Spousal Maintenance
Spousal maintenance is a very important issue to address in divorce cases. A typical situation where can be awarded is where we have a medium to long term marriage. What does that mean? Medium length marriage would be anywhere from say seven or eight years upwards to twelve or fourteen years. There’s no set number of years it varies. It’s a very subjective number as far as the judges are concerned in Arizona. Long term marriage typically is 15 or more years. That’s the first step. The second step is that the Court will look at the disparity in income between the spouses. If one spouse is earning $10,000 a month and the other spouse is earning $2,500 a month that would be a wide disparity which the Court would consider. There are numerous factors under our statutes that Courts are required to go through and conduct an analysis and determine if a party is entitled to spousal maintenance, how much and for how long. Some of the factors the Court looks at is length of the marriage, disparity in income and then the Court will look at some very specific things such as the ability of one spouse to pay. So, if the one spouse is making $10,000 a month taking the spouse’s monthly expenses into consideration does that spouse after making his/her monthly obligations have the ability to pay the other spouse income. Conversely, the Court will also look at the spouse who’s seeking spousal maintenance in terms of what are his/her needs. Can that spouse meet his/her basic needs or how much assistance does this spouse need. Basically what happens is that the Court conducts an analysis through each party preparing, filing out, signing an affidavit if financial information. An AFI is one of the Court documents that is used to determine child support and in this situation spousal maintenance. Each party has to prepare that, attach their paystubs, tax returns and prepare monthly expenses; everything from rent, utilities, groceries, donations, food, entertainment, insurance — all those things are put together and then it’s compared to see if the spouse who’s seeking it how much he/she needs to meet their monthly obligations and again the other spouse’s ability to pay after meeting their obligations. Every case is different so it’s very important that your attorney go through this in detail to determine what the likelihood is. To predict with any certainty is difficult, the Court is very subjective when it comes to this. You can present the same case to five different judges and potentially have five different outcomes. It’s difficult to predict, but the more documentation you have, the more detail the more likely you’re able to get an award on spousal maintenance.]]>
