Divorcing while attending higher education? We can help with the unique facts of a higher education divorce. In a recent case, wife desired to have a doctorate in mental health services and relied heavily on her husband to care for their young children while she pursued her career goals. Our client reported that she lost focus on their relationship and likely started to date a fellow student. He did not want to make an issue of the new significant other but he had concerns about having a supportive co-parent and was stressed out about the financial burden of his wife's education, growing children, and increasing extracurricular expenses. After trying to work out the details of a settlement with his busy wife, he hired our firm to help him secure a majority of the overnights with his children, determine his wife's income, and determine each parties contributions to debt and activities.

When he came to Birt Law, he felt pressured to ignore his children's needs and his own needs while he alone watched the kids while wife attended classes, shuffled the children to and from school and extracurricular activities, and put his own career on the backburner. He expressed he felt rejected due to wife's new relationship and scared about paying support based on inaccurate income projections.

Our firm's goals were to obtain shared parenting for our client so that he could maintain consistency for the children and give him time to pursue career opportunities to benefit his children. We also wanted to impute (estimate with support) the salary of his wife so that our client was not burdened with support obligations that were not accurate. After diligently working with our client to collect factual support for his customary parenting schedule and financial obligations, the firm exceeded it's goals by obtaining a settlement that barred maintenance to wife due to her relationship outside of the marriage and ability to support herself, we obtained a majority of overnights for our client, our client was awarded residential custody of the children, and our client's statutory financial obligations were minimized so that he could pay for all of the customary expenses and activity needs of his children.

Our client reported he felt a sense of relief, a reduction of stress, and an increase in self confidence now that the divorce came to an end.