Commingling
Mixing separate property with marital property in a way that makes them indistinguishable — often resulting in the separate property being treated as marital.
Commingling is the silent killer of separate property. Deposit an inheritance into a joint account: commingled. Use separate funds to pay the marital mortgage: commingled. Renovate a jointly-owned home with separate inheritance: commingled.
Many states allow the spouse claiming separate property to "trace" the funds back to their separate source — but tracing requires records, and the records often don't exist for events that happened years before the divorce. A well-drafted prenup addresses commingling explicitly: it specifies that separate funds spent on marital purposes are gifts, not conversions, or that certain accounts must be kept separate to preserve status.
Related terms
- Separate Property — Property owned by one spouse individually — typically property owned before the marriage, plus gifts and inheritances received during the marriage.
- Tracing — The process of proving that a specific asset originated from a spouse's separate property, even after commingling — used to preserve separate-property status.
- Marital Property — Property acquired by either spouse during the marriage, subject to division at divorce — either equally (in community-property states) or equitably (in the rest).
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