Montgomery Family Law Blog

It is not unheard of for noncustodial parents in Alabama and around the country to earn less than they are capable of or take off-the-books jobs in order to lower the amount of child support they are required to pay. This is referred to as voluntary impoverishment, and the Office of Child Support Enforcement takes it very seriously. When the OCSE suspects that a noncustodial parent is voluntarily impoverished, they may act in a number of ways.

One way the OCSE deals with voluntary impoverishment is by imputing a noncustodial parent's income. When this is done, child support awards are based on what the noncustodial parent should be earning instead of what he or she actually is making. The OCSE bases the imputed income figure on the noncustodial parent's level of education and previous earnings history. However, establishing that someone is intentionally unemployed, underemployed or hiding income can be difficult.

When people in Alabama decide to divorce, they may be deeply concerned about the effects on their finances. After all, the financial implications of divorce can linger on long after the emotional fallout settles. Many newlyweds are choosing to keep their banking accounts somewhat separate. This involves maintaining individual accounts or paying only part of an income into a joint account for the home and other bills. Younger people are more likely to opt for separate banking, perhaps due to the popularity of instant online transfer apps that make it easy to share funds.

Some people may opt for separate finances because they want to make it easier to handle their funds in case of a potential future divorce. However, keeping separate bank accounts is not sufficient to provide this kind of protection. Marital assets remain marital, even if only one person's name is on the account. Since Alabama is an equitable distribution state, finances and property accumulated during marriage are divided based on principles of fairness rather than strictly in half. However, this does not mean that simply keeping separate bank accounts is enough to have that income excluded from the marital pot.

Providing financial security to their children is an important part of being a parent. This is usually pretty straightforward when a child's parents are still married. After a divorce, making sure that both parents are providing the right financial support can be far more difficult. Child support agreements are supposed to make sure that one parent is providing enough financially, but this is sadly not always the case.

A significant number of parents who are supposed to be paying child support simply are not doing so. This means there are a lot of kids in Alabama who are living without a sense of financial security in their daily lives. Here is just how big the problem is.

Social security payments are very important for many older Alabama residents, but a divorce might lead to some confusion about whether they can still receive benefits. In cases of divorce, for people who did not work or mostly depended on their ex-spouse for financial support, benefits from that ex-spouse make up a substantial amount of their payments.

To receive benefits based on an ex-spouse's record, there are some criteria that must be met. First, that marriage must have lasted at least 10 years. An individual's own benefit should be a lower amount than that of their ex-spouse. They must be at least 62 years of age, and their ex must be eligible to receive retirement or disability benefits. To collect half of the amount of the former spouse's benefit, they must be full retirement age, which is 67 for people born after 1960. If an individual claims the benefit before that, the amount they receive will be prorated as they will be receiving a benefit for a longer period of time. They can also receive benefits from the ex-spouse's record if they have not claimed their own benefit, but to do this, they must have been divorced at least two years.