Disclosure Is Not Distribution
A provision requiring someone to tell you about money is not a provision that gets the money to you. I learned that the expensive way.
This is my own experience and a list of things worth asking about. It is not legal advice, I am not an attorney, and your decree is your lawyer's territory.
I want to tell you about a sentence I did not know to look for.
Before my final decree was entered, I raised a specific issue with my attorney. Money was coming in from an asset, and I wanted two things: an accounting of it, and a mechanism for how it would be distributed or credited. I put it in writing. I gave him proposed language.
The decree that was entered requires disclosure of that income.
It does not say who gets it.
Those are two different provisions
This is the part I want you to have, because it is not obvious until you are standing in it.
A disclosure provision obligates someone to tell you a number. Report the income. Provide a statement. Give an accounting.
A distribution provision obligates someone to move the money — who receives it, in what share, by when.
You can have the first without the second. I do. And a disclosure provision on its own produces exactly this: a number you are entitled to know, sitting in someone else's account, with no sentence in the document that says it ever comes to you.
That is not a loophole anybody exploited. It is a sentence that was never written.
Where the gap tends to open
Anywhere money arrives after the decree from something you both owned or shared:
- Rental income from a property that hasn't sold yet
- A tax refund on a jointly filed return
- A bonus, commission, or deferred compensation earned during the marriage but paid later
- Escrow or insurance refunds on a jointly held property
- A security deposit
- Proceeds from an asset being sold on a timeline
Every one of those is easy to address in advance and painful to address afterwards, because afterwards you are asking a court to supply a term the parties didn't agree to.
The question to ask before your decree is entered
For any asset still producing money, or any money expected to arrive later, ask your attorney one thing in writing:
Does the decree say who receives this, in what share, and by when — or does it only require that it be disclosed?
If the answer is only disclosure, ask what it would take to add the distribution language. That is a question worth asking before entry, while it is a drafting matter, rather than after, when it is a motion.
And ask what happens if it doesn't arrive
The second half of the same question, and the one I would now always ask:
If that provision is not complied with, what is my remedy, and who handles it?
Because "he shall disclose" with no deadline and no consequence is a sentence with very little behind it — the same problem as a decree that assigns a joint debt without requiring a refinance. A duty with no date and no teeth is closer to a suggestion than an obligation.
Why I am telling you this while it is unresolved
I do not yet know what happened to the language I asked for. Whether it was presented and declined, or never submitted, or dropped somewhere in between. I am still working through that, and I am not going to speculate about it in public.
But I do not need to know the answer to give you the lesson, and the lesson does not improve with time. It is simply this:
Read your decree for the sentence that moves the money. Not the sentence that reports it.
If you cannot find it, that is not you missing something. That may be the document missing something — and now, at least, it is a question you know to ask.
Part of From the Middle of It — written while I am still in my own transition rather than looking back on it.