Almost nobody makes good decisions in the first fortnight of a separation. The information is bad, the advice from friends is confidently wrong, and the emotional stakes make every choice feel permanent. Most of them are not. A few genuinely are.
Here are the five that carry the most weight, in roughly the order they come up.
1. Whether to move out of the family home
The advice you will hear is that moving out means losing the house. That is not true — leaving does not affect your interest in family property under the Family Law Act, and the property will still be divided.
What moving out can affect is parenting. If you leave without the children and a routine develops in which they live primarily with the other parent, that routine becomes the status quo. Courts are cautious about disrupting a functioning arrangement, particularly on an interim application. The status quo you accidentally create in month one is frequently the arrangement you argue against in month eight.
If you need to leave — and sometimes, particularly where there is conflict in front of the children, you should — do it deliberately:
- Agree a written parenting schedule before you go, even a rough one.
- Keep the schedule generous and keep to it.
- Take your documents. Getting back into the house to retrieve tax returns is harder than you think.
If there is family violence, safety comes first and none of the above applies. Leave, and get advice about a protection order under Part 9 immediately.
2. What to do about the joint bank accounts
There is a real tension here. Draining a joint account is a reliable way to guarantee an expensive, hostile file. Leaving it untouched while the other party does exactly that is also a bad outcome.
The moderate course, and the one we usually recommend:
- Take no more than half of a joint account, and only what you genuinely need.
- Write to the other party (or their lawyer) saying what you did and why.
- Open a personal account and redirect your own income into it.
- Contact the bank about freezing joint credit — a joint line of credit is where the real damage tends to occur.
Dissipation of assets can be accounted for later in the division, but “later” is expensive. Restraint now is cheaper than a tracing exercise in a year.
3. Whether to sign anything
Do not sign an agreement in the first month. Not a separation agreement, not a “just so we know where we stand” document, not a text message that says you agree the house is his.
Section 93 of the Family Law Act allows the court to set aside an agreement about property in specific circumstances — failure to disclose significant assets, taking improper advantage of the other party’s vulnerability, or a lack of understanding of the nature or consequences of the agreement. But setting an agreement aside is litigation. It is far cheaper never to have signed.
An agreement is safe when there has been full financial disclosure on both sides and both parties have had independent legal advice. In the first month you will have had neither.
4. How you communicate from now on
Assume everything you write will be read aloud in a courtroom. Not because it probably will be, but because writing as though it might be produces dramatically better messages.
Practically:
- Move communication to a single written channel. Email, or a parenting app if the conflict is high.
- Keep messages short, factual and about logistics.
- Do not respond within an hour to anything that makes you angry.
- Never use the children as messengers.
Two years of restrained, businesslike messages is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence a parent can have. It is also free.
5. When to get advice
Early, and before you have committed to a position.
There are two limitation periods that people miss, and both are hard:
- Married spouses have two years from the date of the divorce order (or an order of nullity) to bring a claim for property division or spousal support.
- Unmarried spouses in a marriage-like relationship of at least two years have two years from the date of separation.
That second one catches people constantly. Common-law spouses in British Columbia have property rights that most of them do not know they have, and a clock that starts running the day they separate.
None of this requires you to have decided whether the relationship is over. A consultation is not a commitment to fight. Most first meetings end with a client doing considerably less than they arrived planning to do — which is usually the correct outcome.
This article is general information about British Columbia law and is not legal advice. Every separation turns on its own facts.
