Before you make a move
There is a short window between deciding and filing where people do the thing that costs them the whole case. Not out of malice — out of fear, and usually on advice from a friend.
Every item on this page has one thing in common: it feels completely justified at the time. You are frightened, you are being told to protect yourself, and the thing you are about to do looks like protection.
And every one of them hands the other side the moral high ground in a process where that turns out to be worth a great deal — because a judge who has decided which of you is the more honest one decides a hundred smaller things accordingly, for two years.
Two of the seven are crimes in many states, and they are the two people do most.
If you are in danger, some of this advice is wrong for you. Several items below are about not disturbing the status quo. If the status quo is unsafe, disturbing it is the correct thing to do and doing it does not make you the aggressor.
Leaving, taking your children with you, and securing money you need to be safe are treated very differently by a court when there is a genuine safety reason. The route is a protective order, not self-help — and how those work is set out here.
If you are not sure which situation you are in, that uncertainty is itself worth talking to somebody about before you act.
The seven
Do not record a conversation without knowing your state’s rule
People do this constantly, believing they are gathering evidence. In a good number of states it is a criminal offense, and in almost all of them the recording is then useless to you anyway.
The distinction is one-party consent against all-party consent. In a one-party state you may record a conversation you are part of. In an all-party state every person on the call has to agree, and recording your own spouse without telling them is the offense. Which kind your state is, is not something to guess at, and it changes again if the call crosses a state line.
Recording your children, or leaving a device running in a room you are not in, is a separate and worse problem in every state.
You can be prosecuted. Not sued — prosecuted. Several states treat it as a felony.
The recording is excluded, so you gave up the criminal exposure for nothing.
And you have handed them the story. “She recorded me” is the only thing anybody remembers about that hearing.
Do not read their email, messages or accounts
The second thing everyone does, usually because they know the password, and often because they have known it for ten years. Knowing the password is not permission.
Federal and state computer-access and stored-communications laws are written broadly enough to cover a spouse logging into an account that is not theirs. So are the state computer-crime statutes. A shared household does not create shared accounts, and a password you were given years ago for one purpose is not consent for this one.
The same applies to installing anything on their phone, adding yourself to a location sharing service, or putting a tracker on a car that is not yours.
Criminal exposure, and civil liability on top of it — several of these laws carry a private right of action, so they can sue you personally.
Whatever you found is usually inadmissible, and produces the same self-inflicted wound as the recording.
There is a lawful route to almost all of it. It is called discovery, it is explained here, and it gets you the bank records, the statements and the messages without any of this.
Do not move, hide or retitle money or property
Moving money to a relative, opening an account they do not know about, taking cash out over months, retitling a car, transferring a business interest, paying down a debt owed to a family member. All of it is found.
It is found because bank records go back years, because forensic accountants do this for a living, and because the pattern is always the same and always visible. People who hide money are caught by the shape of the withdrawals, not by one of them.
And in many states an automatic order takes effect the moment a divorce is filed, barring both spouses from transferring or encumbering property without written consent or a court order. Nobody serves it on you separately. It is simply on.
The court can award the other spouse more, on the reasoning that you already took your share.
Sanctions and their attorney’s fees, which turns your concealment into a bill you pay for.
You are no longer believed about anything. This is the real cost. Every other contested question in the case — income, the house, the children — now gets decided by somebody who has already caught you once.
Do not empty the joint account
Different from hiding money, and much more common, because it feels like the obvious defensive step — and because somebody will tell you to do it before they tell you anything else.
Taking half, or taking what you need to live on for a month, is a defensible act. Taking all of it is not, and the difference is visible on a single statement.
The word for it is dissipation, and courts deal with it by treating the money as though you still had it.
The amount is charged back against your share. You do not keep it; you have simply been paid early, and in the meantime you have paid a lawyer to argue about it.
An emergency motion in the first fortnight, which is the most expensive kind of hearing there is and sets the tone for everything after it.
It converts a negotiable divorce into a contested one, often permanently. More cases turn hostile over this than over anything else on this page.
Do not delete anything
Texts, emails, photographs, social media, a dating profile, a browser history. The instinct is overwhelming and it is always wrong. Deleting is almost always more damaging than whatever was deleted.
The doctrine is spoliation, and the remedy is an adverse inference: a court can instruct that the destroyed material would have been unfavourable to you — without ever seeing it, and without anybody having to prove what it said.
Which means the worst possible version of what you deleted becomes the version of record. It also almost never works: messages exist on the other phone, in a backup, on a carrier’s system, or in a cloud account you forgot syncs.
The court assumes the worst about the content. That is the entire mechanism and it is devastating.
Sanctions, costs, and in serious cases a finding that decides an issue against you outright.
You look like somebody with something to hide, which is worse than being somebody who had something to hide.
Do not lock them out or cut off what they are entitled to
Changing the locks on a house you both own. Taking them off the phone plan or the health insurance. Canceling a card they use. Removing them as a beneficiary. Shutting off the utilities.
In many states the automatic order bars most of this too — the insurance and beneficiary changes explicitly, in several of them.
A locksmith will change the locks on a jointly-owned home without asking questions. That does not make it lawful, and it hands them a motion they will win.
An order putting everything back, plus their costs of getting it.
A contempt finding, which is the thing that follows you through the rest of the case.
Real harm to somebody who then has a real grievance — a lapsed health insurance policy in the wrong month is a catastrophe, and it will be described that way for two years.
Do not use the children as leverage
Taking them out of state. Not returning them. Refusing a visit because support is late. Telling them what is happening in order to shape whose side they take.
Courts weigh the existing arrangement very heavily, and an early move that changes it — especially one made without agreement — is read as a statement about your judgment rather than about theirs.
And support and time are not connected. Withholding one because the other has not been paid is not a defense anywhere, however unfair that feels when you are the one who has not been paid.
An emergency order returning them, and a first impression of you that is extremely difficult to change afterwards.
It can be treated as a factor against you in custody — often the single most consequential thing on this page.
Taking a child across a state line without agreement or an order has its own set of consequences, up to and including criminal ones. Which state decides is a real question and moving does not answer it in your favor.
What to do instead
All seven have a lawful version that gets you the same protection and costs you nothing.
- Copy, do not take, and do not delete. Statements, tax returns, deeds, titles, pay stubs, retirement statements, loan applications. Photograph or scan anything you already have lawful access to and store it somewhere only you can reach. Copying what you are entitled to see is not hiding anything.
- Open your own account at a different bank, and put your own future income into it. Not the joint money — yours. Credit in your own name is the same move.
- Write down what you spend. Three months of real numbers is worth more in a negotiation than any argument, and almost nobody has it.
- Change the passwords on your own accounts, and turn off the sharing you set up years ago. Doing that safely, without announcing it, is its own subject.
- Ask for it properly. Discovery gets you the accounts, the statements and the messages, lawfully and admissibly. It is slower and it is the version that works.
- Write the timeline now, while you remember it. Dates, amounts, who said what. Not for anybody else to read — for you, in six months, when it has all blurred.
Nothing on this list is worth what it costs. Every item buys you a short-term advantage that is reversed within weeks, and pays for it with the one thing you cannot buy back — being the person in the room whose account is believed.
This page describes general principles and the doctrines courts actually use. Every one of them varies by state, and several vary a great deal — recording law and automatic orders most of all. Where a specific rule matters to you, your state’s own material is here, and the automatic orders are set out on the page about what happens the moment somebody files.