Things get messy after a divorce no matter how clean you think they are. Before you get married you want to make sure that you’ve completely sealed off and contained the disaster that was your previous marriage. The last thing you want to happen is for things from a previous marriage to pile over into your new one, it adds unnecessary stress and stretches a person thin.
To me, a new marriage or any marriage is a fresh start on life. It’s a reset button, a chance for a breath of fresh air, a new life, and a new start, with a new person.
To me that means that everything you were and everything you had in your last marriage, stays in your last marriage, excluding kids, sometimes you want to bring those along with you. Your kids will always be your kids no matter what happens but your spouse can disappear at any given moment.
Everyone that gets married has the same naive thought that this is a forever thing, nobody gets married thinking otherwise. Yet, over half the marriages end in divorce. You have nothing more special than any other person that has gotten married, so while you believe it can’t happen to you…it can.
So here they are.
Child Custody
If you had children in your previous marriage the first thing you want to have on lockdown is Child Custody. It’s great that you got a schedule in your divorce for parenting time but now it’s time to examine that and make sure it’s what you want. Do you get enough time and will those times work for your next marriage.
You have to consider where you are your next spouse are going to want to live. Obviously, if you’re doing week on/week off and the kids are bound to a school district, that doesn’t afford you the opportunity to move. You can fix the order so that one parent has school year and the other summers or some other plan.
Sometimes your new spouse won’t mind when custody battles take place but sometimes they do because they may also have their own obligations and commitments in another location. This makes moving in together very hard when one person has to make a choice between their kids and their spouse.
Your job here is to make sure that one or both parenting schedules work for your marriage, otherwise you’re going to be off to a very bad start. On top of that, it’s not very respectful to be fighting with your ex in court right away after you get married, that’s bad mojo in itself.
Child Support
If you are behind on child support you need to fix it…immediately. People can and do go to jail for failure to pay child support, in some cases for up to a year if you fail to appear when you receive notices. They will issue a warrant and they will find you.
Unless you plan on fleeing out of country and never coming back, which usually isn’t something people do because they’d be abandoning their kids, then you need to go take care of it BEFORE you get married.
The last thing you want to happen is for your spouse to get arrested and put in jail for a year on your honeymoon night for unpaid child support.
It’s a ridiculous thing to let hang over your head and to run from. Go in and pay your dues and take care of it. Serve time if you have to BEFORE you get married.
If your wife disappears all of a sudden people are going to start wondering where she is. If you don’t tell them they’ll think you buried her in your back yard. If you tell them the truth they are going to look at you like: “What the hell did you just get yourself into?”
Save yourself the trouble and fix it.
Warrants / Criminal Behavior
It’s also a good idea to take care of any warrants or legal things you have against you that isn’t related to child support. If you’ve lost your license to a DUI, go pay your fine, and do what it takes to get it back.
If you’ve got speeding tickets, go to court and settle them. They can and do issue warrants for these things. They can and will report to credit bureaus to damage your credit. They can and will take money from your tax refund.
Imagine how mad you would be when your entire tax refund is missing because your spouse had a speeding ticket she never took care of. Or when you go to buy your very first house together you find out that your wife has bad credit. What about the family road trip you’re on where you get pulled over for a routine traffic stop and hauled off to jail because of a warrant you didn’t take care of?
These things cause unnecessary problems in the marriage and can be traumatizing to the kids when you get hauled off to jail in front of them.
Take Care of Debts
Don’t get remarried until you’ve taken care of or cleared off your marital debts. This is a fresh start you’re looking for, don’t’ drag debt into your new marriage. Go bankrupt if you have to, but don’t ignore it.
Ignoring debts also results in wage garnishment, poor credit score, liens being placed on property, liens placed on bank accounts, and tax refunds being withheld.
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck you’re not going to be very happy when 25% of your check is missing by court order. It’s also not a fun thing to have collection agencies harassing you through day and night. Or to have your savings account frozen and stolen to repay a debt.
Don’t set yourself up for failure, take care of this stuff before you get married again. Don’t take your garbage with you.
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