A Plain-English Walkthrough
The form your entire case is built on — what it asks, how the math works, and the mistakes that quietly cost people.
Prepared by Cathryn Salony, CPA · Strategic Wealth · Greenwich, CT
In a Connecticut divorce, both spouses must file a sworn financial affidavit. It is not paperwork. It is the single document the court, both attorneys, and every negotiation will treat as the official picture of your financial life. Support is argued against it. Property division is argued against it. Your credibility, if the case is ever contested, is measured against it.
Most people fill it out in an evening, from memory, under stress. This guide exists so you don't.
Before you begin — a note on safety
Read and store this on a device only you control. If money or information has been used to control you, use a private email address and keep copies somewhere secure.
This guide explains the form. It is not legal advice — your attorney directs what is filed and when. What a CPA adds is making sure the numbers underneath are right.
Section 01
Connecticut uses two versions of the financial affidavit, both numbered JD-FM-6. The short form is for simpler situations. The long form is generally required when your own gross annual income exceeds $75,000 or your total net assets exceed $75,000 — and that threshold is about you individually, not the two of you combined.
If the marriage involves a business, real estate beyond the home, investment accounts, or a high-earning spouse, assume the long form. When in doubt, your attorney decides — but prepare as though every section will be scrutinized, because in a contested case it will be.
Section 02
The Connecticut affidavit states income and expenses as weekly figures. Almost nothing in real life arrives weekly — salaries are biweekly, mortgages are monthly, insurance is quarterly, tuition is annual. Every number must be converted, and converted the same way, or the affidavit contradicts itself.
| You pay or receive it… | To make it weekly… |
|---|---|
| Weekly | Use as is |
| Every two weeks (biweekly) | Divide by 2 |
| Twice a month (semi-monthly) | Multiply by 24, divide by 52 |
| Monthly | Multiply by 12, divide by 52 |
| Quarterly | Divide by 13 |
| Annually | Divide by 52 |
The most common error is dividing a monthly bill by four. A month is not four weeks — it is about 4.33. Do that across an entire expense schedule and you have understated your cost of living by roughly 8%, on a sworn document, in a case where support is negotiated against that exact number.
Section 03
Salary, self-employment, bonuses, commissions, rental income, dividends, interest, distributions. If income is irregular — a bonus, a seasonal business — the honest approach is a year-to-date or trailing-twelve-month average, and consistency about which one you used. If your spouse controls a business, remember that what the tax return shows and what the household actually receives can be very different figures; that gap is an accounting question, and it is exactly the kind of thing worth raising with your advisors.
Mandatory deductions first — federal and state tax withholding, Social Security and Medicare, mandatory retirement, health insurance premiums taken from pay. Then other deductions, like voluntary 401(k) contributions or savings plans. Keep the categories clean: a voluntary contribution listed as mandatory is the kind of small error that gets found and remembered.
This is the section that decides the most and gets the least care. Build it from records, not memory — twelve months of bank and credit-card statements, averaged. Memory reliably forgets the irregular items: car repairs, insurance premiums, the vet, summer camp, holidays, home maintenance. Those are real costs of your life, and if they are not on the affidavit, the standard of living the court sees is lower than the one you actually lived.
Every debt: mortgages, car loans, credit cards, personal loans, tax balances owed. Connect debts to the assets they belong to — a car loan should sit beside the car it finances, a mortgage beside the house — so the net picture reads clearly.
Everything, whether or not you can access it: bank accounts, brokerage and retirement accounts, the home and other real estate, vehicles, business interests, life insurance cash value, and anything of significant value. An account you know exists but cannot see still belongs in the picture — note the institution and holder. Leaving it off because you lack the statement is how things quietly disappear from cases.
Section 04
The affidavit is arithmetic on top of a life. The arithmetic is my profession. I build affidavit-ready numbers from actual records — income traced to its sources, twelve months of spending averaged honestly, assets and debts reconciled so nothing contradicts — and hand you and your attorney a document that will hold when someone pushes on it.
You do not have to be good with numbers. You have to be accurate once, on one document, at the moment it matters most. That is a service, and it is quietly available.
Cathryn Salony, CPA — reach out by email when the time is right. Every inquiry is treated with absolute confidentiality.
If you would rather do this part yourself. The Aligned Affidavit is the workbook I built for exactly that — every figure this form asks for, laid out in the order that makes sense, with the arithmetic already written and a checklist of what to gather. Ten sections, Excel or Google Sheets.