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If you are considering separating from your spouse and moving out of your marital home, consider these 10 things before you move, and definitely before you file for divorce.
1) Consult a lawyer who is Board Certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, which has significant additional continuing education and testing requirements. You want a lawyer who spends the vast majority of their professional time — if not all of their time — handling family law matters. Your future well-being rides on your having a good lawyer right now.
2) What documents in the house do you need to get or copy? Before you move out is the best time to obtain these documents. Sadly, they can be difficult to obtain, even through discovery, after you have left. Ideally, you should have a copy of all your important financial documents. If you are afraid the documents will be missed, copy the documents, put the copies in a safe place outside the house, and put the originals back where they were.
3) Are there any items in the house, whether they have monetary value or not, that you would cry if they were destroyed or missing? If yes, move them to a safe place, preferably outside the marital home.
4) Change your passwords on everything to something your spouse will not think of. Particularly critical are passwords to your bank accounts, online accounts, and computers.
5) If there are critical recordings, photos, text messages, and the like on your electronic devices, be sure they are backed up to cloud storage and there is a copy on a thumb drive and store it in a safe place outside your home.
And that's just the first half of the list.
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