US Citizens w/Children, Amicable Divorce in Taiwan

Legal Legal - Divorce
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American wife came to me after many years of (apparently happy???) marriage. She had been considering divorce for 4-5 years off and on, but for many reasons she felt not able to talk about that so was quite a shock when she announced she had made a decision and moved out 3 days later. We still love and respect each other and are communicating better, but she feels divorce is only option for her future happiness, and I will go along with that because her happiness and our children’s happiness (oldest is teenager) is most important to me. We have done all we can and she still feels this is the best action.

We have:

  • Two years in Taiwan
  • 4 months of being separated (different apartments, banking, etc)
  • Both have employment with local divisions of foreign companies
  • Both have ARCs with purpose being employment at companies
  • We are amicable and know we can remain good friends (famous last words? yeah, we know :smiley: )
  • Both plan to remain long term in Taiwan (happier here then anywhere else in our lives)
  • Children attend local schools and are happy

We are now trying to determine how to best go about doing this “correctly”. I have the forms for Taiwan divorce. I know I need to get a translation and notary/judicial mark on the translation for the housing office. They did not know what to do with respect to children and things came to a halt during our investigations.

We have plans for:

  • spousal support (none)
  • child support (split based on % of income ratios)
  • custody (joint custody)
  • parenting plans in case of unforeseen events (leaving country due to job opportunities/deportation/etc)
  • assets split from time during marriage (down the middle, basically complete except for property in process but not yet sold, handling retirement accounts, etc)

Basically feel we have everything discussed and agreed upon. However, we just are not sure if we can even do this in Taiwan? They really seemed to think that once children were involved, because the children are not locally born citizens that they would not be able to do anything.

Questions:

  • Is children/custody going to torpedo everything for us?
  • If not, do we need an official Taiwanese lawyer to write up the divorce agreement dealing with assets, children, etc?
  • Do they certify/mark/check any agreements at the housing office? Or is it more just a “contract between two parties” type of thing? How are the divorce agreements dealing with assets, children, etc between citizens handled in the case of “uncontested amicable divorce”? We are trying to follow that as closely as possible.

We know that the real issue may arise if one of us has issues with things down the road in the future and wants to revisit any agreements made. What can we best do now to avoid potential future issues?

We originally considered Guam thinking that would be “better”, but seems like that opens up a whole other set of issues. Anyone have any advice?

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Surprised no one reponded. How did you guys handle it in the end?

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Dave, are you hiding/searching something from the forum? :wink:
Hope ok

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5

In the end it was much easier than we thought. After consulting with some lawyers in the USA what it all came down to was as long as both people are completely involved in the process and you can prove that and things were done correctly and consistently where we were, if either of the parties decided to start something later in the US with another modification or dispute or whatever the chances that the court there would look at it and say we will use this as the basis for where we begin looking at things would be quite high. We worked on our agreement ourselves starting from a template or example that we found somewhere, had it checked over briefly by a lawyer who said that despite some antiquated language and things that weren’t generally done so much anymore, it seemed fairly sound and was obvious we’d put in a lot of intent to try and make sure that the children were protected properly, both parties were amenable, etc. we recorded some videos of us working on it together talking about different issues, And then a video statement at the end apologizing to the court for any mistakes that were made and that we had tried our best being in a weird situation Living overseas where local legal counsel basically said we can’t do anything regarding this… So between that we hoped that in the future if there is anything they would look at what we had and go from there.

In the end, once we had some sort of agreement that they could put a stamp on and say that they saw it, the household registration office was perfectly fine to divorce us for 100 NTD.

Still all happily living in Taiwan separately, and I later remarried and she happy with her cats. :slight_smile:

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