Winning a substantial settlement is no guarantee that you will ever actually receive the stipulated alimony and/or child support payments. There are many reasons for that, and they run the gamut from perfectly understandable to bogus and vindictive.
People lose jobs, businesses fail, and stocks go down even in the best of times. The failure of a marriage itself can often have spillover effects that include depression, alcoholism, drug dependency and other factors drastically impacting your ex-spouse’s ability to work and pay support. As we’ve seen this year with the COVID-19 pandemic, unexpected global catastrophes can occur with little notice to employers who are forced to shut-down and greatly reduce staff and wages.
When a man seeks to “get his life in order” post-divorce, paying money to the women and children whom he has abandoned or who have abandoned him may not be his top priority. His inclination may be to get out of town and find someone else to love in another state or country, or in some cases, risk this month’s salary on black 17 at the nearest casino.
Similarly, a woman who has abandoned her children to take up residence with another man, by whom she is now pregnant, may have reasons to focus on the present at the expense of her past.
It is not uncommon that the person who has destroyed your life finds someone else to ruin in fairly short order, sometimes long before the ink is dry on your settlement documents. When that happens, one can expect a request for reduction in support payments to be filed on the grounds that they have a new child on the way or for another substantial change in circumstances.
There is no question that paying alimony and child support can be extremely burdensome. At the same time that a man feels the need to splurge on dates in order to attract a new partner, he is hit with a double whammy: alimony and child support payments are not tax-deductible (or taxable for the recipient); and since the person paying child support is generally the non-custodial partner, he or she may miss out on the child tax exemptions.
When your child support payments are late or stop coming altogether, whatever the reason, it’s time to call Hirsch Legal, LLC. Our principal attorney, Carmina Hirsch, is a strong advocate for children caught in the middle of a divorce battle. She will do her utmost to ensure contempt of court orders are remedied. Conversely, if your financial situation has worsened considerably since the settlement was finalized, she can help you make the case to the court that the payments are unfairly burdensome and a modification is warranted.
Hirsch Legal, LLC represents clients in Upper Fairfield County, Connecticut (Bridgeport, Stratford, Shelton, Trumbull, Monroe, Newtown, Brookfield, Danbury, Fairfield) and New Haven County, Connecticut (Milford, Orange, Woodbridge, Bethany, West Haven, New Haven, Hamden, Oxford, Seymour, Ansonia, Derby, Waterbury, Bethany).
Whether you need to enforce a settlement or defend your children in some other way, we are here for you. Call today!