We granted an application for discretionary appeal filed by the appellant, James Snowden, to consider whether the trial court erred in its award of the parties’ marital home in this divorce action. Because we conclude that the trial court erred in classifying the entire interest in the home as non-marital property and in awarding it to the appellee, Gwendolyn Alexander-Snowden, we reverse. In this State, trial courts must apply the “source of the funds” rule when equitably dividing a home that one of the parties brought to the marriage. Under this rule, a trial court “must determine the contribution of the spouse who brought the home to the marriage, and weigh it against the total non-marital and marital investment in the property.”1 The spouse who contributes a home as non-marital property to the marriage “is entitled to an interest in the property in the ratio of the non-marital investment to the total non-marital and marital investment in the property.”2 This interest is considered the non-marital property of the contributing spouse, and “the remaining property is characterized as marital property and its value is subject to equitable distribution.”3
In the present case, the trial court awarded the entire interest in the marital home to Ms. Alexander-Snowden as non-marital property. The court apparently did so for two reasons. One was that, according to the trial court, there was no evidence introduced as to the value of the home at the time of the marriage. Although such information was necessary to show the contributing spouse’s non-marital investment in the property,4 we conclude that the record contains sufficient evidence by which the trial court could have calculated the value of the home at the time of the marriage. Indeed, the trial court’s own findings of fact, which it made after a bench trial, illustrate the point. In those findings, the trial court found that Ms. Alexander-Snowden brought the house into the marriage; that the value of the house when Ms. Alexander-Snowden acquired it in 1984 was $42,000; that the value of the house at the time of trial was $75,000; and that the property had thus appreciated by $33,000 during the seventeen years since its purchase. The court further found that the property had appreciated $1,941 per year since its purchase and thus had appreciated $21,351 during the eleven-year marriage.5 We conclude that, although no appraisal was introduced establishing the value of the marital home at the time of the marriage in 1988, the foregoing findings by the trial court demonstrate that it had sufficient evidence to calculate the value of the marital home at the time of the marriage. The trial court erred by not doing so.6
