From the article: DIY Divorce in Arizona
Filing for divorce can be difficult and expensive. If you handled your own Arizona divorce, tell us how it went. Were the forms easy to deal with? Were there children involved? Was working with the Maricopa County court system difficult? Did you ever seek out advice from an attorney? Would you advise a DIY (do-it-yourself) divorce to others? Under what conditions?
Note: Please do not include real names. Submissions with profanity will not be published. Approved submissions will be published here as I received them unless I indicate that I have edited them. Share Your Experience
Note: Please do not include real names. Submissions with profanity will not be published. Approved submissions will be published here as I received them unless I indicate that I have edited them. Share Your Experience
Don't do it by yourself if you can help
- I too went the diy ROUTE only my EX was the one who filed. She tried to screw me int he final decree but then I found out decrees don't hold up anyway so if your spouse is to cover some debt make sure ti is explicit. My Ex left me with all the bills in the decree and then even the ones she was supposed to pay off were left unpaid. Now my credit went from 740 to less than 500. Don't do it by yourself! See a paralegal at least and get a mediator.
- —Guest Chump
Don't do it yourself!
- My friend did her own divorce & said it was easy so I tried to do my own documents with the courts online program. What a mess. I got to court but the judge wouldn't sign off, I had missed a check box on the very first form! And he said the decrees (step 4) were all wrong. I consulted a few attorneys, some refused my case completly others quoted thosands. Thankfuly I found a paralegal to help, she fixed everything but it would have been faster & maybe even cheeper if I had just started there in the 1st place. And it turned out about a year later my friend tried to get her husbands retirement money that was in her divorce, turns out she didn't do her divorce right & the company managing his retirement wouldn't give her the money. Of course her ex refused to help her voluntarily & since her divorce was wrong she couldn't force him to. She was out thousands of dollars all because she did her own divorce!
- —Guest HeatherJ
Arizona Divorce Forms
- Typically it is easy to file your own forms, or you can use a paralegal to handle this for you. In most cases, an uncontested divorce is the usual scenario for individuals who file themselves because they pretty much agree on asset and property division, including child custody. It is still a tricky situation and only an Arizona divorce and family law attorney can provide you with advice concerning the law, paralegals cannot.
- —Guest Phoenix Divorce Lawyer
Paralegals Can Help and Save You Money
- About three years ago I and my wife made the decision to divorce. We didn't have a lot of money. Friends of mine recommend that we use a paralegal. I must say I was weary at first but the entire divorce process went off without a hitch. It was one of the best decisions we made. Paralegals cannot give legal advice but paralegals know the process and the rules of court. Our paralegal saved us thousands of dollars in comparison to the quotes we were given by attorneys. So if you have a simple case and you don’t want to do all that messy paperwork and hassle with the court yourself I would recommend using a paralegal.
- —Guest James85086
Reasonably Easy
- Ten years ago I filed for divorce on my own. It wasn't all that complicated as we had no children and we had very little shared property and debt. For the most part, I was able to use the standard forms found online. The forms came with easily understandable instructions. I also attached a rider which was accepted by the judge describing payment of mutually incurred debt. The expense at the time was difficult to handle since we had quite a bit of debt between us, but all things considered it wasn't expensive at the time. Once we got over a couple of hurdles put in place by the ill-informed paralegal my then soon-to-be-ex was consulting, the legal part of the process was quite simple.
- —author1701
