Marital assets are generally the assets that you and your spouse bought when you were together. As you get a divorce, you merely need to divide these assets.
As straightforward as this sounds, couples that are not getting divorced amicably often run into issues. One spouse may not want to divide things in the proper manner, or they make take issue with the division laid out by the court.
In some cases, a spouse may decide that they’re going to dissipate the marital assets. This is different than hiding those assets or attempting to keep them, but it accomplishes a similar goal.
Spending down the family assets
It may help to think of this as spending down what the family already controls. Hiding assets means your spouse tries to illegally keep them, but this is very difficult to do since it may be obvious to you that things haven’t been reported properly.
Dissipation, on the other hand generally just looks like frivolous spending. Rather than buying assets, which could be sold or split, your spouse may start spending on things that you cannot return. They may begin eating lavish dinners at fancy restaurants with someone they’ve started dating. They may take a long vacation where they spend tens of thousands of dollars that can never be recovered.
No matter what it looks like, what they’re really trying to do is to deprive you of the assets that you deserve. If they do this, you must know about your legal options so that you can take the proper steps to put an end to it.