Myth: Permanent maintenance is forever. Not true. Permanent maintenance, also known as indefinite maintenance, is modifiable based upon a substantial change in circumstances. Under Illinois law, permanent maintenance abates upon the remarriage, cohabitation, or death of the recipient. It is modifiable based upon a change in circumstances that is involuntary. A person who loses a […]
Myth: All support payments are tax deductible. Wrong. Maintenance payments ordered by the court or covered in a Marital Settlement Agreement if they abate upon the death of the payee, are generally tax deductible to the payor and tax includable to the payee. Child support payments are not deductible by the payor or tax includable […]
Illinois is one of only a few states where spousal support (commonly referred to as “maintenance”) statutorily terminates short of remarriage. Specifically, the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act provides that one of the several factors which will justify a termination of maintenance is the cohabitation of the maintenance recipient with another person on […]
Divorce can be an emotionally stressful and challenging time. Unfortunately, the divorce process can be made even more difficult when one spouse acts punitively to hurt their former partner by engaging in tactics that manipulate one party’s financial resources in order to injure the other spouse’s means of support. While the goal of all divorce […]
Under Illinois divorce law, the so-called “equitable distribution” principle (enacted in 1977) allows courts to allocate marital property in myriad ways. The asset mix in the “marital pot” in numerous cases, however, does not lend itself to a percentage division that a court is likely to order (or on which the parties might ideally agree). […]
The Second District Appellate Court recently found that social security disability income can be used to satisfy an obligor’s duty to fund college expenses. In re Marriage of Truhlar, 2010 WL 3667117 (2nd Dist. Sept. 17, 2010), the parties had agreed, at the time of their divorce in 1994, to contribute to the cost of […]