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.