So you and your ex-spouse have divorced. You have a court order in place from a Mississippi court outlining what each of your respective rights, duties and obligations are. And afterward, you both decide that what the Court ordered, or in many instances what you each agreed to do, is now not what each of you want.
Can you just decide to agree to do something else? Of course you can. But doing so has strings attached - long, slimy, sticky strings that may eventually get you tangled up. Think of an attacking octopus with its 8 legs, each with those suction cups flailing around trying to grab you and not let you go. Can you see it?
Doing something that is different than what the Court has ordered is ok in only one situation: when you get the previous order modified by a new order from the Court. To do otherwise is running the risk (which you should not take) that you and your ex-spouse are going to agree on all future issues (and if you have children together that is NOT going to happen).
If you and your ex-spouse don't follow through and get the new agreement reduced to a Court order, your ex-spouse can later ask the Court to hold you in civil contempt. Civil Contempt is the willful failure to follow an unambiguous court order. To prove that you are guilty of civil contempt, all your ex-spouse has to do is to show that you failed to comply with the Court order.
A common example is: Ex-husband and ex-wife had a child during the marriage. Wife gets custody of the child during the divorce, and husband has to pay child support. Now the child is 14, giving the mother fits because teenage ego and hormones are in full swing, and sends the child to live with the father. Mother agrees that while the child lives with the father that the father need not pay the Court ordered child support. They don't go to Court to get an order relieving the father of the child support obligation. After a few months, the teenager decides that he/she had it better over at mom's house, and decides to move back in with the mother. Somewhere along the way, ex-husband and ex-wife gets into a dispute over something. So ex-wife proves to ex-husband that she has the upper hand by filing a contempt action against ex-husband for failure to pay child support (during the months that the child resided with ex-husband). Ex-wife can easily prove what she needs to for contempt. Even though ex-husband will likely be able to avoid liability for the contempt action, he will still necessarily incur legal fees and heartache, not to mention time off from work, because his ex-wife got angry.
Moral of the story: Always, always, always go to the trouble of getting a court order modifying anything that you and your ex-spouse has agreed upon to avoid the sticky octopus arms. The expense of getting a lawyer to draft up an Agreed Order that both of you sign pales in comparison to the expense and stress you will incur in defending a contempt action.
Final thought: Just because you and your ex-spouse type something up, sign it, and have it notarized is not sufficient to modify a court order.
To learn more visit our website at http://www.showspowell.com/.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment