You will need three years of tax returns with all schedules, statements for every account, documentation for the house and any other property, anything relating to a business, and the paperwork for insurance, debts and employment benefits. Gathering it before you file is the single most useful thing you can do, and it is the one part of a divorce you fully control.
Most of what drives the cost of a divorce is outside your hands. This part is not.
The list
Tax - Federal and state returns for the last three years, with every schedule and attachment - W-2s, 1099s and K-1s for the same period - Any correspondence from a tax authority
Income - Recent pay stubs for both of you, or the last two years of self-employment records - Documentation of bonuses, commissions, and anything paid on a schedule other than monthly - Stock compensation: grant agreements, vesting schedules, and the current position
Accounts - Statements for every checking, savings and brokerage account, going back a year - Every retirement account, including plans from former employers - Pension documentation, including the plan summary and any benefit estimate - Health savings accounts and education savings accounts
Property - The deed, the purchase documents and the mortgage paperwork for each property - A recent mortgage statement and, if you have one, a recent valuation - Vehicle titles and loan documents - Anything else of substantial value with paperwork attached
Business - Two or three years of financial statements and business tax returns - Partnership or operating agreements, and any buy-sell agreement - A list of business accounts and any business debt
Insurance and estate - Life insurance policies, including whether each has cash value, and who owns and pays for each - Health, disability and long-term care coverage - Wills, trusts, and every beneficiary designation you can locate
Debt - Credit card statements, loan documents, lines of credit - Anything either of you has personally guaranteed
How to organize it so it stays useful
A pile of correct documents that nobody can find anything in is not much better than no documents.
Group by category rather than by date, keeping everything about one thing together. All the house paperwork in one place: the deed, the purchase documents, the mortgage, the valuation. Given only the deed, a professional can tell you who owns a property. Given the whole group, they can tell you what it is worth to you, which is the question that actually matters.
Scan everything and keep a digital copy somewhere only you can reach. Not a shared cloud account, not a shared computer, and not a family email address.
Then make a one-page index: what exists, where it is, and what is missing. The gaps are the most valuable page in the file, because they are the list of questions to ask.
Separate property and marital property
Once the documents exist, each asset gets classified as separate property or marital property. It is worth understanding roughly where the line falls, because it shapes what is even under discussion.
Broadly, things acquired during the marriage tend to be marital, and things owned before the marriage, or received by gift or inheritance, tend to be separate. Broadly is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The rules vary by state, and separate property that was mixed with marital money during the marriage can stop being separate.
What that means practically is that you need to know how each significant thing was acquired: bought before the marriage, bought jointly, inherited, or given. Your attorney applies the law of your state to that. Your job is to be able to answer the question.
Why this is worth doing first
It lowers what the process costs. Legal hours spent chasing a mortgage statement are billed at the same rate as legal hours spent on strategy, and there is no reason to spend them that way.
It changes what the conversation is about. If you arrive at your first legal meeting with an organized file, the hour is about your options. If you arrive without one, the hour is about homework.
And it tends to make people feel considerably better. There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from not knowing what you own. It is very often smaller than it felt once it is written down on one page, and occasionally larger, which is also worth knowing early rather than late.
Where to start
Start with the tax returns. They are the single most useful document, and almost everything a household owns has to appear on them somewhere.
If you would rather not do this alone, getting organized is where an engagement usually begins, and the first conversation is complimentary. If one person handled the money in your marriage and it was not you, start here instead.
General education, not advice about your situation, and not legal or tax advice.
