Quit Claim Deed (With Individual Acknowledgment: Fill & Download for Free

I can only speak to the divorce I experienced in Wisconsin in 2012.It didn't happen.The mortgage was a legal agreement created financing our jointly owned "home" to me and the ex by the bank. Our divorce was NOT the bank's problem. The mortgage was legally binding to both myself and the ex. The bank needed to be certain it would be paid, regardless of the arrangements in the marriage settlement agreement regarding who would be responsible for paying off the mortgage and who would subsequently "own" the property.I was the sole earner in our marriage. It would have been absolutely nuts for the bank to agree to release me from my responsibility for the mortgage they had provided to me and the ex. The ex had/has no legal source of income other than me!I was in a tough position. I had no credit (the ex liked to open credit accounts in my name and hide the incoming mail notifying me of the new lines of credit and the bills), I had no home, I owed the mortgage on the property I was ceding over to the ex, and I had 8 minor children. Damn!What did I do?I hired a savvy family law attorney in my state to advise me through the process. He assured that my marital settlement agreement contained the appropriate legal language to insure that if I had to personally pay any payments on properties ceded to the ex to prevent foreclosure, that the amount I had to pay plus a significant penalty would be subtracted from the monthly Wisconsin Section 71 payments en lieu of spousal support and child support agreed upon in my marital settlement agreement.I filed a Quit Claim Deed on each marital property with the relevant county courts and notified the lien holders on the properties. This at least absolved me of responsibility for any subsequent unpaid property taxes on the properties that would now be owned solely by the ex. It also freed me from liability for anything that happened on those properties.I approached the lien holders (my bank and some private individuals) to officially share with them certified copies of the Marital Settlement agreement so that they would be aware of the precautions I had ascertained were in place to protect their interests regardless of what the ex chose to do (pay or not pay) letting them know I was fully aware of my on-going responsibility to make certain my financial obligations to them were fulfilled.I approached the CEO of the hospital where I worked and asked for the hospital to guarantee to my bank that I would meet my financial obligations. When the hospital board approved this, I agreed upon a financial value for this guarantee as something of value so that I could be taxed appropriately for this.I meet with my banker and reviewed all that I had done to make absolutely certain that my financial obligations would be met and humbly asked that he offer me, a homeless single mother of 8 minor children with bad credit, but good personal references and a good history with his bank, a privately held, in-house home mortgage.After a good laugh about all the details I had attended to make certain his bank would be paid and that he personally would suffer little risk by floating my request by his bank's board of directors, he kindly, generously and graciously took my case to his bosses and secured me approval for a new mortgage of my own (a first in my life).Every single month, I honor my obligation to make certain my bank is paid -- even when I was out of work for an unexpected illness for a year -- and I made certain that every single remaining payment to that bank on the property the ex received never reached the 30-days-past-due mark until that mortgage and other notes they held for us were paid off per the original mortgage and loan terms.I gratefully acknowledge that as a doctor, I have been able to avail myself of resources not available to the average divorcing parent.

There was a recent article at "The Establishment" website about this, which I found particularly annoying. It seems to me that people are slowly becoming zealous, conservative and hypocritical about public personalities, which are now, just like before the 1960s, expected to appear like angels before the public: one faux step and you are labelled.The following is a rough translation of an article I wrote in response to it and published in my personal blog:"The Vultures Are Always Watching"It is almost a cliché to say that death is the last work of an artist, though few are those who can plan for it, making out of it an achievement. Most are caught unaware, when their careers are over and the limelight is but a memory. Few have, like David Bowie, the chance to leave a legacy to posterity. He was lucky to remain culturally relevant through the end, while many other names, some as big as himself, were forgotten.What is not unheard of any more, is the use of the death of a public person as a stage.There is an old proverb that says that after the war is won there are many who brave to go to the battlefield to collect spoils and to spit on the dead heroes. If it is already disgusting to exploit the death of a person to prop up one's agenda, it gets worse when the exploit comes at the cost of the image of the deceased, which is not alive any more to defend himself.Death is the moment after which the image of a public figure becomes less protected.The individual is not alive any more, to feel personally affected by slander and to seek reparation against it. And, since he is not adding any more value to his legacy, the heirs of the estate think twice before they spend the money on a cause that is more likely to prop up someone else's agenda than to create good for the estate. Suing is costly, and an estate is always the weaker side on a judicial battle: it does not make sense, even to legalist judges, to grant payments due to a dead image, and dead people instantly become prone to public scrutiny anyway. So, when a person dies, you can slander him/her mostly without opposition.Now that David Bowie is dead, it has been published an unbelievable article at the American website "The Establishment", accusing him of various sexual offences, or acts now considered sexual offences. While he was alive, he was never sentenced for any of them, though some are really contentious. I don't plan to write about these acts, I don't know enough about them, I don't want to be an opportunist that spits on the corpses of the dead. I prefer to talk about the absurd inanity of a paragraph included in the article.Bowie may have trans­for­med pop cul­ture, but his work can­not stand apart from its cre­a­tor. It may feel worse to reject his music than it does to mourn his death, but no amount of talent trans­cends rape and sexual assault. He does not get a pass because his lyrics and per­sona made you feel good.In short: nothing that a human being does is worth more than the individual who produced it.Art does not transcend the bounds of the individual.You are the standard by which your works should be measured.This is such an enormity that it took me two days to realise the full implications. The most direct one is that you can deny the value of art because of the flaws on the artist. The second one is that being a transparent public person does more harm than good to you, because it will be understood as "shameless". The third is that, when this line of reason is acceptable, you can use the talent and the work of famous dead people to promote yourself. You try to make someone else's gold into lead if you have no philosophers' stone on you.An artist, being a public person, is exposed to judgement because his deeds are know, or become known. All his current and former associates (friends, lovers, spouses, relatives, children, neighbours, partners, coworkers etc.) are interviewed and become celebrities on their own. They add their contribution to the formation of the popular legendarium around the artist. Because so much is known about a public person, a lot of bad things are known too.To reject David Bowie's music because of rape allegations that were never proved does nothing for the supposed victims, but it does a hell of a lot to make the world a more hypocritical place, in which people care more for their image than for their personal improvement.Artists, as people they are, do not have, in fact, no immunity. They are demanded much more than normal people. If an artist has any immunity, that's not because of his art (in fact people love to hate artists), but when they are famous and make a lot of money. Being rich is never bad in a capitalist society. You can buy a lot of things, you can buy most people (if you set the right price tag), you can buy the love of a lifetime (it is always easier to love a rich person, show me someone who ditched a millionaire to marry a lumberjack and I'll acknowledge true love) and you can buy judicial immunity too. If something seems impossible to buy, that's just because you can't afford the price. A lot of people are treated with leniency by the justice system (if not for a true reason, just because the poor kid has "affluenza"), but some people who are treated like this happen to make nice art. We need to learn how to separate artistic value from the person of the artist. And we need to be more forgiving of the bad spots in each other. No one is an angel. I don't expect the artists I like to be either.Nobody refrained from buying Volkswagen cars just because the brand was established using stolen Czech patents and Polish slave labour. Why should any one ditch the legacy of David Bowie because someone once claimed he had sex with teenagers and that is now considered wrong? Volkswagen cars are not worse because once Polish slaves worked at the factory and David's music is not worse because of his drug abuse or out-of-wedlock relationships.To demand an spotless conduct from an artist is puritanism. It is just natural that the mistakes made my a public person go into the spotlight. Nobody is labelling me a rapist because I once had sex with a 15-year-old girl because nobody knows. I am not famous, she is not famous, neither of us have gone to television shows to pander our long-lost relationship for the vultures to pick. But some former love interest of Bowie's, who was 15 when they had sex, was interviewed for television and taught by feminists that she should consider that relationship as rape, because that is how it is considered now. This shameless use of "hindsight" to retcon the past. Did people actually consider it rape back in the 1970s? What values have changed in Western culture since then? To expect people to have behaved like now we think they should have behaved is dishonesty on steroids. Anachronism, indeed.Only relevant people make relevant mistakes.If are not ready to refrain from everything that is great about art and about mankind, we must learn to forgive. Would you quit the USA because it was founded by slave owners, like Washington, or rapists, like Jefferson? Why quit David Bowie?To demand that perfection is also wilful celebration of ignorance. Indie artists, especially indie gospel artists, do not have strong accusations against them because they are scantly known. If you feel good about liking only "safe" artists that is because you love ignorance. You feel comfortable for not knowing what your idols do. But ignorance is not a virtue and irrelevance is not a morality.Bowie was not anything like that. He was a man harassed by a traumatic childhood (which included almost losing sight from an eye in a fight with his best friend over a trifle) and who lived a large part of his life under drug addiction and uncertain ethics. That he produced such powerful and valuable music is something to celebrate. To hope that someone in his condition could have known always the right from the wrong and to have foresight of what the future would consider OK or not is ridiculous.There is nothing wrong in remarking that the dead artist was a troubled soul, who made many mistakes in life and probably had many reasons for regret. He himself did it. What is wrong is to claim that these minor aspects of an artists personal life should be enough reason to drop his works as valueless.

There are already several outstanding answers on this subject (Aaron Brown, Henry Walleski) , so I will focus my answer on:Libertarian Ethics and the Use of LandWhy Land?The topic of land use is an area that libertarians tend to avoid, because it tends to raise objections over property rights. The logic of the objection is that, if we own our own bodies, and therefore the fruit of one's labors is ours alone, then how is land itself " the fruit of one's labor"?Geo-libertarians hold that land itself is not the production of labor, and therefore it cannot be owned by an individual. So who does own it? That depends on the philosophy of the person involved. For now, we will just say that it is a political question.The point is to consider the ethical aspects of libertarianism. I am a bit reluctant even to discuss land, especially when the public at large is already so misinformed concerning the other fundamental concepts of libertarianism. Many do not truly understand the political implications of freedom versus slavery; specifically, ownership of the individual, freedom of association, and that the fruits of individual labor are the sole property of the individual.While libertarianism is the most ethical way to organize a society, it stands to reason one would want to ensure it is ethically sound in all respects, including how we treat land and other resources that are not products of individual labor.Land EthicsThere are several different approaches to land ethics.One is utilitarianism, first brought out by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The general concept is that land ought to be used to produce the maximum good to the greatest number of people. An example would be industrial agriculture. Since there may be second order effects, such as fertilizer runoff into streams or other environmental effects, it does not rule out considering the negative effects on the population as a whole in determining whether it is in fact the "maximum good."The libertarian view varies depending whether your are a "left" libertarian or a "right" libertarian. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains the distinction quite well:“Both endorse full self-ownership, but they differ with respect to the powers agents have to appropriate unowned natural resources (land, air, water, minerals, etc.). Right-libertarianism holds that typically such resources may be appropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes her labor with them, or merely claims them—without the consent of others, and with little or no payment to them. Left-libertarianism, by contrast, holds that unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner. It can, for example, require those who claim rights over natural resources to make a payment to others for the value of those rights. This can provide the basis for a kind of egalitarian redistribution.”The egalitarian view holds that, while libertarian approaches ensure maximum liberty, it results in an uneven distribution of resources, and the common example is food. It holds that there should be equal access to land resources including food, for everyone.Finally, the ecological view is that land and associated resources are part of a ecosystem, of which man is only one part. It therefore follows that the use of land and resources take into account not only human needs, but the needs of all elements within the ecosystem.An Ethical Libertarian Approach to Land and Other Natural ResourcesWhile the primary goal of libertarianism is to maximize individual freedom, no single person really owns a "first claim" on a given parcel of land or any other natural resource. Why? No one individual produced it.However, any system of libertarian laws must serve to protect the individual and all property that person produces. So, how do we reconcile these two disparate concepts?Any country's system of government (that is not a dictatorship or other autocratic system) assumes a framework of laws, and most developed countries acknowledge individual freedoms to some extent. Libertarian-based countries would serve to protect the rights and freedoms of the citizens within its borders.Such a country should therefore treat all land and natural resources within its borders as belonging to all of its citizens. Property deeds as they are known today could be converted to instruments of control. As such, the use and control of land is granted to individuals and collection of fees for resource depletion would be paid out as a dividend to all citizens.Because land is a limited resource ("they aren't making any more of it!"), a fee could be charged based on the demand for use of that land. Prices would still be set by the marketplace for use of the land. For example, the instruments of control in Manhattan will still be far more valuable than that of swamp land in Louisiana, because the demand for using the land remains the same.The difference would be that fees would be based only on either the resources consumed by the individual, or the market value of rents (location preferred), not the value of any final goods or services produced by an individual. This is ethical because the added effort (labor to clear trees, extract minerals, pump water etc.) is not “taxed,” only the value of resources extracted.One can argue that the current system of “land ownership” is already instruments of control in that taxing authorities can just confiscate your land for non-payment of taxes (certain homesteading laws may be one exception).The difference is that under a more geo-libertarian-based system, everyone would share in the natural wealth of the country, something akin to citizens in Alaska being paid an "oil dividend" each year for living in Alaska.Such a system would preserve existing market structures and not upset supply/demand market dynamics, but would serve to establish a more ethical approach to land and resource use, and best of all be consistent with libertarian ethics.[1] [2] [3]Footnotes[1] Libertarianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2010 Edition)[2] definition of Land ethic and synonyms of Land ethic (English)[3] Lou G. Cornell's answer to Can a libertarian argument be made to tax owners of land (not counting any improvements)?