Oneida County Law Blog

Many alimony awards take on the common form of one person paying to their former spouse monthly payments of money. These payments can go on indefinitely or they may end after a certain amount of time or the achievement of self-sufficiency for the recipient party. However, in some cases, New York couples may resolve their spousal support matters with a different form of alimony payment. Rather than paying support over time, they may agree to a lump sum award.

A lump sum alimony award is effectively what it sounds like: a single payment that encompasses the entirety of the support relationship between two divorcing parties. When a lump sum payment is made, the alimony relationship is over and the spouse who pays is not required to provide their ex with more financial help.

Not every couple that chooses to get married will elect to draft and execute a prenuptial agreement before formalizing the relationship between the partners in marriage. Those that do, though, create contracts that can dictate how certain financial and property-based decisions will be handled in the event that the marriages end in divorce. Because of this, individuals who entered into prenuptial agreements with their spouses may not be able to change the decisions that they made in the past regarding certain divorce-related topics.

Prenuptial agreements cannot provide couples with complete agreements on how all marital matters will be settled if divorce happens. For example, prenuptial agreements cannot establish how the custody of children will be managed as all such matters must take into account the needs and best interests of the children. Prenuptial agreements are made before marriages happen and therefore a child may not even be born when decisions about their hypothetical custody are considered in the creation of a prenuptial agreement.

Many parents who get a divorce discover that they can benefit from a 50-50 parenting plan in which each parent shares the joy of caring for their children 50 percent of the time. Children will have two homes and live with both parents an equal amount of time with this plan.

While the central premise of equal parenting time is a constant with the 50-50 split, parents may have varying ways of divvying up time depending on the schedules and needs of everyone involved. Here are several ways parents might divide their time in this way:

New York courts apply the income shares model in child support cases. This model generally requires both parents to contribute to the financial support of their child and a percentage of the sum of their collective incomes should be set as support for their child.

Under the New York child support guidelines, parents are expected to contribute 17 percent of their collective income to the support of one child. In this type of child support case, if the mother earned $200,000 per year and the father earned $70,000, the court would start by calculating the sum of their combined income to $270,000. The court would then calculate 17 percent of $270,000 as $45,900, and that would be the amount of money the parents would need to contribute for the child for a year of support.