My wife and I are legally separating. In AZ, basically the exact same thing as a divorce, we’re just still married and she can hang on to my health insurance a bit longer.

She’s agreed to not do common property, and just file uncontested to keep our assets under our control; I keep the house under my name, take care of the consumer debt, she keeps her student loans.

As for physically splitting, I want to buy a house that has the exact same floor plan as our current one. I’ll then rent our current house to her at a super low rate and she keeps most of the stuff. I’ll be in the new one and rebuild. Makes the kid sharing easy.

The question is, what do I need to do make sure the new house isn’t somehow able to be slipped into community property if I have to close on the new house before the separation is final?

The other option is renting some shitty studio for not much less than my new mortgage and throwing away more money…