To tell the judge what you want to happen, you'll need to understand some legal terms and some California property law. You’ll see terms like separate and community property on many court forms. These are important to know because this is how a court will decide how to divide your property. In general, you keep your separate property and split your community property.

Community property

Community property: What you own or owe together during your marriage

Did you live outside California for part of your marriage? Then it's called quasi-community property. Learn more

Separate property

Separate property: What you each own or owe individually from before you married or after you separated, and any gifts or inheritance

Community or separate? You need to know your date of separation

You need to know when you married and when you separated to figure out what's separate property and what's community property. The day of your marriage is generally easy to figure out. Separation can be trickier.

Date of separation:

• The day that one of you let the other one know (by actions or words) that they wanted to end your marriage

• After that day, your or their actions were consistent with wanting to end your marriage

For some people, this is the day they moved out. For others, this is a day the two spouses agreed together that their marriage was over, and they made plans to divorce. Generally, from that day forward, what you or your spouse earned or loans you took out were no longer community property.

How to tell when something is community property

Generally, this is what either of you earned (or debt you took out) after you married, but before you separated. The “community” is you and your spouse. The property belongs to you both equally.

Community property is:

• Anything you earned while married

• Anything you bought with money you earned while married

• Debt you take on while married

Property you didn’t earn, like a gift or inheritance one of you received while married, is not community property.

Have student debt? There are different rules. Learn more

You may have more community property than you realize. Many people don’t think about retirement or pension plans. You have the right to part of the money in that plan if any of it was earned during your marriage.

You may have more community debts than you realize. Your spouse may have debt in his or her own name that you don’t know about. Usually, these debts belong to you both.

https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/divorce/property-debts

The judge must use a set of factors (the Family Code 4320 factors) to decide the length and amount of support. If you’re asking the judge to order long-term spousal support, you will need to let the court know what your situation is for each of these factors.

The judge must consider:

• How long you were married

• Your age and health

• Your incomes

• What you’re capable of earning (called earning capacity)
  This means each person’s skills and education along with the job market for those skills. They also consider the time and cost it might take to gain skills and education.

• Your standard of living while married
  Standard of living is basically your lifestyle. It means things like the type of house you lived in, the kind of car you owned, what kind of vacations you took and how often, whether you used credit cards a lot.

• How much property or debt you each have

• Whether one of you helped the other get an education, training, career, or professional license

• Need and ability to pay
  This means how much money the person asking for support would need to have the same lifestyle during their marriage and whether the person paying can pay that amount.

• The impact of tax laws on spousal support

• If there was a history of abuse during your marriage

If you have children together:

• How caring for children impacted either of your careers

• How working now will impact your children

These are also good things to keep in mind if you and your spouse try to agree before you go to court. This tells you what a judge would consider if you can’t agree.

https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/spousal-support/longterm

Generally, separate property is:

• Anything you earned or owned (or a debt) from before you married or after you separated

• Anything you buy with separate property or you earn from separate property

• Gifts or inheritance (to one of you) even if it was given or inherited when you were married

If you have separate property, it belongs only to you, as long as it was kept separately. Kept it separately means you didn’t give it to your spouse.

Property can be part community and part separate. This is called commingling. This just means that separate property and community property got mixed together.

This often happens with big purchases, retirement plans, and bank accounts.

Some couples don't want to get divorced for religious reasons, personal beliefs, or financial reasons. For example, they stay married to keep a spouse or domestic partner on an insurance or benefit plan.

Sometimes a spouse files a legal separation because they don't yet qualify for a divorce. To divorce, spouses must meet the divorce residency requirements.

• Divorce residency requirement: Before filing for divorce, one of the spouses must have lived in California for the past 6 months and at least 3 months in a county where the case is to be filed.

To file for a legal separation, only one spouse must live in California. There's no time requirement.

If a spouse wants a divorce and doesn't want to wait to meet the residency requirements, they can file papers (a petition) to ask for a legal separation. Then, once they meet the residency requirements they can change (amend) the petition to ask to a divorce.