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All right. Today, I want to talk about a very basic and essential topic that is worth your understanding and understanding the nuances of it, and that is spousal support. And when I talk about spousal support, I also mean alimony in there as well. Spousal support or alimony is the same term used interchangeably. Sometimes I’ll refer to it as spousal support, sometimes I might say alimony, but know that they are the exact same thing. There’s a lot of details that you should know about alimony or spousal support, and I want to make sure you understand the basics of it.
Let’s start with just a simple definition. What it is, is a court-ordered provision of money for one spouse after divorce, or sometimes separation as well. Spousal support is a very important concept. You may be on the paying end of support, you may be on the receiving end. But oftentimes, people ask, “Well, why do I have to pay support?” or, “Shouldn’t I be receiving spousal support?” And you should kind of understand why it exists. Very simply, one spouse pays the other money, usually on a semi-regular basis. And the reason it exists is that most of the time, both spouses don’t have equal resources.
Usually, one spouse earns more than the other, and to make up for that difference, they have spousal support. Particularly, in a longer marriage where if you’ve been married for a long time, and if you’re getting divorced and one spouse didn’t work or barely worked part-time, that income difference can be substantial. Sometimes, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year a difference and so spousal support is there to make sure that the lower-earning spouse does not end up without any form of income after the divorce process is over.
Why it came into play, if you look up the history of spousal support, why it even exists, is actually, once upon a time, you could get divorced but oftentimes, if we are assuming traditional gender roles, the wife would be left destitute. The husband who has had some sort of profession many, many decades ago before divorce laws evolved would work the job, the wife would stay at home if you think of the traditional family as it used to be. Before spousal support, if a wife were to get divorced, the wife would have no money and they would have to start over with basically nothing. They would be destitute.
And so, spousal support was enacted by just about every state to minimize that from happening and keep that from happening in this situation of divorce, like other evolutions in divorce include no-fault divorce laws, which I’ve talked about on the podcast. It used to be the case where you had to prove a reason that you were getting divorced. Now you can get divorced for any reason at all in any state. Look, there are pros and cons and what not to everything, but just want to give a little bit of context there.
Now, the big question that I get asked a lot is, “How much alimony am I going to get?” And the answer to that is it depends. There are numerous factors that are considered. Now, every state has its own nuances to how spousal support is determined. Some of them, it’s a little bit more formulaic. More often, it is almost just whatever you and your spouse agree to or whatever a court decides is the amount of support that’s going to be paid, and there are very few guidelines. Particularly, for my California listeners… I work with a lot of people in California, a lot of people in New York… Now, I work with people everywhere but in those two states in particular people, the question is, “How much support am I going to pay?” And the answer is, well, we’re going to have to figure it out and negotiate it because it’s not a hard and fast rule in terms of spousal support.
So there are a lot of nuances to the spousal support question and what financial status means, and trying to give a bunch of examples is a little bit tricky because everyone’s situation is different depending on state and income level and savings and earnings, et cetera. So, I won’t try and dive into 50 different examples of ways spousal support might be calculated just based on the financial status question, but something to think about.
The next issue is living conditions and lifestyle. Some people who make $500,000 a year spend $600,000 a year, which means they have a lot of debt. I also know families who make $500,000 a year who spend $80,000 a year, and they save a substantial amount of money every year. The point is, is that lifestyles can vary dramatically between families. And if you are in a situation where you or your spouse doesn’t spend very much money, there may be the case for lower support amounts going forward. Now, it doesn’t apply in every state and every situation, but something to think about.
Earning potential, is a very important topic in terms of how the spousal support…
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