Key Factors Courts Consider for Spousal Support in Divorce Cases (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So the factors that you can consider. So you may say, okay, we've been married for X amount of time. We do want there to be spouse support. How can we figure out what might be reasonable? There's some factors that the court would look at. Now, again, we're talking about if you go through an amicable divorce, but if you're gonna go to court, the judge for long-term support would look at several factors. They're not gonna just run a calculation, a diso master, it's what it's called, report. They may do it just as a guide, just to kind of see what the calculation is, but they are looking at the factors. They're gonna look at earnings of the parties. They're gonna look at the needs of the party to be receiving spouse support. And they're also going to look at these other conditions. And you can always Google this, Family Code 4320 factors is what they're referred to. But the court's looking at this. How long were you married? Your age and health, can you get a job? Can you work? Your incomes, how far apart are they? What are you capable of earning? If you haven't worked for a while, for instance, if you were to go back into the workforce, what would you be able to earn? Your standard of living while married. This is an interesting one because I always tell my clients, if you have one set of income, whether you're both working or not, and one set of expenses, one mortgage, one rent, your vehicles and cost of living for living together, the standard of living is always going to decrease for both parties when you separate and you have the same incomes from both parties or just one party. And now you have two sets of household expenses. How much property or debt you each have? Okay, like I was saying earlier, if one spouse takes on more debt, maybe you want to reduce the amount of spouse support to be paid to take care of that and even that out. Whether one of you have helped the other to get an education, training, career, or professional license. What that's referring to is if one spouse is taking care of the kids 100% of the time and they did not work for the sole purpose of the other spouse going to school and working and being able to promote and be more gainfully employed and earn more income, then that would obviously be considered a factor in how long support should be paid. History of abuse, we won't go through all these, but you can see what they're looking at. Not just the spouse support calculator, but they're looking at more at overall, what was the relationship like, the marriage like, for purposes of coming up with a real good duration that would work and be appropriate for both parties.