Spousal support. Spousal maintenance. Alimony. Those all denote the same thing in Florida, being applicable to payments from one spouse to another in divorce cases.
An initial point to note concerning alimony is that it does not feature in every divorce. A judge will make a support determination based on a number of statutory factors. Input from a proven family law team can often make a material difference in the result.
When might alimony make sense in a Florida divorce?
Spousal support commonly features when one spouse is economically disadvantaged eompared with the other. It could be the case that one partner worked throughout marriage so that the other could attain credentials enabling a lucrative career. Maybe one spouse quit school or a promising job to stay at home and raise a family during marriage, with the other experiencing steady on-the-job advancements.
In such cases, one spouse clearly enters post-divorce life with a money-making capacity not equally shared by the other. Spousal maintenance is a legal tool that exists to address and remedy that inequity.
The role of experienced legal counsel in an alimony case
Alimony discussions and outcomes sometimes play out amicably and without a hitch. Understandably, though, that is far from uniformly being the case. We note on our website at the established Tampa family law firm of Quinn & Lynch that a maintenance request is often resisted by a would-be payer spouse.
Disputed matters can revolve around many issues, with amount and duration often being top-tier concerns. Experienced alimony attorneys will always seek to promote a client’s best interests in the least adversarial and cost-efficient way. That typically mandates a focus on party cooperation that helps to skirt formal litigation and a court-driven process.
There are several types of alimony and, as noted above, many factors that can determine a support outcome. We will take a closer look at specifics in an upcoming blog post.
