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Here's what I suspect may be legally possible for your fiance, although I am not a lawyer. I believe in alimony that the law protects the payer as well as tries to honor the divorce agreement, but...that the payer must have enough by law to sustain himself. So I believe the alimony will be reduced enough for your fiance to be able to survive after he retires. Asking someone to be able to pay a fixed amount beyond what they are bringing in, that would render them unable to meet their own basic needs, seems unreasonable.
Exactly what I was talking about yesterday. Everything can be renegotiated, child support and alimony if the payee or even the person getting it has a change in their job situation. When you file the motion, they ask for your W2's, not sure about income taxes, they also want to know what your current monthly living expenses are. It's all taken into consideration.
I can't recall how they would count the OP living with him paying 1/2 or if the ex has a boy friend living with her. I'm not sure if it enters the equation or not.
The attorney I mentioned yesterday is really good. I'll be shocked if her fiance doesn't get alimony reduced, especially in these COVID times where people were laid off. Now is the perfect time to do with when OP's fiance would have proof they didn't work a few months during the lock down. I'm pretty sure she said they were both laid off because my hub was too.
Honestly, they do not even need an attorney. It's very easy to file the claim yourself. Court is being heard in Zoom. My daughter just went to court with her ex last week.
Judges awarding financial support are not printing presses. I have some serious thoughts here.
I am a happily married attorney. From what I see legislatures and judges set support awards (including both child support and maintenance) at wild and unaffordable levels. Getting reductions from amounts "awarded" is easier said than done. I think you should consult an attorney.
Awards - Judges set awards according the the perceived needs of the child and the wife. Even though the husband's income is supposed to be considered, the husband is often regarded as minimizing income to minimize mandated payments. While there may be some truth to this, the problem is that the divorce adds to living expenses since two households now must be maintained. That immediately reduces how far the respective incomes go. Judges will say (and I have heard them say) that they consider it their "moral duty" to feed the wives and kids. The problem is that the judge is not printing the money. It remains to be seen how Covid plays into this. I have gotten rent for commercial tenants effectively reduced. I can't predict that the same will be true for support and maintenance.
My overall analysis - There is no question that "back in the day" divorce was too hard to get. The parties needed "grounds" that were sometimes hard to prove. And judges didn't like to determine whether there was really adultery, or withholding of "marital relations," or cruelty. So the concept of "no fault" divorce was created. Fine, as far as it goes.
Join that with wanting to empower women, and you wind up with a lethal mixture where no one has an incentive for marriage to work. The woman just reads the law or talks to her friends, or worse listens to Internet chatter and "learns" that the judge will "give" her x-amount for maintenance. And better yet the child support checks will be written to her so the child perceives the mother to have real economic power. Sounds good, particularly if there is friction.
The problem of course is that the husband may well be unable to finance those payments, particularly with now having to maintain two sets of household payments. And since there will be friction over seeing the children, and over control, the husband may be unwilling to make all of the payments.
***** the past.* It always looks greener on the other side. Do you really want "the alternative"? There's a reason you are here now. Move on and make the best *of now*.
To quote Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson from “Help me make it through the Night”;
Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow’s out of sight.
Does anyone have any experience with deep regret and how did you get past it?
It is a fundamental part of the human condition, and many people are tortured with it. I read a story about a physician who was married with a family and had a solid income. But all of his friends had made a killing in the stock market (this was a few years ago) and he had always been nervous about jumping in thinking it had already peaked. Instead stocks kept soaring.
So we are talking about a man who lived better than most of us, but he didn't have the money his friends had. He ended up killing himself.
On older friend of mine worked alongside Howard Head (born July 31, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – died March 3, 1991) when he was an an aircraft engineer for Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore. In 1947 Howard Head went skiing for the first time at the age of 33. He decided he could invent a better ski using the structural principles that he had learned during his experience as an aircraft engineer. In a warehouse he rented from in downtown Baltimore, he began to make protypes and he decided to go into business full time in 1950. He asked my friend to join him in his new venture, but he was afraid to leave the comfort of a well established engineering firm. Naturally Howard Head became a multi millionaire when he sold his company in 1969 and a legend in the ski business. My friend retired with a normal pension.
I remember when I read that story that I swore I would never have those kind of regrets. A lost opportunity that didn't result in a lifelong illness was just a lost opportunity. Move on and make the best of now. But as I approached 50 I became similarly consumed by regrets over my errors. I found that constant needling from women put me into a profound depression,
So I have no solid advice for you.
Last edited by PacoMartin; 02-27-2021 at 12:11 PM..
Yes, I was stupid to give up the pension aspect. I was 34 and only had a year to go (10 years) for it to be vested. It was a union job too so the pension was a very good one and turns out now as a senior I could be living a more tolerable life with the pension.
My boss had recommended me for a promotion into a job that was becoming vacant soon but I was passed over for the position because I was female. I was on speaker phone in my boss's office when the GM at the other end of the line said, "Forget the skirt. Who else have you got?"
You don't fight these kinds of things in court otherwise you are black-listed in the industry and would never work in it again. It was the early 80s and I already had a career of 12 years by then and had goals.
At that time women were rare in my line of work.
It is only one tiny part of all the regrets in my life so it didn't come to mind often. I've done a lot of work on myself over the years and have forgiven myself. I was just young and doing the best I could with what little experience and foresight I had in those days.
I'm not knocking it, but for some people it isn't as lovely as you might imagine. I know someone like that. Engineer. Retired at 58. Had a pension, a paid off house, and a fat 401k balance. He's been semi-depressed the last 16 years of his life. He never developed enough interests outside work (before or after he retired) and it hasn't been good. I'm not saying you'd end up like him, but there's definitely more to a happy life than just having money roll in effortlessly.
I know someone like that, too, a woman I worked with. We have a nice pension deal (of course that those younger than us in the next tier won't enjoy) and she worked for nearly 40 years before she packed it in. I swear she was in the office visiting every two weeks the first year. Lived in NYC, had a house with a pool in Florida, a long-time marriage with a good husband who loved her, and she was miserable. She even said, "I miss work so much. I am not a good retiree."
It blew my mind, because I could not wait until my turn came, and I cannot understand people who get bored so easily. There is so much to do, so much to read, so many movies and so much listening to music that I missed over the loooooooooong decades of having to work work work.
Anyway, eventually her daughter got married and had a child, and being a grandmother is apparently what did it for her. Once that baby was born, we hardly heard from her ever again.
Because I worked part-time in the same industry (public sector engineering) after retirement, I do see former coworkers who are now working in the private sector, still full-time, up to 70 and over. They just don't know what else to do. One guy is 70 and waiting for a project to start. He says he and his wife go for days without even speaking to each other in the same house.
I think the first paragraph in your post says it all, your job was killing you. 6 years a go I left a high paying job, a leadership position, something I thought I had worked my whole life for. Turns out I was the most miserable, negativistic, resentful man I could possibly have become. Nothing helped: exercise, prayer, meditation, talking and talking and talking, and I finally resigned, without a job to go to. My friends and family thought I had lost my mind. And when I took a new job with the fed govt at a huge and I mean huge pay cut, the FBI who interviewed all new employees in my line of work cornered me and couldn't understand why I left my job for the new job I had accepted. They were convinced they were going to find a reason, something I was hiding. Once the dust settled and I started recovering from the abusive hours and high stress position I was in, I started lamenting the loss of income and retirement savings. Now that I'm on the doorstep of retirement, I wish I had more money, but I have no regrets about leaving that job. So you do the best you can with what you have. I know teachers including my own sister, who worked their whole lives laboring in school districts, hating their jobs. Teaching is a noble but very tough job and it's not for everyone. I think OT is similar. Now retired with full pensions, they have regrets they didn't exit their jobs and do something else while they had the chance because all they have to look back on is misery and the pension doesn't mean as much as they thought it would. So I guess it works both ways. So one foot in front of the other and trust your judgment that you did the right thing. Who knows, you could have developed an illness from the stress and not even be with us if you had stayed in your toxic job. You can't look back, just look forward and make the best of it. Don't waste your energy in regret.
I'm not knocking it, but for some people it isn't as lovely as you might imagine. I know someone like that. Engineer. Retired at 58. Had a pension, a paid off house, and a fat 401k balance. He's been semi-depressed the last 16 years of his life.
Here's what I suspect may be legally possible for your fiance, although I am not a lawyer. I believe in alimony that the law protects the payer as well as tries to honor the divorce agreement, but...that the payer must have enough by law to sustain himself. So I believe the alimony will be reduced enough for your fiance to be able to survive after he retires. Asking someone to be able to pay a fixed amount beyond what they are bringing in, that would render them unable to meet their own basic needs, seems unreasonable.
You may also need to postpone your marriage until this issue is resolved. Nothing wrong with a long engagement.
I know you are worrying about your own retirement, I do think it is twice the burden to also have to worry about supporting your fiance. Your fiance has to figure out how to pay his own bills, it is not fair for you to have to feel stressed over that.
Nursing home work is very physically demanding! It is not good to have to give up your own health, and your foot sounds like enough of a problem that being on your feet all day is not sustainable. Could the nursing home give you a desk position for a couple hours of the day? Or something less taxing? Could you "retire" from this position and work a desk position in a nursing home? Could you up your certification to the next level for the nursing home environment?
You can sell beachy collectibles and whatnots on ebay, etsy, mercari, facebook marketplace, all by taking pictures and mailing the items, never having anyone come to your house.
Thanks. The problem is he has arrears, he has fallen behind many times (like when his work dried up for 4 months during Covid) and it's now in the tens of thousands. It's the arrears that allow social security to garnish his check, and in my research, it seems they will take 65% of his SS check. Even when he finally got pandemic assistance, 2/3 of it was sent straight to her.
We are definitely postponing marriage. The house is in my name, and she is just waiting for our finances to be merged so she can go after them. The "engagement" may end up being forever, which makes me sad as I've never been married and have a lifetime of wedding ideas I will probably never get to use. I know I shouldn't worry about his bills, but he can and has gone to jail for being too far behind. There was a period when he had a significant back injury and couldn't work for a couple of weeks, and my greatest fear was him being carted off to jail while in agonizing pain.
There was a site from a group called NJ for Alimony Reform that reported some of the worst cases. There was one where a guy with brain cancer was put in jail for weeks until a local attorney took his case pro bono. It's really awful. My fiance was only married 15 years, and he never even wanted to get divorced, she cheated on him and kicked him out. She once told him she only stayed for 15 years because that's what you needed in NJ for lifetime alimony. That group did manage to get reform passed, and there is no longer lifetime alimony in NJ, but the legislature refused to make it retroactive.
There really isn't anything else I could do in the nursing home. I'm employed by rehab companies that contract in the nursing homes, not the homes themselves. I am looking at alternative careers that I can transition to without needing more education though. Again though my age makes it tough to transition to something new.
I was thinking of sites like that. The problem will be the shipping. Some of the most valuable items are original art and photographs of that shore town, some are quite large and I fear the shipping costs would force me to lower the price so much I wouldn't get nearly what I could get with pick-up. There used to be a couple of consignment stores in that town that sold furniture and household items, but they went down the drain with Covid. They were probably barely making it even before, as rents in that town are sky high. They also used to have a city-wide yard sale every year which would have been perfect, but they stopped having it a few years ago. I tried to sell some of it at a yard sale down here once but all anyone wanted was kid's clothes and video game consoles it seemed. I know I could sell a lot of the stuff on my former town's FB page, but it's an hour away. So it still sits up there till I figure it out. I may take one pic to the post office just to see what mailing would cost. I know UPS would be too much.
I think the first paragraph in your post says it all, your job was killing you. 6 years a go I left a high paying job, a leadership position, something I thought I had worked my whole life for. Turns out I was the most miserable, negativistic, resentful man I could possibly have become. Nothing helped: exercise, prayer, meditation, talking and talking and talking, and I finally resigned, without a job to go to. My friends and family thought I had lost my mind. And when I took a new job with the fed govt at a huge and I mean huge pay cut, the FBI who interviewed all new employees in my line of work cornered me and couldn't understand why I left my job for the new job I had accepted. They were convinced they were going to find a reason, something I was hiding. Once the dust settled and I started recovering from the abusive hours and high stress position I was in, I started lamenting the loss of income and retirement savings. Now that I'm on the doorstep of retirement, I wish I had more money, but I have no regrets about leaving that job. So you do the best you can with what you have. I know teachers including my own sister, who worked their whole lives laboring in school districts, hating their jobs. Teaching is a noble but very tough job and it's not for everyone. I think OT is similar. Now retired with full pensions, they have regrets they didn't exit their jobs and do something else while they had the chance because all they have to look back on is misery and the pension doesn't mean as much as they thought it would. So I guess it works both ways. So one foot in front of the other and trust your judgment that you did the right thing. Who knows, you could have developed an illness from the stress and not even be with us if you had stayed in your toxic job. You can't look back, just look forward and make the best of it. Don't waste your energy in regret.
That's true. I think my memories of it have faded somewhat, and now it doesn't seem as bad as it did then.
It is a fundamental part of the human condition, and many people are tortured with it. I read a story about a physician who was married with a family and had a solid income. But all of his friends had made a killing in the stock market (this was a few years ago) and he had always been nervous about jumping in thinking it had already peaked. Instead stocks kept soaring.
So we are talking about a man who lived better than most of us, but he didn't have the money his friends had. He ended up killing himself.
On older friend of mine worked alongside Howard Head (born July 31, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – died March 3, 1991) when he was an an aircraft engineer for Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore. In 1947 Howard Head went skiing for the first time at the age of 33. He decided he could invent a better ski using the structural principles that he had learned during his experience as an aircraft engineer. In a warehouse he rented from in downtown Baltimore, he began to make protypes and he decided to go into business full time in 1950. He asked my friend to join him in his new venture, but he was afraid to leave the comfort of a well established engineering firm. Naturally Howard Head became a multi millionaire when he sold his company in 1969 and a legend in the ski business. My friend retired with a normal pension.
I remember when I read that story that I swore I would never have those kind of regrets. A lost opportunity that didn't result in a lifelong illness was just a lost opportunity. Move on and make the best of now. But as I approached 50 I became similarly consumed by regrets over my errors. I found that constant needling from women put me into a profound depression,
So I have no solid advice for you.
It's okay, just knowing I'm not alone helps.
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