Do your lawyers have family law expertise with international and Canadian Law? No this is my first time on your site.

Hi Debra......I am currently residing in Bali Indonesia. My husband and I of forty years are both Canadian and seperated 6 months ago. My daughter has advised that I should retain some sort of Canadian legal council in case something goes very wrong. I have been a stay at home mom for a good portion of our marriage. I am currently 63 years of age. My husband retired in December 2021 and things began falling apart. Financially, I depended on him to make all our financial decisions never thinking I would be in this predicament in a foreign country. He took his last working job with a Chinese company and took both our special needs son and I abroad to be with him as usual. He was transferred after 2 years to Indonesia with the same company....that is how we ended up in Bali. Anyway, all of our bank accounts that I know of are joint. My husband invested most of our joint income with a financial banking investment company. It seems that most of the investments are in his name as he claimed that they were all to do with RRSP's etc. The financial institution has been notified and they are supposed to be making sure that all of our investments...including mine can not be moved or touched without double signatures. It has been flag marked all over both files until a legal document has been prepared and signed by us both. This will protect us both.....but because of the situation, I encouraged this because I am the one who would be left with nothing to speak of if he wanted to do that to me. Currently, he says that he would never do this and will take care of both my special needs son and myself for the rest of our lives. We think that staying here in Indonesia would be best as it is affordable and offers a positive environment for our 23 year old son. Should something happen to either of us....we would be able to afford to hire people to look after him on a full time basis for the rest of his life and also provide a home for him. That is a huge concern as you might imagine. At his time my husband seems to be transparent, but I feel is still unpredictable because of our situation. I helped to put him through Univercity, help to pay back student loans, gave birth and raised 4 children and we adopted the fifth who is special needs. We moved about every five years so that he could climb his corporate ladder and so forth. He has been a CEO and has made six figures over the last working years of our marriage. Our only dependant is our special needs son whom we adopted at the age of 21 months. Our current arrangement only between the two of us is that he has our son for one week and then I get him one week and so forth. So far so good. At first I was hopeful that we would be able to work thru the minor problems he seemed to feel that we had.....but it seems inevitable that we are heading for a legal separation or divorce. I also had an inheritence of about $800,000.00 Canadian dollars that I shared with my family and put into our home. When we left Canada.....everything we owned was sold and the money was put into our joint accounts. He then proceeded to invest a good portion of our assets with my consent. I feel very gut wrenched that he could become mean and try to shirk his responsibilites living here in Indonesia. Is there anything that I can do to protect myself and our existing assets. He has said that he would divorce me if I should want, but neither of us would end up nearly the amount we would should we leave cash etc. in investments and draw from that as planned. I am so confused. He will be 65 in June and if he does go back to work could easily make a six figure salary again, where unfortunately this would not be the case for me. I also have fibromyalgia and it would be difficult for me to find and do any job in Canada for more than minimum wage even if I could work. Please if you kindly could tell me my legal rights and what I should do to protect myself in this current situation. Thank you.

I live in Indonesia....was going to ask you to call me, but seems this can not be done. I will look for your response.

Our last residence was in New Brunswick. We have common assets or joint bank accounts. We also have investments that are mostly in my husband's name but I also have a portfolio in my name. Yes they include RRSP's etc. as well as cash accounts. Thank you

Left in June 2016

We were both raised in Ontario and married in 1981 in Hamilton Ontario. I lived in Burlington and my husband in Hamilton. Both of us were born in Hamilton, Ontario.

Left Canada to go to China in June 2016 and then moved to Sumatera and then to Bali

Thank you for this information. You can mark my question as complete.