Division of marital property.

Issues: Divorce;
Division of marital property;

Tymes Anna v Ronald Unpublished Mich App. 10/30/2007 No. 270598 out of Kent County LC No. 04-011087-DM
e-Journal Number: 37525

In a case called Tymes the Court of Appeals rules on how to divide the equity in a marital home.
At the time of the parties’ marriage in 1987, defendant Ronald Tymes was employed full-time at General Motors Corporation (GM).

Although plaintiff Anna Tymes was then also employed full-time as a nurse’s aid, she later left that job in order to care for the couple’s children.

The parties purchased a home in 1994, after which plaintiff began working part-time performing secretarial functions at a church.

Before trial, the parties reached stipulations regarding their personal property. They also agreed that defendant would receive the marital home as his separate property and would remain responsible for the mortgage payments on the home. At the close of trial, the trial court awarded each party one-half of the $10,000 in equity it found in the marital home.


The trial court’s finding regarding equity in the marital home and its decision to award plaintiff half of the equity; Draggoo v. Draggoo; Olson v. Olson;

Defendant Ronald Tymes argued that the trial court erred in finding that there was $10,000 equity in the marital home and that the court’s decision to award $5,000 of the equity to plaintiff was inequitable.

We disagree.

In Draggoo v Draggoo, 223 Mich App 415, 429-430; 566 NW2d 642 (1997), this Court
set forth the following standards of review that apply in divorce cases:

In a divorce case, this Court must first review the trial court’s findings of fact . . .
under the clearly erroneous standard. A finding is clearly erroneous if, after a
review of the entire record, the reviewing court is left with the definite and firm
conviction that a mistake has been made.

This Court gives special deference to a trial court’s findings when they are based on the credibility of the witnesses.

If the trial court’s findings of fact are upheld, this Court must decide whether the
dispositive ruling was fair and equitable in light of those facts. The dispositional
ruling is discretionary and should be affirmed unless this Court is left with the
firm conviction that the division was inequitable. [Citations omitted.]

"The goal of a court when apportioning a marital estate is to equitably divide it in light of
all the circumstances." Reed v Reed, 265 Mich App 131, 152; 693 NW2d 825 (2005). "As a
prelude to this property division, a trial court must first make specific findings regarding the
value of the property being awarded in the judgment." Olson v Olson, 256 Mich App 619, 627;
671 NW2d 64 (2003).

The trial court may base the valuation on expert testimony, lay testimony, the parties’ testimony, or may appoint its own independent expert to provide the court with a
more objective valuation. Id. at 627 n 4.

In this case, trial testimony revealed that the parties refinanced the marital home in 2002.
At that time, an appraiser valued the home at $110,000, which defendant claimed at trial was not an accurate valuation. Specifically, defendant testified that the appraiser inflated the value of the home to help the parties obtain a larger mortgage from the bank. In or around October 2005, plaintiff’s attorney arranged for appraiser Kevin Garcia to conduct an appraisal of the marital home.

Plaintiff testified that Garcia appraised the marital home "in the eighties." Defendant
testified that he was present when the appraisal was conducted and that Garcia appraised the
home’s value at approximately $84,000. The record also reveals, however, that in October 2005 defendant filed a petition for bankruptcy in which he declared the value of the marital home to be $103,800, subject to a $93,858 mortgage. Defendant testified at trial that he did not have a copy of Garcia’s appraisal when he prepared his bankruptcy petition and, thus, was required to estimate the value of the home using its state equalized value (SEV). According to defendant, the SEV was based upon the 2002 appraisal and, thus, was not an accurate reflection of the true market value of the home.

On the record before us, the evidence supported the trial court’s finding that there was
$10,000 equity in the marital home. Based upon the figures provided by defendant in his
bankruptcy petition, which he signed under penalty of perjury, the equity in the home was
approximately $9,942.

We recognize that defendant testified that the 2002 appraisal, upon which
the declaration in his bankruptcy petition was based, was not an accurate representation of the
value of the home, and that the condition of the home had deteriorated since the 2002 appraisal
was conducted. However, it is not a reviewing court’s function to resolve conflicts in the
evidence or pass on the credibility of witnesses. See Stoudemire v Stoudemire, 248 Mich App
325, 339; 639 NW2d 274 (2001). Rather, we must give special deference to the trial court’s
findings. MCR 2.613(C); Draggoo, supra at 429. Affording such deference here, we find no
clear error in the trial court’s conclusion regarding the equity in the parties’ marital home.


Furthermore, defendant failed to establish that the trial court’s decision to award $5,000 of the
equity to plaintiff was inequitable. The trial court’s decision to award one-half of the equity in
the home to plaintiff was consistent with its goal of fashioning a "roughly congruent" property
distribution in this case. See Jansen v Jansen, 205 Mich App 169, 171; 517 NW2d 275 (1994).