“Stock options can affect child support order” is a Boston Herald article by Gerald Nissenbaum, the lawyer whom we interviewed for the Massachusetts chapter of Real World Divorce. Here’s the question from the reader:
My wife is dragging me back to court. She wants more alimony and child support because I made money by selling stock I got by exercising stock options in my employer’s company.
But in our divorce agreement, I agreed she’d get three-quarters of the proceeds from the sale of our marital home and I got to keep my stock options. Can she get a double dip?
The answer from Nissenbaum turns out to be “yes,” with the explanation: “search for the latest appeals court case on child support — Hoegan v. Hoegan. Then forget about trying to hold onto your wallet.”
The plaintiff here has a great strategy. Give up something that will yield income in the future in exchange for more cash now. Then get between 20 and 50 percent of that future income (11-25 percent of the pre-tax amount, but paid on a tax-free basis) via a child support modification based on the fact that the defendant’s income has changed. (And since judges are reluctant to modify child support awards downward, a plaintiff could easily end up with 200 or 300 percent of a short-term income boost if the child support is set during the period of temporarily higher income.)
[The appeals court case shows why you want to be a divorce litigator in Boston. The kids were born in 2003 and 2004. The mother sued the father in 2010. They’ve been litigating now for six years. The youngest child will yield a cashflow for whoever can hold onto primary custody through the year 2027. The cash yield from the children cannot be determined definitively without lawyers on both sides arguing in front of a judge.]
So the guy pays his lawyer for negotiating a child support modification and then the appeals court effectively says the guys lawyer was a dud for advising his client in this direction.
Considering that the probable outcome of this case will be, however one wants to call it, a deepened (enlarged?) peony for the defendant-father of children here given a lesson in how any father can be milked with the support of the law, I am waiting with bated breath for the USA’s first courthouse divorce-rape murder-suicide bombing affecting also the plaintiff, her lawyers, and the law-upholding judge [observe: not wishful thinking, but a premonition of sorts]. All this giving the couple’s absent, but in time grown-up, children enough future “food for thought” as to how they’ve instrumentally been abused by one parent against the other.
Of course, one such morbid “deplorable event” won’t be enough to awaken the interest of the investigative powers of The New York Times, but it ought to be enough for at least one feature-length post-mortem profile in The New Yorker magazine.
Your link is bad, but I found the case here.
http://finnandeaton.com/stock-option-income-and-child-support-hoegan-v-hoegan/
This is one of the most startlingly bad aspects of the current system. The parent cannot agree to a binding contract for the care of their kids. Only the parents with sole legal custody (eg, widows) have full parental rights.
Ouch!
Cue Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” song!
That is just diabolical. I guess she had the better lawyer.
Oh well, like your pilot example from the other day, this guy will probably marry again.
@Germani: Cue Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” song!
Or “Rich Girl” by Hall & Oates!
Smartest woman: That pilot definitely has not married again. And in fact he is currently restricting dating/sexual activity to outside of the U.S. (and therefore not subject to U.S. family courts). His plaintiff may marry a third time when she is done with him…
How about suing plaintiff in civil court outside family court system, for breach of contract and fraud?
What if that pilot’s out-of-US-jurisdiction, fully protected “horizontal jogging” activities somehow result in a pregnancy, and then the “joggee” temporarily moves to his own, or other child-support-lucrative US state? Maybe, for the sake of prevention, the pilot needs to ensure that his jogging partners are denied visas to the USA on some trumped up, anonymously reported terror suspicions? Otherwise, what’s that DHS for.