Articles tagged: alimony

The Alimony Reform Act: Lessons Learned in the Last Six Years

The Alimony Reform Act: Lessons Learned in the Last Six Years

The Alimony Reform Act of 2011 defined what alimony is and how it should work in much greater detail than the prior law. The Alimony Reform Act, 2011 Mass. Acts ch. 124. However, it also left many questions unanswered. In the six years since the Act became effective, on March 1, 2012, the courts have slowly been further clarifying, and in some cases arguably undercutting, the Act. In this article, we will summarize the provisions of the Act and note the court cases that have affected the language of those sections.

Alimony: What is it?

Alimony is defined in the Act as '…

This December Don’t Dread Divorces

This December Don’t Dread Divorces

by John Fiske

Thanks to the 2017 federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, (“TCAJA”), divorce lawyers and mediators know that December will be a busy time and some of us may be working right up to the bell on Monday, December 31st. Under the TCAJA the alimony exclusion has been repealed for all separation agreements executed after this December (technically you could say the alimony exclusion is suspended, because the TCAJA repeal expires on December 31, 2025).

We can only imagine the conversations we will be having in December with clients who call us looking for a divorce and learn they have less than a month to write a separation agreement if they want to preserve the ability of the payor of alimony to exclude the payments from his or her taxable income. This article prescribes aspirin and a possible solution.

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The Goose, the Gander and the Alimony Reform Act

The Goose, the Gander and the Alimony Reform Act

By William M. Levine and Hon. E. Chouteau Levine (Ret.)

[Note: to avoid a gender pretzel and to avoid offending anyone, the hypothetical clients in this piece are styled as a married couple of either or both male or female gender.]

Five years and many appellate cases later, the Alimony Reform Act (eff. March 1, 2012) (“ARA”) now has some meat on its bones. The more we work with it, however, more scenarios emerge that we had not previously considered; and we wonder if the drafters did either. One aspect we have been pondering is how critical elements of the statute address the scenario where former spouses “trade places” after divorce. In other words, the parties’ earnings change inversely, sufficiently to make the initial alimony payor a putative payee.

In…