My Spouse owned Our house before we married and we both moved into the house after we were married. What will happen to the property?

Tricky answer.  First and foremost, the fact that your spouse had his or her name on the deed to the property before you all were married is not completely determinative of the issue.  In most circumstances, titles to assets are ignored in a Kentucky divorce case.  Instead, the background facts and circumstances are much more significant.  What was the original purchase price of the house and was it purchased through financing?  What was the value of the house at the time you were married?  Was it encumbered by a mortgage while you all were married?  How much mortgage debt existed when you were married?  How long have you been married?  Did you and your spouse decrease the existing mortgage indebtedness during the marriage?  Did your spouse improve the value of the property before the marriage, or did your spouse only maintain the property’s value before the marriage?  What kind of down payment did your spouse make when purchasing the home?  By how much?  Did you and your spouse improve the value of the property during the marriage?  How much mortgage debt is on the property now?  Did you and/or your spouse refinance the property at any point or take out loans and use the property as collateral?  Are one of you wanting to keep the house?  Do either of you have the ability to refinance and buy out the other’s interest in the home?  Do you both want to sell it?  Does only one of you want to sell it? 

​All of these questions, and many others, are relevant to determining your potential share in the house, and an experienced KY divorce lawyer will be able to go over these issues with you to determine what potential rights you may have.  From there, courts use different calculations to determine the marital vs. non-marital share of the home.  Courts also take different approaches if the parties cannot agree on how to handle the asset in the divorce process.

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