Louisiana Divorce Lawyer: Another Community Property Example

Trish and Chris are dating exclusively and are thinking about getting married.  They live together in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Chris works as a paralegal to a divorce lawyer and Trish works in sales at a computer manufacturer.  One thing that Trish and Chris both love is cars.  They are subscribed to a variety of car magazines and they watch a huge amount of car related shows.  Each one of them actually owns three cars, for a total of six between them.  A couple weeks before they plan to get married, Trish and Chris go to the dealership together and purchase a car.  The car goes under Chris’s name, but Trish helps to pay for it.
The day after they get married, Chris and Trish go to the car dealership yet another time.  They buy a car, and this time it gets put under Trish’s name.  For the next three years, the married couple finally takes a break from purchasing cars.  Then, in the fourth year of their marriage, they just can’t resist.  Each of them sells one of the cars which they had purchased before they got married and uses the money they each respectively earned from the sale to turn around and buy another car.
In year five of their marriage, Chris and Trish go through some tough times in their marriage and each decide to contact a divorce lawyer.  Even though they have an opportunity under Louisiana law to decide amongst themselves how to divide up the property, they two just cannot seem to agree on how to split up the cars.
In Louisiana, one of the main ways that a divorce lawyer can tell what will happen to a piece of property after the marriage ends is by determining when it was purchased and with what funds.  For example, many things which spouses purchase after they have been married, as long as they use money they’ve made after they were married—are considered “community property” and are owned evenly between them.  The opposite of community property is “separate property.”  Using that generality as a guidepost, divorce lawyer would probably struggle to determine without more evidence if any of the above cars truly belong to the community.  The car was purchased by Chris and Trish right after they got married was probably purchased with money acquired prior to the marriage – therefore separate funds went into a community asset.  Notice that even though the car was put under Trish’s name, it is still community property.
As for all the other cars, a divorce lawyer would likely have an easier time finding that they are probably the separate property of the person who purchased them.  The cars bought before the marriage was created are not community property.  Even the car which Trish and Chris purchased “together” is not community property; although depending on other facts that we may not know, Trish may still have an ownership interest.  Either way, it is not part of the marital regime, and any ownership that Trish might have is the result of laws not germane to our discussion here.  Finally, notice that the cars that each of the spouses bought during the marriage would likely be separate property, because they were purchased with the proceeds of the sale of each spouses’ separate property.
This above is informational only, not legal advice. Will Beaumont. New Orleans.