{"id":4211,"date":"2010-03-22T11:05:45","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T11:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2010\/03\/staying-together-for-the-mortgage.html"},"modified":"2010-03-22T11:05:45","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T11:05:45","slug":"staying-together-for-the-mortgage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2010\/03\/staying-together-for-the-mortgage.html","title":{"rendered":"Staying together for the mortgage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recession may be hard on the pocket book, but it may be keeping together more marriages<\/a>, as a result: <\/p>\n

\n\"Divorce.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>In the Great Recession, breaking up is hard to do.<\/p>\n

With housing values depressed and jobs disappearing, divorce has become a luxury beyond the reach of some couples. There is often not enough money to pay for separate households or to hire lawyers, fight over children and go to court.<\/p>\n

What has always been painful is now desperate and confounding, with a growing number of couples deciding to wait out the economic storm while others take new approaches — such as living together as they separate.<\/p>\n

“I have lots of files sitting in the drawer, where people can’t move forward,” says David Goldberg, a divorce lawyer and mediator in Gaithersburg. He has been working in family law for 44 years and says he has never seen a time like this one.<\/p>\n

Lately, he said, “I have a lot of clients who have ended up in bankruptcy.”<\/p>\n

The difficulties of divorce in the downturn are familiar to Paulene Foster, a 42-year-old federal worker from Olney, who says her precarious finances forced her to wait a year. If that wasn’t enough, she also shared a house with her estranged husband — him in the basement, her upstairs. Strapped months went by as the couple were saddled with a suburban townhouse that would not sell.<\/p>\n

“It was a mess,” Foster said.<\/p>\n

Her divorce, filed last month with a $105 check after going to a self-help law clinic in Montgomery County, comes as the national rate of failed marriages has declined slightly — not necessarily because divorce-minded couples are happier than before but, some experts suggest, because they don’t have the money to call it quits.<\/p>\n

At one Woodbridge law firm, 20 to 25 percent of clients seeking a divorce live under the same roof as their estranged spouse to save money as they await court action.<\/p>\n

Other couples say they are stymied by the grim reality that they owe more on the family home than they could get if they sold it.<\/p>\n

How do they start over if debt is all that’s left to divide?<\/p>\n

Heather Hostetter, who has a divorce practice in Bethesda, said that many couples used to divorce with enough equity in a house so that both spouses could re-create lives not so different from their old ones.<\/p>\n

“It used to be you could go own another home,” she said. “Maybe it’s a little smaller, maybe it’s not in the same neighborhood.<\/p>\n

“Now you see people who go from homeowners to renters.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Check out the WaPo link<\/a> for more. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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