As Bitcoin surges in value once again, divorcing spouses may be tempted to convert cash into electronic currency. Finding it can be harder than finding cash, but if you do find it, you can make a comparatively fast case that your spouse is undercounting assets.
Photo: FlippyFlink, CC BY-SA 4.0 via
Now and again a client comes to us for information on a spouse’s assets. But if the client has already signed a power of attorney, the search could involve both spouses’ assets.
A power of attorney between married people could work like this: Wife grants Husband the power to buy and sell things on Wife’s
Fine print doesn’t mean print that’s illegible or incomprehensible, but it’s there for a good reason.
The fine print is where you will often find an important potential marital asset that can easily slip off the net-worth statement divorcing parties need to provide: Restricted stock units (RSU’s).
These are not the same thing as
If asked to describe the attributes of a good investigator, “empathetic” is not the first word that would come to mind for most people.
For anyone looking for hidden assets, though, empathy is a must.
Empathy means “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” and it’s a critical tool for any professional
Imagine fighting this virus without the internet or electricity.
The Covid-19 pandemic is one of two catastrophes we’ve read about from time to time over the past few years. The risk of a deadly virus has been discussed by the likes of Bill Gates and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Most of us read, and then hope
A frequent problem when taking in a new asset search in divorce is figuring out how far back to look.
Clients in divorce usually know a lot more about their spouse than anyone else, at least when it comes to daily habits, close friends, and other bits of information that can inform our asset search.
Half the time when someone calls our office about asset identification they tell us, “I need bank account information.”
When told that without a court order there is nearly no legal way to get that kind of information from a bank without the account holder’s consent, many ask: “If it’s illegal, why did an investigator
We’ve written here many times about how tough (i.e. slow and expensive) it can be to track down overseas assets. In short, you need to be going after serious money to make it worthwhile, and you can often get clues to the location of offshore money right here in the U.S. That’s helpful if you
This blog has been pretty clear over the years that an offshore asset search is not for the faint of heart or anyone on a tight budget.
We have recommended that even if you think there are assets outside the U.S., you could get a better idea of where they may be by searching U.S.
The college admissions scandal has been full of wonderful teachable moments – about ethics, humility, greed and corruption. Now for asset hunters there is a new nugget today: overpaying on purpose.
As the Boston Globe reported yesterday, a municipal home assessor found it odd that a home in Needham, Massachusetts (near Cambridge, where Harvard