Divorce not necessary for financial security
I recently learned that my husband who has been sober for over 20 years fell off the wagon last year and has done an excellent job of hiding it from me. I work in a hospital and took up essentially living in our finished basement to keep him and our children safe. Our kids have autoimmune diseases and are at high risk for COVID-19 complications. He is able to work from home and supervise remote school. The arrangement has been hard on all of us but harder on him than I realized.
In addition to drinking most nights, after the children went to bed, he took up online gambling. He has run up significant debt and I am terrified we will lose our home. I have been advised to divorce him and make him take the debt so I can keep the house. That just doesn’t seem right. I love him and I believe the circumstances over the last year are to blame. He needs help and I want to stand by his side. But I also cannot risk losing the house over this. Do I need to divorce him? Is there another way?
Where there is a will, there is always another way. In Massachusetts we have Homestead protection. When you purchase a house that you intend to primarily reside in, you have an automatic protection of your equity up to $125,000. Look at the paperwork from when you bought the house. Usually, a separate Homestead form is recorded at the time of purchase that increases protection from $125,000 to $500,000. If you have not recorded a Homestead on your home, it is an easy form to complete and will cost a nominal sum to record at the Registry of Deeds. Do this right away. Not only does the Homestead protect you now, if you decide to sell your home, the protection on sale proceeds remains in place for six months after the voluntary sale of your home, meaning you would have six months to use the sale proceeds to buy a subsequent home.
You should also consider transferring title of the house into your individual name, assuming all of the debt is in his name. You should consult a real estate attorney to see if that would further protect your home. If the debts are solely in his name (meaning not on joint credit cards), the debt collectors should not be able to attach your assets.
As you start to clean up this mess, prioritize tax payments over consumer debts. The tax collection agencies are far quicker to place a lien on real estate for unpaid taxes than anyone else and they will eventually force a sale of the property to get their money.
Once you have secured the house, you can turn your attention to helping your husband recover. You do not need to divorce him to achieve financial security.
Wendy O. Hickey has since 1994 been involved in and since 2003 been a trial lawyer who concentrates her practice on national and international family law. Any legal advice in this column is general in nature, and does not establish a lawyer-client relationship. Send questions to dearwendy@bostonherald.com.