Divorce Lawyer
If you’ve been ordered to pay spousal support or alimony, you typically have to pay your former spouse monthly. Since this is normally done through a court order, you may feel like you have few choices. What happens if you don’t have the money to pay spousal support? There are ways that you can reduce the payments. Normally, you have to request a modification. Here are some of the reasons people request modified alimony.
Financial Emergency
No one can predict when an emergency is going to happen. Say you’ve been keeping up on all of your bills, including spousal support, but then suffer a financial emergency. This can happen due to an injury, accident, or loss of a job. Anything that causes you financial stress and hardship may classify as an emergency. To pay for the emergency, you may be unable to pay your spousal support in its entirety.
If for any reason your alimony obligations are interfering with your ability to pay for basic expenses, then you need to contact a family law lawyer, like a family law lawyer in Rockville, MD, to discuss the steps it will take to modify your alimony payments.
New Support Obligation
After your divorce, you are bound to go through a number of different life stages. What happens if you have a child? When you have a child, you have to spend more money on the new baby. This is an expense that you’ll carry until that child is an adult. If your alimony payments are interfering with your ability to support your child, then the courts may order that alimony payments are lowered so that you can support your new obligations.
Physical or Mental Disability
If you find yourself injured, ill or otherwise mentally or physically disabled, then you may not be able to work in order to pay for the spousal support. When it comes to modifications, generally the courts allow it when you cannot afford to care for yourself. When it comes to disabilities, you often have to rely on government support. The money that you do have, you need to spend on yourself, rather than your spouse. In these conditions, it is possible to have your alimony payments adjusted.
Spousal support is not necessarily forever. While there is usually a time when you will stop paying entirely, there are also moments where you may be able to have your payments reduced. If you want to request a modification of alimony payments, then there are a few different reasons that most people cite.
Thanks to The Law Office of Daniel J. Wright for their insight into some of the top reasons to modify spousal support.