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Staying Together for the House

Talk about sweat equity. Maybe more like blood, sweat, tears and irritation equity. San Bernadino Press-Enterprise:  

Love may fade, but bills must be paid.  

That’s why some couples who are divorced or separated are continuing to live together, experts in the Inland area and throughout Southern California say.

Divorce lawyers, real estate agents and psychologists who work with ex-couples say they are seeing men and women staying together after the breakup because they just can’t afford to live separately, given the slumping housing market.

Former partners are not parting “because the equity in the house, which is their biggest asset, is rapidly going down,” said Martin Bender, a Temecula lawyer specializing in family law. “A lot of parties are (afraid of) losing their major asset. They are trying to hold on in hopes that it will go up.”

…

“Divorce is an economic disaster, so they can’t really afford to do anything but pay the lawyers,” said Kristina Diener, a Woodland Hills clinical psychologist who has worked with divorced couples and written extensively on the subject.

The trend of cohabitating exes differs also from the so-called “nondivorce” — in which couples do not legally separate but lead separate lives while still living together — for legal reasons. Unless spouses legally break their union, each party can continue to claim a share of their joint assets, including the home.

Riverside Realtor Collette Lee said she closed escrow last month on a home whose occupants had divorced six months earlier and were sleeping in separate bedrooms and leading separate lives.

“It was an amicable divorce — well, as amicable as a divorce can be,” Lee said. “It was just very strange.”

…

Diener said cohabitating exes often get along better than they did before the breakup.

“They’re able to tolerate each other because now they’re not bedfellows, but they’re the devil they know,” she said. “They’re civil and respectful. It’s like no rings, no strings.”

Some even reconcile.

“They take a breather from each other emotionally — it’s almost better than a marriage counselor.”

Howbout that. Money can change everything.

Topics: money, everything

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 6:23 pm on Wednesday, February 6, 2008

One Response to “Staying Together for the House”

1. saltydog Says:
   February 8th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

   Ah, reality.

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