gypsygabba
Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? California. After date of separation and filing for divorce, Ex-spouse took out a $392,000 on an inherited (him) small ranch that together, we totally gutted and remodeled with community funds; (funds were from a house that we owned and sold after building it and living in it for three years) as well as our construction company funds and company labor. Call me naïve, although I prefer “trusting,” I believed him when he told me that IF I would consent to sell our new house, one-half of this ranch would be mine, and that he would “even let us” remodel the house to my specifications. I kept my part of the deal, but when we visited the trust attorney to get OUR trust in order, he informed my husband that, by leaving it in the trust of his “Joe Blow’s Child’s Exempt Trust, that he could never be sued for any lawsuit for construction defects, etc., where he could lose the ranch. When he determined that construction lawsuits could cost a pretty penny, he again made a verbal promise to share half this ranch with me but that he didn’t want to take a chance on losing the ranch in such an instance. In fact, the reason that he felt that way was because he had done some substandard construction on one of the houses that “he” built (he always spoke as if he was the only one who had any say-so over the business). We had been married 20 years by that time, so I took him at his word and didn’t insist that we put it over in our trust. Nevertheless, it was commingled and there is no way to track expenses as it was all taken from the same account: Blow’s Construction Co. The ranch has significantly increased in value, mostly because of the improvements that we made. Am I entitled to part of this value?