Mediation and Divorce Blog - Equitable Mediation Services

After years of soul-searching and months of counseling, you’ve made the difficult decision to end your marriage.

But don’t want your divorce or separation to be a knock-down, drag-out brawl.

One where you and your spouse hate each other when it’s over. Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on divorce attorneys or litigating in court. And scar your children for life by destroying their family.

Instead, you want to have a peaceful divorce.

But you don’t know how or if it’s even possible.

So before you do anything, let’s first take a closer look at what it means to divorce amicably. And discuss five things you'll need to do to plan an amicable divorce process from the start.

If you and your husband or wife just made the decision to split up and end your marriage, you may be wondering how to get a divorce in California without a lawyer.

There could be many reasons you’d want to avoid attorneys in your divorce:

• You and your spouse want to keep things civil for the sake of your children: You don't want California family law attorneys putting your kids in the middle of your proceedings and using them as poker chips. Because even though your marriage is ending, you don’t want to destroy your kids and want to remain good co-parents moving forward.
• You don’t want to lose years of your life trapped in a never-ending court battle: You have friends or family whose California divorce process took 2-3 years to complete and they never got that time back or recovered emotionally. Your time is precious and you want to heal and move forward as quickly as possible.
• You don’t want to waste your financial resources on expensive legal fees: You’ve done some research and learned that the cost of retainers for California divorce lawyers average $5,000 to $10,000 per person. And you've heard that a divorce in California using attorneys can cost $25,000 or more! You’d rather spend your hard earned money on your kids and your future.

No matter what the reason, the answer is YES - you CAN get a divorce without a lawyer!

And not only that, but you don’t have to risk making expensive mistakes like you would with a do-it-yourself divorce method.

It's Saturday morning. You're standing at the kitchen sink.

And you hear it mocking you.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

That pipe under the sink has been leaking for weeks. And the bucket just about needs emptying again.

Between the kids' activities, homework, your travel schedule and everything else going on in your life, you just haven't had time to fix the darn thing.

But today is going to be the day...

Your wife keeps telling you to just hire someone. But you insist you're going to fix it yourself. It's a leaky pipe. How hard could it be?

Four hours and one flooded kitchen later, you finally give up.

The water from the now exploded pipe got under the fridge, shorting out the cooling coil. And while you were under there, you somehow managed to break the garbage disposal by hitting it with your wrench.

That leaky pipe which looked oh-so-simple to fix is now going to cost you a lot more than you had originally planned...