Community Property

• Texas is a community property state. Therefore, all items and assets accumulated during the course of marriage are considered to be owned equally by each spouse. Exceptions include property singly owned prior to marriage, gifts or inheritances to one spouse and money obtained from personal injury. Therefore, if you owned real estate before marriage, but you place your spouse's name on the title, divorce does not change the fact that your asset became community property during the marriage.
  
  

Quitclaim Deeds in Divorce

• You may have owned a home in Texas before you were married and added your spouse's name to the title with a quitclaim deed after the wedding to combine your assets. A quitclaim deed transfers a portion or all of a property to another person without any warranties regarding the title. Adding your spouse's name relinquished 50 percent of your ownership. Now that you are divorcing, you may want to undo your spouse's ownership of your property.
  
  

Quitclaim Reversal

• If you live in Texas, reversing a quitclaim deed is allowed only under specific circumstances. Divorce does not automatically undo a quitclaim deed. Only after a judge has given you the property in a divorce decree can you use a quitclaim deed with your spouse's signature transferring the property to you as the sole owner. Otherwise, to reverse the original quitclaim, you have to prove that fraud was involved with the property transfer or that you were threatened into signing the deed.
  
  

Considerations

• Regardless of the divorce decree and quitclaim deed subsequently filed, a mortgage obligation does not change because of a transfer in title. Therefore, if you refinanced the property during the course of your marriage, which placed your spouse's name on the title, you still are both responsible for satisfying the mortgage lien. The only way to remove your spouse's name from the loan note is to refinance by qualifying for a new loan by yourself. Therefore, it's in your spouse's best interest not to sign a quitclaim deed until the mortgage obligation is released because it cannot be reversed even after divorce.