In the final days before the dissolution of my marriage and the crummy financial agreement I got stuck with my attorney insisted that I get an expert to do a title search regarding the real estate in my case. That must have cost me around $400.00 or more.
Before you get pulled into this kind of nonsense consider doing the title search yourself!
All you have to do is look up the land records for the particular town you live on by googling online. So if you live in Farmville, for instance, you would type Farmville Land Records into the search engine and hit return. Once you have gotten to the land records for the town you live in, all you then have to do is type your name or your soon to be X's name into the search engine and include the timeframe you are considering.
Anything and everything related to real estate and your X and you will be listed on the land records. This means that the title deed to your home, any mortgage documents, release from mortgage documents, liens, will all be there.
Next, if you click on view next to any particular document, you will see that a copy of the document is available online--most towns have scanned them all into their computers--and you can then print out a copy of your own, all without even leaving your house, or the library, wherever you do you work.
You can pretty much get good copies of these documents from any town or city in the entire United States wherever you think either you or your X may own real estate. Doing this yourself saves you the money you might have to spend to have someone do it for you.
There is another reason why a search of this kind is helpful. Many men siphen money out of the marriage by taking out mortgages without the knowledge of their wives. In the sixteen years of my marriage, my X took out or attempted to take out as much as one or two mortgages per year. There is no way to track those mortgages if your X didn't tell you about them except through examining the mortgage documents listed in the land records.
At least if you review the land records you can find out which mortgage companies your X made applications to and you can find out how much money he borrowed. Once you have that information you can then subpoena the mortgage companies for the mortgage applications which include even more financial information which could be helpful to you in tracking down hidden assets or simply confirming the accuracy of what you know already.
Not only can you get the names of the mortgage companies, you can get the names of the lawyers who were involved in the transactions and also the names of the mortgage company representatives, so you have the names of people who could really help you with your inquiries.
These records generally go back at least two or three decades or more, so you can obtain a substantial amount of information from them. For those of us whose X's have kept us completely in the dark regarding financial matters, a review of these documents can be truly revelatory.
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