How Is An Inheritance Treated During a Divorce in Massachusetts?

An inheritance in divorce is divided by the court. They have the right to divide it 50-50 or they can allocate it differently. As a general matter, if an inheritance is fairly traceable to the person that received it, then the court would not divide it 50-50, especially if the inheritance was received close to the date of divorce. It also depends on how the parties treated the inheritance during the marriage. If for example, they got an inheritance 10 years ago, and decided they both wanted a new kitchen, and they’ve both enjoyed the kitchen; then you’re not going to be able to really go back and take out that $30,000 and say that you should get it back out of the marital estate because the terminology there is that it’s ‘woven into the fabric of the marriage’. If the inheritance is ‘woven into the fabric of then marriage’, then it will probably be treated as a marital asset subject to a 50-50 division. If however it was segregated and treated as a separate asset by the parties such as an investment account in only one name, and the non-inheriting spouse didn’t even know how much it was or where it was, then it’s much more likely to be considered in a less than 50-50 division and sometimes entirely excluded from the division of the marital estate.

This informational blog post was brought to you by Cynthia L. Hanley, an experienced Mansfield, Massachusetts Divorce Lawyer.