Legal Question in Family Law in Texas

Probably not much, unfortunately. The problem is that the divorce decree cannot legally affect the mortgage lender's legal rights and responsibilities, only those of you an your ex. Neither you nor the judge can force the lender to take you off the loan. In reality, neither can your ex be forced to refinance, because again that involves infringing upon the rights of a third party--it would be kind of like requiring that she remarry. The other guy gets a say in that!

She can be, and probably was required by the decree, to put forth her best efforts to try to refinance within a certain time, and if she didn't try at all, you can file a motion to enforce that provision of the decree and try to have her held in contempt if she really did just willfully blow the whole thing off. The indemnification provision probably won't help you much--it just means that she's theoretically responsible to you for any money you end up having to pay on the mortgage loan due to her failure to pay. The catch on that, obviously, is that absent refinancing, you're still liable to the lender, even though you no longer own the house, and if she stops paying, she may well not have any assets you can collect on if you fo have to pay the lender something. Right now, it sounds like she's still paying, so that's not really relevant right now anyway, but still it's not a good situation to be in if it comes down to that.

I AM curious though how it is that the mortgage went from being $250 to $400 a month without you knowing about it. That's a huge difference, and actually sounds like maybe she did refinance and either switched it to a 15 year mortagage or somehow had a fair amount of equity and refinanced for some of that to get cash. If she did refinance, your name should be off it now--have you checked with the lender to make sure that's not the case? If you're still on the mortgage, they should certainly be willing to talk to you about it and explain why the monthly payment would have jumped so drastically--that shouldn't be possible without you knowing about it, but then it could well be that you didn't update your address with them when you moved out (if not, do that NOW), and so they sent you and your ex one notice letter. Good luck.