Alimony, also known as spousal support or spousal support, is often the ugliest sticking point in a contentious divorce case. “Alimony is a highly emotional and highly contentious issue, which means couples go to court and fight over it,” said Lina Guillen, trial attorney and editor at Nolo.
The word maintenance comes from the Latin term for “nutrition” and roughly translated means “eat money”. The concept originated in England at a time when divorce did not yet exist and the husband was legally obliged to support his wife if the two separated because they were still married.
In the United States, each state has its own spousal support laws that authorize a non-working or low-income spouse to seek child support from the higher-income ex-spouse. But the rules and conditions of who is entitled to child support and how much they are entitled to differ from state to state.
“The fundamental question is, does one spouse have financial maintenance needs and is the other spouse able to pay?” says Güllen. “When alimony is awarded, there is usually a large discrepancy between the spouse’s income and assets.”
Note that alimony is separate and distinct from child support. While children and parental responsibilities may play a role in the payment of child support—for example, if a spouse is unable to work while raising young children—child support is provided solely for the best interests of the child. Both federal and state governments take an active role in enforcing child support payments, as non-compliance usually means more families need government support. There are no such enforcement mechanisms for alimony payments.
How do you get alimony?
Again, each state has its own specific rules for who is entitled to child support, but Guillen says there are many similarities.
First off, you must be married to qualify for alimony. If you’ve never married but have still lived with a romantic partner for years, you might qualify for something called palimony (a playful contraction of “pal” and “alimony”) in a handful of states.
The length of the marriage is also important. Really short marriages of a year or less are unlikely to qualify for alimony, since there probably wasn’t enough time for one spouse to become financially dependent on the other. The longer the marriage lasts, the more likely it is that there will be an income imbalance.
“It’s really a case-by-case decision, but the shorter the marriage, the lower the likelihood of receiving alimony,” says Guillen. “I would say a five-year marriage with children, if either party stops working or takes a lot of time to help with two young children, there will likely be some spousal support until that person rejoins the marriage.” can return to the labor market.”
In every maintenance case, it is about the financial circumstances of both spouses. Whether alimony payments are decided by a mediator or a judge, they will ask for detailed financial records — bank accounts, payslips, assets and debts — to determine if one spouse will be in financial distress post-divorce and how much the other will be able to make a contribution.
Part of this calculation is what is known as the “marital standard of living”, a measure of how the couple was used to living during the marriage. Did they live in a three bedroom house with two cars and an annual vacation in Florida? Or a mansion with servants and a private yacht? While judges won’t guarantee both ex-spouses the same standard of living, they won’t allow the higher-income spouse to live in luxury while the low-income spouse is on welfare, Guillen says.
Finally, a court will consider whether a spouse sacrificed increased income or an entire career to support the other spouse’s ability to work or finish school. For this reason, Guillen gave the example of a couple with two children as the standard recipe for alimony payments. When the children were born, one spouse left the labor market to stay at home so the other could continue working. Historically, this was the role of women, which is why most alimony traditionally went to women rather than men. But that’s starting to change.
In Orr v. Orr in 1979, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s child support statute, which restricted child support payments to women, was unconstitutional. Decades later, the number of men receiving child support from their ex-wives is still relatively small — just 3 percent out of 400,000 child support payments, according to the 2010 census — but with women now being the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households, that’s shifting the trend is towards more men entitled to alimony. Alimony payments are becoming less common in general, falling from 25 percent of all divorce cases in the 1960s to just 10 percent in 2015, according to Reuters.
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