If you and your spouse are moving toward a divorce, you may want to close your shared bank account. Generally, couples will empty their joint account and start new individual accounts where they can deposit their paychecks moving forward.
However, it’s important to know exactly how to do this. For instance, if you and your spouse are both listed as joint account holders, you may need to close the account together. Your financial institution may prevent you from doing it on your own, so some level of cooperation is necessary.
But this isn’t the case in all scenarios. For instance, your spouse may only be an authorized user on your account. In that case, you may have the ability to close it on your own. Just make sure you know what steps to follow before taking action.
Why is this important?
The way you handle this process is critical because it could be misconstrued as an effort to hide assets. Perhaps the funds in your account are marital assets that need to go through property division. If you close the account and take all of the money without notifying your spouse, they could claim you’re trying to dissipate or conceal assets that they deserve. This can make property division much more complicated.
As a result, it’s best to cooperate with your spouse. It may even be wise to divide the balance of the account in advance. However, you certainly don’t want to do anything that gives the impression that you’re trying to hide assets or circumvent the legal property division process.
This is just one important step to take as you move toward divorce. Be sure you know about all of your legal options at this time.