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Hello, everyone. I’m Dr. Michael Mantell with another edition of Family Law Matters with Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, the founder and managing partner of the Primus Family Law Group. How are you doing, Bonnie? Hi, Michael.
I’m doing well. How about you? Terrific. Looking forward to another discussion, a very practical discussion about an important topic in family law, and that is spousal support, meaning money.
So you’re paying money and you’re paying every month and every month and every year and every blah, blah, blah. When do you say enough? When do I go to court and say, your honor, when do I get to stop this? Well, Michael, if you’ve been married longer than 10 years, the court reserves jurisdiction over spousal support literally forever, and you can be ordered according to the order at the time of judgment. There’s no end date in sight.
So you could be in your 40s and be looking at paying spousal support, and that’s what we’re talking about, spousal support, the support you pay to your ex-spouse indefinitely, tens of years, 20s of years. And so the rule of thumb is about half the length of the marriage. So if you were married 15 years, about seven and a half.
But I think it’s a good practicality when advising your clients to wait beyond half, because if you’ve been paying for longer than half, that’s a good argument that the other person has had enough time to become self-supporting themselves. This is barring disability or extraneous, extraordinary situations. So that is something to consider.
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Now, so on a practical level, if the spouse remarries, let’s say you get divorced, and three years later, he or let’s say, whichever way it goes, the recipient, thank you for that legal term, the recipient gets married. Oh, then it ends. It’s over, right? Yes.
Now what happens if the recipient who’s now married, gets divorced? Does it fall back to the first person? No. Once it’s over? Yeah, that intervening event. Now that becomes the second husband’s monkey.
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Okay. Now, you mentioned disability. Let’s suppose the spouse who is the recipient of the financial support becomes ill or disabled or something.
Does that mean that the person paying spousal support has to pay more now for that? The marital standard of living is what spousal support is based on. So that’s over here in the past. It’s also based on a present ability to pay.
So the person who’s now become disabled, that is something that wasn’t in existence during the marriage. So it may be something they can try to glom onto, and a court may consider it, but the marital standard of living is the basis for spousal support. So what happens if the recipient, former husband or former wife, whichever way it works, because sometimes the woman is paying the spousal support.
Correct. But let’s suppose that they’re paying X dollars a month. That was agreed upon.
And suddenly the payer, the person paying support, wins the lottery or inherits millions of dollars, wins the lottery, gets a raise in salary, gets a new job. Does that mean that spousal support increases now? No. No.
Sorry for that short answer. It is very hard to get spousal support to increase because it’s based on the marital standard of living. So if somebody were to go today and say, I want spousal support to be increased, they would go back and say, well, what was he or she earning during the marriage? That didn’t change.
It’s just now your present ability to pay that amount. So the person who won the lottery may not be able to walk in and claim, look, I’ve lost my job. I don’t have any ability to pay spousal support anymore.
But wait, you have $5 million over here. You still have a present ability to pay. So someone could contact you or your team of legal experts at Primus Family Law and say, we’ve been married 15 years.
I’ve been paying for the last nine, 10 years, and I want to stop paying. Okay. No change in income.
The recipient hasn’t changed marital status. So why would a court say, yeah, okay, you can stop because you want to? Well, the recipient has a duty. If in their judgment, there is something called a Gavron warning, which is, hey, in getting this support, but you have a duty to become self-supporting in a reasonable period of time.
And after 10 years using, or nine years using the example, depending on the person’s age and their ability to earn, there’s a whole set of factors that are considered. You have a duty to become self-supporting. And if you’re that in the example I gave before, where you’re 40 something years old, you’re, let’s say a college graduate, you have a duty to become self-supporting.
I know I keep repeating myself, but it’s important that you do for yourself so that the other person can stop doing. And is there a time that the court says, I mean, like you get divorced and you’ve been paying two years, three years, when does that recipient go get a job? Um, well, again, all those circumstances, how old is the person? Um, do they have any disabilities? How old are your children? If you have children, if you have very young children, that may be vacant, you know, um, what skills you have, what is the market for those skills out there? Let’s assume everything is in that person’s favor. A person can go in, you know, and, and at least the first time say your honor, make the person do job contacts, make them show us that they’re trying to find a job.
And then after X amount of time, then if they still don’t have a job and there’s a market for that job, then I would like the court to consider acting as if they got a job and impute them with income so that my obligation can be lowered. So, uh, the person says my, my former spouse who I’ve been paying child support to, excuse me, spousal support to, um, has a new job and now he or she is earning X dollars. So whether it’s two years after the marriage or whatever it is, I want to, I want to pay less child, uh, spousal support.
And that’s when they come in and talk to you and you go to court and represent them for that. Right? Correct. If, or hope they, there is a way, I mean, well, let me put it this way.
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If the other person’s income has increased, but yours has also increased. There’s also those factors to consider because both circumstances have changed. And it depends if you signed in your judgment, something called a non-modifiable spousal support, which means I’m agreeing to pay X regardless of the circumstances, except if you get married or, you know, somebody dies.
So that X will not change if it’s risks you take for the agreements you make. It’s risks you take for the agreements you make. Okay.
That’s, we’ll give that quote to you, Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel of Primus Family Law. There’s a lot of, it depends, and people have all kinds of thoughts in their head. Oh, I’m not going to pay any more.
I don’t have to. I heard that they need to be in touch with the expert, Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, founder and managing partner of Primus Family Law is the expert. If people want to be in touch with you to find out, more about this and not live in their own, I thought I heard and all that, how do they get in touch with you? You can reach us at 619-574-8000, or by email at info at PrimusFamilyLaw.com or our website, www.PrimusFamilyLaw.com. Terrific.
Bonnie, thanks very much for another wonderful edition of Family Law Matters.