When divorcing, both parties need to understand their financial, emotional, and legal situations. For decades Stan Corey, author of The Divorce Dance, has been educating divorce clients about their financial situations and about the long-term implications of decisions they are making during divorce. When I talked with him on Family Matters, he talked about what people need […]

  By Guest Author Catherine J. Byerly Structured settlements aren’t something you hear about all too often in divorce – but they can come up, and when they do you want to have all the facts. But first, what is a structured settlement? A structured settlement is a particular way of resolving an amount of

  We did not even know that we had been nominated, but Colin Family Mediation Group LLC won the Best of Burke Award in the Legal Services category in 2015 and again in 2016! It is wonderful to discover such high regard for the work we mediators do. Below is a copy of the full press

by guest author Vee Cecil If you have been diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, you are probably able to go about your daily routines with relative ease, save a few mishaps here and there. But as your symptoms increase, you may begin to struggle with daily tasks, such as grocery shopping, which were once second

  The adjective “blended” is frequently used to describe stepfamilies. Unfortunately, this term makes the stepfamily process sound like a smooth transition, uninterrupted by conflict or disagreement. Anyone who has been a member of a stepfamily—myself included—knows that this is not the case. Dr. Patricia Papernow, author of Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships, identifies five

  A month before her first book was published, Jessica Rector found out she was pregnant. Having lived the life of a broadcast journalist, coach, and adventurous traveler, Jessica initially found her new identity as a single parent isolating and overwhelming. The negative depiction of single mothers in the media and in political debates fanned the

  Family Matters, hosted by Dr. Virginia Colin, has been on VoiceAmerica.com for 3 1/2 months now. Here is a list of the topics discussed and links to their recordings. You can listen to any episode via internet any time you want. You can also download any episode as a podcast, free from iTunes or Stitcher. If you listen

When I created the chart below, I was thinking about family mediation, because that’s what I do. Most of the benefits, however, apply to many different kinds of disputes or conflicts. It could be a landlord-tenant issue, a dispute between a homeowner and a contractor, a serious quarrel among neighbors about parking or pets, a

by Virginia L Colin, Ph.D.   The short version? It’s a calling. Here is the longer version: My first clue about what I should be doing came late in the 1990′s, when I learned that a friend was in a custody war that had been going on for a year and a half, with many