(1) The person is married to one of the legal parents of the child;

(2) The child has lived with the person and his/her spouse during the past 60 days;

(3) If the child is over the age of 12, the child states in writing that he or she would like to be adopted; and

(4) The other parent of the child agrees in writing to give up his or her parenting rights, or that parent’s rights have been terminated.

Depending on your circumstances, there may be additional considerations.  For example, if your spouse’s child has been living with you for at least 12 months and your spouse dies or becomes mentally incompetent, you may also be able to adopt your step-child.

As long as the child’s other parent is agreeable and willing to sign a consent to your adoption and relinquishment, the step-child adoption process can be straightforward and fairly quick.  If the other parent is not agreeable, step-parent adoptions can become incredibly complicated and can require termination of the other parent’s rights before the adoption can be completed.

Under Montana law, there are only certain circumstances under which a declaration of invalidity is possible.  For example, invalidity is appropriate when one of the parties to the marriage lacked the capacity to consent to the marriage either because of the influence of alcohol/drugs or because they have some sort of mental disease or defect that makes them unable to consent.   If a party was forced into the marriage or induced by fraud, the court may declare the marriage invalid.

Another circumstance where the court may declare a marriage invalid is if one of the parties to the marriage lacks the physical capacity to consummate the marriage and the other party was not aware at the time of the marriage.

Age can also be a reason that marriage is declared invalid.  If one or both of the parties was under 16 years of age at the time of the marriage, the court will likely declare the marriage invalid.  If one or both of the parties was 16 or 17 years old, but failed to obtain a parent’s consent or the consent of the court, the marriage is likely invalid.

Finally, if the marriage is prohibited, it will likely be declared invalid.  For example, if one party is already legally married, an additional marriage is prohibited by law.  Marriages between relatives are prohibited by law as well.

Because Montana’s invalidity law is very fact based, anyone considering filing a petition for declaration of invalidity should speak with an attorney about their rights.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, commonly know as COBRA, permits individuals to stay insured under their spouse’s insurance policy for a period of eighteen months, provided you pay the premium.

The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration explains:

Group health coverage for COBRA participants is usually more expensive than health coverage for active employees, since usually the employer pays a part of the premium for active employees while COBRA participants generally pay the entire premium themselves. It is ordinarily less expensive, though, than individual health coverage.

In the past few months, Congress has been in a heated debate about subsidizing COBRA coverage.  The COBRA subsidy would assist individuals by paying up to 65% towards cost of the premiums.  Without the 65% assistance, premiums are often prohibitively expensive for unemployed or divorced.

Unfortunately, the Medicaid package that was passed on August 11, 2010, did not include a COBRA subsidy.  This means divorced individuals can still receive 18 months of COBRA coverage, but they will need to come up with the full premium payment.

For more information on COBRA coverage, see the United States Department of Labor FAQ’s here.

The New York Times article brings up an interesting point: if marital funds are used to purchase the policy, is your ex-spouse entitled to a portion of the insurance benefit?  Since this is the first divorce insurance program in the world, courts have likely not encountered this scenario.

The cost is approximately $15.99 per unit per month and each unit results in $1,250 of coverage, provided the policy has matured.  Not necessarily a bad payout if you divorce shortly after the 48 month maturity period.  It will be interesting to see if other insurance companies follow suite or if WedLock will fold sometime soon.

Read the New York Times Article here or go straight to WedLock’s website here.

First, you will recall from previous posts on this blog that there are several options for those that plan to handle their case on their own.  See Divorce Options for information and links to divorce forms created by Montana attorneys specifically created for use by Pro Se litigants (a person without an attorney).  These forms are featured on the State of Montana’s government website, so I find that they are reliable and based on Montana law.

Next, if you are looking into using online forms from a do-it-yourself divorce website, determine whether or not your case is “contested.”  I have looked through numerous on-line pay sites and it is clear that most of those websites are designed for people who have uncontested cases.  Uncontested means that both parties involved in the divorce are in agreement about ALL issues in the case: property division, parenting, child support, etc.  If your case is contested, a few fill-in forms will probably not cut it.

Rather than pay $300 to a random online site, I suggest you first look into divorce resources in your city.  For example, Kalispell has a fantastic Self-Help Law Center at the county courthouse.  Second, you may want to take your few hundred dollars and set up an appointment with a local family law attorney, so you can be sure you are getting information specific to Montana law and your own circumstances.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment.

A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. The findings of Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University are published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.

“Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households,” Liu said. “The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere.”

Liu and his research assistant Yu started with the obvious – that divorce rates across the globe are on the rise. Housing units, even if they now have few people in them, require resources to construct them and take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. A refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two.

When they calculated the cost in terms of increased utilities and unused housing space per capita, they discovered that divorce tosses out economy of scale. Among the findings:

• In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
• In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
• The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.
• The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

To track what happens when divorced people returned to married life, the study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results: The environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households.

Liu, a University Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife and Rachel Carson Chair in Ecological Sustainability at MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, has spent more than two decades integrating ecology with social sciences to understand the complex interrelationships between nature and humans and how those interactions affect the environment and biodiversity. Liu and Yu began to discuss this research project when Yu was a high school student.

This new work also acknowledges that divorce is not the only lifestyle trend changing family living structures – the demise of multigenerational households and people remaining single longer are examples.

“People’s first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple,” Liu said. “But a lot of things become simple after research is done. Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships. People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered.”

The research, Liu said, shows that environmental policy is more complex than one single solution. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy, Liu said.

“Solutions are beyond a single idea,” Liu said. “Consider the production of biofuel. Biofuel is made from plants, which also require water and space. We’re showing divorce has significant competition for that water and space. On the other hand, more divorce demands more energy. This creates a challenging dilemma and requires more creative solutions.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

A copy of the paper can be downloaded from www.pnas.org or www.csis.msu.edu/research.htm#publications.