By 1999, Nancy Hofman was married ten years, had three children and a career and income about to take off. She moved from corporate credit analyst for a manufacturer to stock broker for Charles Schwab, where her husband was an equally well-paid IT professional.

When the Internet bubble burst, Schwab turned to a more relationship-based client service, where Hofman, 44, really shone as a portfolio consultant in the private client division. "I really do it for the relationships," she says of investment advice. She traveled a lot while carefully choreographing the home routine with her older daughter and husband, who greeted the two younger ones after school.

Then her husband, she says, had a midlife crisis and suddenly quit his job. After a bout of depression, he enrolled in nursing school, where he had an affair with a fellow student that ended his 17-year marriage and took a job paying half of what he was making at Schwab. That would figure horribly for Hofman later in family court.

Despite the trouble, Hofman kept it friendly. Fearing a toxic legal battle, she filed her own divorce papers, assuming she and her husband would work out the details as they came along. An equal parenting plan would eliminate child support details.
But the cordiality ended when a judge ordered Hofman to pay her husband up to $6,000 in back child support and $400 a month thereafter, even though there was a co-custody living arrangement. When Hofman asked the court for a reduction, the female judge recalculated their respective incomes and raised Hofman's payment another 20%. The judge refused to consider Hofman's health insurance costs even though she had allowed them in the ex-husband's accounting.

Hofman, who lives in Avondale, Ariz., now also has to budget for her children's college education, since she no longer trusts the courts to enforce her ex's early commitment to it.

Hofman would later apply her personal experiences in a new position as managing principal with Lee Munson's Portfolio LLC, a New Mexico-based investment management firm, where she has offered a new service for clients: advice on how to structure divorce settlements fairly and manage assets afterward. She has also completed a new certification program in divorce financial analysis (the CDFA), in addition to her designations as a chartered mutual fund counselor, an accredited wealth management advisor and an accredited asset management specialist.

The incidence of women like Hofman paying child support or alimony is increasing. But actual stats are elusive since alimony data is not compiled from divorce decrees but from appeals court records, according to Randy Kessler of Atlanta-based Kessler & Solomiany Family Law Attorneys. Men don't seek "manimony" unless they believe they've got a very strong case, so few cases are appealed or counted, says Kessler, the new chair of the Family Law Practice section of the 400,000-member American Bar Association.

However, there is strong Department of Labor data showing that an increasing number of women are earning more than their spouses, the main criteria for establishing alimony. From 1992, when Good Morning America anchor Joan Lunden got hit with an $18,000-a-month temporary alimony settlement, until 2009, 4 million more wives outearned their husbands. The biggest one-year jump occurred in 2009, the depths of the credit crisis, when the percentage of wives making more than husbands jumped to 37.7%, from 34.5% in 2008. Many Web sites now encourage men to seek alimony.

Not that all men do, or take it for as long as they could. Linda Y. Leitz, a CFP, EA, and CDFA in Colorado Springs, Colo., has seen her women clients, even those who are primary earners, pay less spousal support for shorter periods. "Maybe we're behind the times," she says, "but men don't like the idea. It's horrifying and humiliating to them."

Women must also help non-custodial ex-husbands financially because of the 1984 Child Support Enforcement Amendment, which says that visiting children should enjoy the same standard of living with each parent as they do with the other.
While it's true that men need money because of the poor economy, says Kessler, "alimony and child support awards to men really are less a function of the poor economy and more a sign of women's achievement in the workforce."

These imbalances bring up sensitive emotional issues, and advisors have to help their clients navigate them. A 53-year-old accounting executive facing a hefty alimony payment to her husband of 20 years lamented, "It feels like punishment for loving him."

It can also feel like a punishment for success. Self-employed women in particular, Leitz says, "broke the glass ceiling-the mold-and blazed new trails to create their own businesses, and feel it's all come back to bite them."

Luckily, none of her clients has had to dissolve a business to satisfy an alimony order.

It's a common complaint among women that their modest recent gains in the workplace are being snatched away too soon by alimony, excessive child support and college tuition. And even their workplace situation hasn't improved. According to the DOL, even though women made up 53.8% of the workforce in '92, they had actually lost ground marginally eight years later, making up only 53.6% in 2010.

Linda Lea Viken, a family lawyer of 34 years, who is also a two-time South Dakota state senator and the current president of the 1,600-member American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, recalls a female client who had to pay her stay-at-home husband $4,200 a month to cover his country club membership so he could continue his tennis lessons.  The number of stay-at-home dads has doubled in the past ten years, says Viken.

"Most women scream about it," admits Bettina E. Munson, a family law attorney in Freehold, N.J., who has female clients who pay alimony. "There are 13 factors in the statute affecting alimony. The law is not sexist."   

Maybe not, but the law does recognize sex as a criteria for ending alimony, which can be granted for life, notes Viken. Under a co-habitation clause, if the ex-husband takes a "live-in lover," the ex-wife can stop paying alimony.

The tax implications of a split shouldn't be overlooked either, says Jane Honeck, CPA, PFS and author of The Problem with Money? It's Not About the Money! (published in 2010). Since alimony is tax deductible and child support is not, the woman paying may want to give up a stock portfolio in lieu of paying child support, she suggests. Similarly, a real estate transfer to the lower income spouse could avoid a capital gains hit on the estate. 

Donna Smalldon's client, an upper management executive in her mid-30s, recognized the couple's salary disparity, $9,000 versus $1,400 a month, meant she'd have to pay "transitional support." She didn't expect to defer thousands from her 401(k). Says Smalldon, a Portland, Ore.-based CDFA, CFP and financial mediator: "She felt she'd been supporting him long enough" after 13 years of marriage, while he, "a hopeful musician with lots of different interests, pursued his dreams." 

Her client wanted to pay $2,400 a month for three years. He wanted $2,650 for four. They settled on $2,500 for 40 months with the ex furnishing his annual tax returns and agreeing to take less support if his monthly income rose above $1,400, or to drop it entirely if he earned $4,100 a month for six months.

"At the end of the day, she may have been a little more generous than the court might have ordered, but how much would she have spent fighting it?" Advisors said often the best they can do for clients is help limit the damages, including the bad blood.