1. If you are living with someone else, your financial need has likely been reduced or eliminated, thereby reducing or eliminating your need for spousal support.
2. If you are living with someone else, accepting (or taking) spousal support is, in essence, double-dipping.
3. If you are living with someone else, while receiving spousal support, your former spouse is also supporting that other person.
4. If you are living with someone else, you are likely in a social and financial interdependent relationship akin to a marriage.
5. In many instances, if you are living with someone else, you may be violating a Marital Settlement Agreement or may be in breach of a final judgment.
Alimony reform is on the rise, and there’s simply no avoiding it. Nor should there be. In a modern society, where the rules and roles have changed dramatically since the days when women didn’t work outside of the home and didn’t have the right to vote, and there’s been a significant shift towards rebalancing economic equality, traditional notions of what spousal support is, when it is required and when it should be modified, must be redressed. One ripe area for change is the circumstance of cohabitation, its effect on spousal support and the challenges surrounding the ability to prove it. Since spousal support is based, at least in part, on the need of one party for financial support and the ability of the other party to pay, logic dictates that if the recipient spouse has a decreased need for financial support, than the payor spouse should pay less. Therefore, if the recipient spouse is cohabiting with someone, the resulting financial need is decreased. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, as with so many things in family law, it’s complicated.
You might think I’m anti-alimony. I am not.
You might think I’m anti-woman or an ultra, man-hating feminist. I am neither.
What I am, quite simply, is pro-fair. I am pro:
- Terminating spousal support in the face of the recipient spouse being in a supportive relationship;
- abolishing permanent alimony, except under very specific circumstances whereby the recipient spouse is unable to self-support;
- evaluating past earnings and earning capacity to enforce imputed income to an intentionally underemployed person;
- using vocational resources to determine a person’s ability to work, including considerations for amount of time out of the workforce, age and stage in life, and
- awarding retroactive repayment of alimony, when it has been proven that a recipient spouse has breached the cohabitation clause of a marital settlement agreement and has intentionally deceived former spouse in an effort to keep the alimony.
Read more about it here: http://huff.to/2bGfmZE
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