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Canby Connection • September 2013
Aurora Law Of f i ce
How much spousal support will I receive? How much will I have
to pay? These are crucial and difficult questions to answer. There
are many aspects that need to be addressed in order to answer
these questions.
There are two types of support: Temporary support, which is
paid to get the family through the time between filing for divorce
and the final trial, and then post divorce spousal support.
Temporary support tends to be a hachet job: the judge makes
a rough and ready estimate of how much each party needs to live
on and divides the net income up so that the parties can survive
until the trial is over. The result is that the paying spouse feels
they are paying too much and the receiving spouse that too little
is paid. It is simply not possible for a
judge to divide an income to sup-
port two households that often
barely support one. Inevitably tem-
porary support decisions are felt to
be unsatisfactory by both parties.
For that reason, the best tempo-
rary support solutions are the ones
crafted by the spouses themselves,
usually with the assistance of their
lawyers and a mediator.
The types of spousal support
awarded at the divorce trial, that will
be paid or received after the divorce
is final, are transitional support,
compensatory support and mainte-
nance support.
Transitional support is paid to help the spouse educate them-
selves or receive some type of training. The length of time this
support is paid will often depend on the length of time it takes to
complete the education or training.
Compensatory support, which is not commonly awarded, is
paid to compensate the receving spouse for the benefit they gave
to the other spouse, in terms of improving their educational quali-
fications or allowing them to exploit a business opportunity. The
easiest example of this would be the spouse that worked to sup-
port the family while the other spouse went to medical school. In
this situation the working spouse has conferred on the doctor
spouse a benefit in the sense of increasing the earning ability of
the doctor spouse. Here spousal support would be sued to com-
pensate the working spouse for the long term income enhancing
benefit conferred on the doctor spouse.
Maintenace spousal support is the most common spousal sup-
port awarded. This is what most people think of as “spousal sup-
port” . In long term marriages the standard which the court uses
in deciding how much support is to be awarded is what would be
considered “fair and equitable”.
Like so many of the principles that can be accurately stated in
this area of law, it is not obvious what this means simply by
announcing that this is the rule. Many of the cases coming out of
the courts on this subject contradict each other and it is difficult
to discern how these cases come to be decided. For every “rule”
you can announce, there is another rule contradicting it. For
instance, the court is not going to equalize incomes by awarding
spousal support in almost all cases except in cases of long term
marriages, 30 years or more, where both parties are retired and
are in their late 60’s or older. So, for example, a couple who have
been married for 38 years, living on social security, at an age
where they are extremely unlikely to return to the work force, the
court would probably equalize incomes. In most other cases they
will not.
Unlike child support, there is no computer program that you
can use to predict spousal support. At best you can consult an
experienced divorce professional to obtain a range of possible
spousal support.
Where the marriage is not short term (usually 5 plus years and
more) and there is a gap of 25 percent or more between the
earning capacity of each of the spouses, you should anticipate
that some amount of spousal support will have to be paid.
In short term marriages (4 years or less) spousal support tends
not to be awarded. But there are no hard and fast rules, and in
exceptional cases, support can be awarded.
How long will I have to pay spousal support? Judges often say
in one breath there is no rule on how long spousal support has to
be paid but the rule of thumb is half the length of the marriage.
That is the general rule that most divorce attorneys use. So if you
have been married 12 years, spousal support might be awarded
for 6 years. Again, there are no hard and fast rules and much
depends on other factors, such as the health of the parties, the
possible need to take care of very young children, the education
and age of the parties, the amount of debt in the marriage and
the assets and other resources available to support each of the
spouses.
This is one area of divorce law where you absolutely need to
consult an experienced lawyer because as you can see, this is a
murky and difficult area of the law in which to make predictions
on your own.
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