• Maintenance can be ordered in an amount upwards of 25 percent of your net income, and the amount of time you are ordered to pay may or may not have a set deadline.
Additionally, clients should consider the impact divorce has on credit, child support payments, issues regarding custody and intangibles such as a general loss of productivity while the divorce proceeds and a lengthy period of uncertainty that can last years if there are disputes over significant assets or appeals to the ruling.Additionally, you have to consider the impact divorce has on credit, child support payments, issues regarding custody and intangibles such as a general loss of productivity while the divorce proceeds and a lengthy period of uncertainty that can last years if there are disputes over significant assets or appeals to the ruling.
The Grass Isn't Greener
In my experience, the decision to divorce after a long period of marriage is often fueled by having met someone else, not a crisis that leaves no other reasonable option except ending the marriage.
Barring the relatively small percentage of cases involving abuse or some other horrendous circumstance, I believe a large portion of divorced couples that were married for 10 or more years could have celebrated their fiftieth anniversaries had they hung in there and would have judged their marriages reasonably satisfactory at the least.
Instead, after meeting someone new, many will suddenly decide that their marriage is terrible when that is not necessarily the reality of their situation. They think they have found something better, but most of the time that turns out not to be the case, and now they must also deal with the financial complications of divorce.
Anyone considering divorce (particularly individuals who have become successful during the course of a long marriage) need to consider the financial fallout of ending their marriage before pulling the trigger.
It’s ironic that the people who have planned their lives very analytically and have had a measure of success financially with very carefully scripted career and retirement plans will often approach the subject of divorce without the same foresight they have applied to every other aspect of their life.
Divorce is very often the single most important — and destructive — decision a person will make. This is a serious choice with real consequences.
You do not want to let decades of careful planning and hard work be destroyed on a whim.
Joseph E. Cordell is the principal partner of Cordell & Cordell, a domestic litigation firm focused on representing men in divorce. Since co-founding the firm with his wife, Yvonne, in 1990, he and his team of almost 200 attorneys spread across 115 offices in 30 states have helped tens of thousands of men going through divorce.