Cheating requires a lot of personal investment. If someone wants to conduct an extramarital affair, they will need to woo someone else and hide their actions from their spouse. Those in high-asset marriages often have the necessary time and resources to commit infidelity, possibly for years before their spouse discovers their affair.
Your ex probably spent hours sending furtive text messages and emails, arranging covert meetings and sneaking around to meet their affair partner. They may have paid for a second phone, for expensive dinner dates and for motel rooms. They may have also bought gifts, paid rent at an apartment or funded travel.
Now that you know about their infidelity, you have every intention to file for divorce. Can you ask the courts to consider all of the money they wasted on their affair when they divide your property?
Misconduct and dissipation can influence property division
Decisions made regarding the division of marital property require a fair or equitable approach. A judge can consider wasteful financial conduct, like money spent on an extramarital affair, when they divide your property and debts.
For example, if you can show thousands of dollars in credit card charges that went toward gifts and meetups with the affair partner, you could potentially convince a Georgia family law judge to exclude those debts from property division proceedings and make your ex solely accountable for them.
If the spending involves cash withdrawals from your bank accounts and expensive gifts, a judge with access to records of that spending or the amount of money diverted from the marital accounts can then factor that conduct into their other property division choices. The more money your ex spent conducting their affair, the bigger the impact their use of mineral resources for their infidelity could have on your divorce proceedings.
You may need help exploring your financial records
Some people attempting to prove dissipation will need to bring in outside professionals to help them build their case. A professional can create a more accurate representation of your spouse’s wasteful financial behavior than you would be able to create on your own.
Pursuing justice in a Georgia divorce often requires learning more about state law, especially when it comes to high-asset property division matters and wasteful conduct.