How is alimony determined - what are the requirements to receive it, how is the amount that is to be paid determined, and how long is it paid out for? Thanks!
It is completely state dependent and also dependent on the individual case and aggressiveness of the female’s lawyer (it is almost always females that get it with a few exceptions). There is no way to answer your question with a blanket answer that applies across the whole U.S. Until recently in Massachusetts, alimony didn’t have any time restrictions and was very open-ended.
This lead to some absurd situations like men paying alimony to women for many decades even though they were only married for a short time or alimony payments payments that were such a long-term burden for the male’s financial health that he had to work well into old age to continue them even though his ex was well off financially and retired. This has been reformed in the last year or so but it is one reason alimony can result in outcomes that few would deem fair.
Most divorces these days don’t involve alimony these days because most females work but alimony is still a possibility under many situations and the particulars depend completely on the state where you get divorced.
It normally is a negotiated amount. If one spouse make less than the other spouse, then alimony in an amount to equalize the income of both parties is where you would expect to end up.
If the husband makes $6,000 a month, and the wife earns $3,000 a month, one might expect that the husband would pay his ex-wife $1,500 a month so that they both end up with $4,500 (half of their combined income) a month. Normally, alimony is only paid for a few years, and would be terminated if the spouse receiving the alimony remarries.
Get an attorney.
Also, alimony paid is taxable to the recipient and tax deductible to the payor. Whereas child support is not taxable to the recipient or deductible by the payor.
In many, possibly most, States it’s based on a formula that takes into account the salary of the spouses. It will generally only be for a fixed amount of time and will step down every few years until it goes away. How long the alimony lasts and the step-down schedule will depend on the length of the marriage.
Of course, all of this is negotiable and can be changed if both spouses agree.
You mean “the lawyer of the spouse receiving the alimony”. I don’t know of any state nowadays that requires alimony recipients to be female (and in fact, AFAICT any such requirement would run afoul of Supreme Court ruling in Orr v. Orr against gender bias in alimony awards).
This is true in practice, but as I said, there’s no law barring males from receiving alimony. As of 2006, the percentage of US alimony recipients who were male had risen to 3.6% from 2.4% in 2001.
(And as gay marriage becomes legal in more states, if the stereotype about lesbian relationships lasting longer on average than gay male relationships turns out to be reflected in marriage statistics, then we’ll see a higher proportion of gay male alimony recipients increasing that percentage further.)
EarlyMan, you might want to start by looking at the Wiki article on alimony, which is pretty detailed and thoroughly footnoted, although of course I can’t vouch for its reliability.
Is this nitpick really necessary? Shagnasty said “almost always females”, and you in turn quote a statistic that would say that 96.4% of alimony recipients are female. That pretty much sounds like “almost always”.
As had been said it is highly variable. Different states have different statutes and traditions. In a handful of states it is closely related. But in most it isn’t, giving judges wide latitudes to rule. In a lot of states it is often alimony that is the piece of any divorce decree most up to the whims of the judge.
In my case (Colorado) child support came off a spread sheet. You entered the numbers into the required cells and a number was spit out. The judge has little to no direct influence on that. She could have made some decisions that would have affected the numbers that were entered but she couldn’t change the equations, which were set by statute.
Likewise division of assets were fairly straightforward. There was a principal of an equitable split. As long as everything lined up more or less at a 50-50 split the judge could rule however she wanted, but she couldn’t go too far from 50-50. And in our case most of the assets were sold and the proceeds split, so most arguing was over the value of the handful of things that weren’t splittable or sellable.
The spousal support (as alimony is legally known in Colorado) was far more variable. The judge could have awarded whatever she wanted, for whatever time she wanted, based on whatever she deemed relevant. There is almost no statutory restrictions. According to my lawyer… customarily the wife would receive 40% of the husband’s income, minus 50% of the wife’s income, for a period of a third to a half the length of the marriage (plus child support). In my case the final decree was for 36% of my income for seven years (based on a 13 year marriage). I thought this unfair… but given that my ex had initial asked for 50% in perpetuity, it was a lot less than it might have been. And it was kinda in line with the customary amounts.
It is, but I think stating the actual percentages helps to clarify the facts for the reader, who may well not have any idea whether the actual incidence of male alimony recipients is, say, one in fifty or one in five hundred or one in fifty thousand.
In fact, that statistic indicates that males constitute almost one in twenty-five alimony recipients in the US, which to me sounds like more than “a few exceptions”.
And if we’re talking about alimony laws in their broadest applicable sense (which seems to be the way the OP phrased the question), then ISTM it’s most accurate to call the parties involved “the recipient” and “the payor”, rather than assuming that those terms are automatically equivalent to “the female” and “the male”.
Moreover, as I noted above, due to the recent (and no doubt future) legalization of gay marriage in various jurisdictions, it’s no longer accurate even to assume that every alimony case has one female and one male in it.