Re this story what tis the legal presumption under which she is due £300,000 21 years after the divorce?
Can somebody translate this from Daily Fail to English?
“Agony aunts” are (female) newspaper advice columnists that readers mail in questions to. She wrote on the topic of finances.
The whole story doesn’t make any sense. She lost her fight to get more money, and she’s getting the money? It’s a lump sum in installments? Huh? And if she’s a financial guru who’s been getting 24 kilopounds a year for decades (in addition to whatever she’s earned on her own), how the heck is she penniless now?
It’s the consolidation of the remaining maintenance payments.
It doesn’t appear she wanted more money. She has been getting £24,000 a year and apparently wants to continue that indefinitely.
Either the judge or her ex-husband is looking to put an end to the ongoing payments. The ex-husband will pay her £300,000 and that will be the end of his payments to her.
He was paying her a yearly amount out of the business for a number of years. Then he sold the business and gave her a share of the proceeds.
That was my take as well. The judge basically said, “Yes, you were entitled to alimony for a while, but dammit, it’s been 21 years since your divorce. You aren’t getting payments for life. He owes you 300k pounds and that’s the end of it.”
Well, economically, she’s getting the present value of a perpetual stream of annual payments of 24,000 GBP at an 8% rate of return.
For a perpetual annuity (sometimes called a consol):
PV = Q/r
Where Q = the amount of the annual payment and r= the rate of return.
24,000/0.08 = 300,000
If she wants to continue receiving 24,000 GBP per annum, she just needs to find a bond paying 8% per year. (Tough now, but not unheard of.) Really, all the decision changed was who is responsible for finding the appropriate investment vehicle.
“Living costs and bringing up the children.”
21 years ago.
The kids are grown and she can just fuck off. I don’t see why she should get a penny. There has to be and end to alimony somewhere.
It would probably have been cheaper to have her killed years ago. 
They didn’t say she was any good at it.
Hey, she’s got somebody paying her £24,000 a year.
I barely even see this as an improvement from the ex-husband’s point of view. £300,000 is the amount he’d pay her over the next twelve and a half years.
And there’s apparently no community property issue involved. He built up his business after they were divorced. So it’s not relevant how much he sold it for in 2013 unless she can show he had hidden assets back in 1992.
I would agree that I don’t think open-ended spousal maintenance is a particularly great idea. Although, I do think that if one spouse can show, for instance, that as a couple they agreed that one spouse would suspend his/her career to raise the children while the other worked, then at divorce, the stay-at-home spouse should not be left holding the bag. And I am sure that there are other scenarios where some degree of time-limited maintenance would be appropriate.
But, just as it would be unfair substantially to alter the terms of maintenance in the wife’s favor 21 years post-divorce (and that seems to be the premise of the OP), we must also recognize that it would be unfair to the wife likewise to alter the terms in husband’s favor. Whether it makes it her a good person or a bad person, the wife did rely on the existence of this divorce settlement. And she is now nearly retirement age, so substituting this income will not be an easy task. Perhaps you feel she should not have asked or should not have been awarded this maintenance. If this is so, this should have been addressed 21 years ago.
This being so, if the husband wishes to cash out his obligation, the “buy-out price” should be calculated according to generally accepted finance principles. The wife is made somewhat worse off, as her husband is no longer the guarantor of the annual payout amount. (And, moreover, I would have set the discount rate at a more realistic 6%, yielding a PV of 400,000 GBP.)
But, no, there is no basis for “correcting” the maintenance award. Either 24,000 per annum, or a one-time lump sum of the present value equivalent. The ship long ago sailed on relitigating the merits of the maintenance award generally.
Like has been said - she wanted to keep receiving 24,000 a year, he wanted out. The judge set “out” at one lump equal to 12 years payments. Since she’s 59, then everyone whould be still kicking and hopping in their 70’s and the ex won’t have to keep paying til he (or she) dies.
£24,000 is a decent amount but not fantastic. IIRC that’s about $40,000 a year. She has a job, presumably it pays, this was just gravy.
Perpetual alimony may be out of vogue now, but 20 years ago it was just starting to go out of style and I suspect a lot of people were still getting it. She would have been 39 with kid(s) to raise, he probably was decently off even then, and easy target for a good divorce lawyer. I suspect the ex-husband now was looking to end the whole thing. With £2.6M, I assume he can afford to.