parent has less than 40% of the parenting time, they will pay child maintenance. Even if there is equal parenting time, child maintenance can be payable. The usual method is to calculate how much each parent would have to pay if the other parent had the majority of parenting time, and then to set them off against each other. For example, if Parent 1 would have…

That which each party owned prior to commencing the relationship usually belongs to that person at the end of the relationship. It is known as “excluded property”. Only the increase in value that occurred during the relationship is “family property” and up for division. The valuation date of property is at the date of trial, not the separation date, barring any unusual facts. Decreases in value during a relationship are not shared by the parties. The party who suffered the decrease usually gets stuck with it. Generally, that which is put into the property by a spouse, or a parent of a spouse…