I hate being at a point of having to ask for help, but here I am. I have been going through a divorce for over a year and a half now even though we have no children together and we were only married for just over 5 years. The divorce process should not be taking this long. It seems like it is being purposely dragged out by my ex to create as much debt for me as he can.

I am the one that wanted a divorce. Why did I leave? Physical abuse, financial abuse, and his alcoholism - along with the other types things that people that are willing to do those things to their partners do. During the time I was still at our house after we agreed to divorce my ex constantly told me that he wanted to try to do the divorce ourselves without bringing in lawyers. We don't have kids together and were only married a little over 5 1/2 years. Dividing things shouldn't be that hard and the money we could save on legal fees we could both use towards rebuilding our own lives. I believed him. I agreed to try to settle things without lawyers, and made many decisions with that as the goal, that have attributed to my current position. I have these detailed below so you can understand why I made these decisions and how they ended up contributing to where I'm at now.

I do work a full-time job, take on extra side work when I can, have been selling personal belongings, and cut many expenses so my dollars can stretch farther. -- You know, the costs you expect to go through if you get divorced. Unfortunately, the divorce has not been as straightforward as it should have been and I am now drowning in legal fees. I need a miracle just to make it through to the end. I have to share with you enough of what has been happening for you to understand what I am going through and why I need help. I will be leaving many details out and I will not share anything that I don't have documented proof of. At this point I owe my lawyer over $15,000 and there is going to be a lot more added to that bill. I did make the initial retainer payment to her and have been making monthly payments to her. This is the amount due with all the payments. She has seen the games he is playing first hand and has allowed me to accrue debt with her since she knew I would be completely run into the ground if she didn't stay on. I'm grateful to have a lawyer willing to fight for an unfair situation! We have mediation at the end of this month, another pre-trial conference at the beginning of October, and if it goes this far, the trial at the end of October. I'm easily going to have another $5,000 - $10,000 or more in attorneys fees on top of that.

I've made what some people would call "mistakes" going through the divorce process by following the rules the way one is supposed. Following the rules has cost me a lot of extra money as I describe below if you want to read it. I promised myself I was going to keep my own ethics and not let his games change who I am. I'm still holding firm on that even though it is costing me way more than I expected. I'm willing to deal with debts, but he can't take my soul from me.

I share all of this with you not for sympathies or condolences. The more games he plays the more I know I made the right call to leave. I knew it would be hard. I was mentally and emotionally prepared for hard. I know this is a temporary point in life and I will get to start rebuilding once the divorce is finalized. I feel that he has made it clear that he is going to make it as difficult as possible for me to rebuild. I am grateful for any contribution you are willing to make to help close the gap of what I owe and will soon owe.

If you want more details of what I have gone through during this divorce process you can keep reading below.

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Games to Raise Our Legal Costs

My ex has delayed the divorce process multiple times causing more legal fees for both of us, except he can afford them. He makes well over 6 figures. I make significantly less than him. I have heard him talk about how he can outspend me on legal fees before we separated when we were having marital issues. He threatened me not to get a lawyer. He made veiled threats about how he would file for bankruptcy if I left him. During our marriage, any time we would argue he would cancel my joint cards to our checking and debit accounts. Sometimes for months at a time. With all of this and the physical abuse instances he did to me, I expected him to fight dirty - just like he did throughout our marriage. I didn't expect it to be at the level he has taken it to.

He delayed submitting his financial records until after he filed for bankruptcy DURING the divorce process. I hope you never have to experience why all legal outlets strongly advise against filing for bankruptcy during a divorce. It basically ties the divorce judges hands on making any financial decisions against the person that filed and the divorce cannot be finalized until his bankruptcy has been fulfilled.

Did he HAVE to file for bankruptcy - no. Somehow in his "destitute" finances he has been able to continue paying for his country club membership aside for about a 4 month period when he first filed his bankruptcy and has been spending around $500+ a month at liquor stores and another several hundred dollars a month at bars and grills, and still continuing his day trading - which is not his job. He does it on the side on his own in addition to a regular 401K account. As soon as his bankruptcy was accepted, he rejoined his favorite country club and has even traveled to play on other expensive golf courses.

Yes, there was a lot of debt, most of it the mortgage on our home and the second mortgage he took out on it telling me he was paying off debts at the time that were mostly incurred from legal fees and from making an arrangement to move into our new house before the old one was sold. Plus both of our previous exes that we did have kids with took us back to court when we got married - and legal fees aren't cheap. Let's face it - two house payments and two sets of utilities, and legal fees will rack up some debt! However, I learned through the documentation supplied through the court that while he did pay some debts off or down, he also put a large chunk into his day trading account buying high risk shorts and puts on stocks. I wasn't allowed to see any bank or credit card statements during our marriage showing exactly where our money was going. What I have been learning looking at them has made my stomach churn.

Sale of Our House

We put our house on the market a few months after deciding to divorce, spending some time getting it fixed up and ready to sell. The house and property was appraised at close to $1.2 Million. We bought it after we got married and I was on the title as half owner. We had lived in it for 5 years and purchased it for significantly less than that. Even with the second mortgage we had some equity in it. I am quite handy and helped with repairs on the house and updates to get it ready to sell starting in February 2024. I left the house in June 2024, but continued to help with repairs and getting stuff out of it through July that summer. It finally sold in May of this year - 2025. The bankruptcy he filed in February forced most of the profit to go towards the debts he had filed for, many of which included people he hired to make more improvements to the house. He spent over $26,000 between different companies to have most of the rooms painted. - $26,000+ on Interior Paint - according to his invoices. Of course, one of those invoices was to a friend's company that he paid to come out to our home in Olathe, KS from Colorado. He was able to whittle the profit from our $1.2 Million dollar house down to $3,500!!! Which is sitting in escrow until the judge tells us how the money is to be divided.

Plus, I found out that he let the new owners start moving things in over a week early before the house closed. He didn't tell me or either of the real estate agents this. I was tipped off by a neighbor I was friends with. She sent me photos of the U-Haul in the driveway. My ex had moved out the month prior to this. I asked my real estate agent to do a walk through when I found out and sure enough the new family had started moving things in. If you have ever bought or sold a house you know this is a GIANT no-no and can cause all sorts of liability issues and even lead to the sale not closing. The real-estate agents made us all sign additional contracts that gave the new owners legal permission to be there. My ex claims he did this out of the goodness of his heart and didn't charge them. However, when we moved into the same house before our contract closed on it we paid the owner a pro-rated rent for the amount of time until it closed, so I am struggling to believe he did this for free.

Gave Up the Majority of My Income at the Time to Get the House Ready to Sell

I agreed to give up most of my main source of income - pet sitting - when we started the divorce process so we could get the house ready to sell. It makes sense though to not have a bunch of animals in your house or on your property if you are trying to sell it and i wanted to do all I could to make the divorce go as smoothly for both of us as I could. I continued to keep my pet sitting clients that I took care of at their house, but this was a very small percentage of my clients. I also had a part time job online at the time that I kept, but I was making several thousand a month pet sitting, so my income was cut drastically. I am a very handy person so it also made sense to have me do many of the repairs and updates to get it ready to sell so we could save money on having to pay contractors. I have done custom interior painting, remodeled multiple bathrooms, fixed plumbing issues, drywall issues, and even fixed a giant 6' x 10' hole in the basement ceiling of his old house that had to be ripped out because it had issues from a slow leak from the kitchen sink above it. I found out during this divorce process that he filed a home owners insurance claim for the repair using quotes he had gotten from contractors to submit to the insurance company, but I didn't get paid a dime. I had no idea he got a check from the insurance company for the work I did. Many times that I was working on repairs and updates to the house he was out golfing. He golfed several times a week most weeks.

Note: I have since been able to get promotions at my job to where I am not a full-time employee. I still haven't done much pet sitting since I'm not allowed where I'm staying and my clientele are near where I used to live. I'm about a 30 minute drive from where I was.

My ex is not very handy. Many times he "helped" when I wasn't there I came back to what felt like sabotage creating more work for me. Most of the times he "helped me" was when I wasn't in the house - either moving stuff out or pet sitting at a client's house. He helped to paint the trim in the master bedroom and splattered paint on the hardwood floors and got white paint fingerprints on the front of the black split AC unit that I had to clean up. He was conveniently gone golfing and the real estate photographer was getting ready to come by. Other times he decided he would pull tape while I was gone on another room I had painted and pulled giant portions of paint off with it. I have no idea why he didn't stop when he saw the paint coming up. He had me epoxy the floor of what was our workout room. We had moved the workout equipment he was keeping to the next room of course so I could do the whole floor at one time. He moved the workout equipment back into the room after I left while the epoxy was still wet and ruined the floor. There are many more instances than this. I took photos of the damage he did to the work I had done.

Moving Out

Part of the agreement in me taking this income loss for a few months and doing the repairs and updates on the house was that he would help me get into my own place when we put the house on the market as long as I agreed that any help he provided would come out of my shared of our marital assets. I felt that was a fair offer and said I would be happy to sign a document he could use if I tried to screw him, which he told me wasn't necessary. My goal was to get into a little starter house with 2-3 bedrooms and a fenced in yard so I could resume my pet sitting. I was happy with something older and cheaper since I have the skills to fix it up. With it just being my son and I, I didn't need a lot of space. I was expecting the kind of place you get when you are just starting out or starting over. I wanted to stay near the area within my son's school and my pet sitting clientele.

He showed me multiple spreadsheets he had created of what our assets and debts were and what my projected each of our portions might be depending on what the house sold for. He wanted more since he makes more - ok, fair. I agreed and not fighting it would save us both a lot of money. At the beginning of May last year he told me he wanted me out by the first of June. I told him I was fine with that, but I would need him to start the help he promised upfront so I could pay the down payment on buying or renting a place since my income had been reduced so much for multiple months and I hadn't had access to our joint accounts since I told him I wanted a divorce. The agreement was a monthly amount - not a lump sum. He agreed he would help so I could get into a place. Come to the end of May and he still hadn't given me the amount we agreed on. I know from the past that if I don't adhere to the terms he sets precisely, he will refuse his side of the agreement. So I asked a friend if I could move in with them for a month or two until I could get my own place sorted out. This friend has helped other people with renting a room from him while they got back on their feet. I officially moved out on time as agreed. My ex backed out of our agreement. He claimed the offer to help was only for if I got my own place. I reminded him that I couldn't get my own place without help. That didn't matter. He completely reneged on our agreement.

Looking back I feel I was used for free labor and that he wanted me in a bad position financially. I failed to mention that as soon as we agreed the divorce was happening at the end of January he made me hand over all my cards for our joint accounts so I had no access to them. I only had access to the little amount I was making. I'm still at my friend's house over a year later. Even though I have increased my income through my job, I haven't made enough to account for the legal fees. The small amount of savings I had is gone.

I kept helping with house repairs and interior painting even after I moved out with this spirit in mind - many times working on it while he went out golfing. He's not handy and when he would try to help he caused more problems with the project that I had to fix so I didn't complain about him going off golfing even though I knew it was unfair. He got a divorce lawyer shortly after I moved out without telling me and had me served when I was at the house working on repairs and loading up more stuff he packed he wanted me to take.

Storage Units

Another issue is that I rented storage units to put my son's and my things in until I could get settled into my own place, expecting to only need them for a couple of months. I ended up with way more stuff than expected. I do have a lot of tools and supplies for household repair work and I had a business reselling items on Ebay and Facebook market that I found on clearance or still new in the package at garage sales. Plus my son's and my clothing and personal items. We made an agreement to sell as much of it as we could while we got the house ready to sell - which I was put in charge of because "I'm good at that sort of thing" and we divided the profits at the moment of anything sold. My ex claimed he didn't want things from his previous marriage because he didn't want the "energy" of it. I figured I could easily get rid of anything I didn't want at a later date. He did keep nearly all of the high value items though. I was already too tired from household repairs, interior painting, cleaning and listing items for sale, managing the incoming messages from buyers, working part time, and bouncing around to pet sitting gigs I could get at people's houses. He packed several boxes on days I took pet sitting jobs at the client's house to "help me". I have come to find out that in doing so, he took pieces apart from several things and put them in random boxes. So there are many things that I can't use or sell until I get through enough boxes to find all of the pieces. There is also trash like used paper towels and many broken items in the boxes he packed.

I asked my lawyer last year if I could start getting rid of stuff from the storage units since it was clear I wasn't going to be able to get my own place anytime soon and I flat out couldn't afford the monthly payments. She said I need to hold onto everything for now until we had an agreement of what could be sold or given away and how that affects the division of assets. So I held onto them and eventually started looking for boxes I needed like winter clothes. I only brought enough to my friend's house to get through for a couple of months. I asked again months later if I could start going through things to get rid of since I can't afford the storage units. She reached out to his attorney that wanted photos of every item before making any agreements. I said that is absolutely unreasonable and I am not going to pull everything out of storage, photograph it, then put it back in while I waited for approval. I offered to let him have back anything that needed to be sold since he has multi-car garage space and wouldn't need to pay for storage. I also offered to photograph and track things as I pulled them out and got them sold or donated - this offer they accepted. And now he wants half of everything I have sold - and he doesn't want to help pay for the storage units they have been in. Games people, I'm telling you!

I have been able to get the biggest storage unit emptied and closed since I got the approval in May this year to start going through them thanks to some help from some great friends. I couldn't have done it without great people in my life! I have another one partially emptied that I have the goal of getting emptied this month.

Other Thoughts

As I mentioned, these are just a few examples of how I have gotten to this point. I may not have needed to share so much, but I'm asking for a lot of money. It's not normal to ask the community for help with legal fees - unless you are fighting an unfair battle. And this battle has been very unfair.

I have decided to start a website will be designed to help others that are going through similar situations, are in abusive relationships, and provide resources to hopefully prevent some people from getting into abusive situations. I have much of the template written down, but I haven't started building it yet. My delay is being able to buy the domain name and hosting. I've built websites before so I don't have to hire anyone to do it for me. If anyone is interested in following this project as I start to build it let me know!