When people are worried that their spouse isn’t going to fairly divide assets with them, they’re often concerned that their spouse is going to try to hide those assets. For instance, maybe you are married to someone who has a lot of wide-ranging investment portfolios and you’re not really sure what is even in those accounts. You feel like it would be easy for your spouse to just transfer them to someone else and deny they ever existed.
This does happen, but it’s not the only underhanded action that people will take to prevent an ex from getting assets. A similar trick is simply to dissipate those assets so that they really are gone.
How could this happen?
Dissipation of assets can be thought of in many ways as squandering those assets. Your spouse is just trying to waste them. If he or she does this, then you can’t have your portion of that money.
This is typically done in non-refundable ways. If your spouse was able to buy a product that could simply be sold or returned, the money stays with the family. But if they spend it on something that you can’t return, then the money has truly been wasted. For instance, your spouse could decide to take a trip with their friends, dropping tens of thousands of dollars on plane tickets and lodging and food. Even if you find out they did this, you can’t ever get that money back, so they’ve essentially wasted your portion of the money – along with their own.
This doesn’t mean that you have no options, however. If your spouse has done something like this, you need to know exactly what steps to take next to protect your post-divorce future.