If I represent the person who’s gonna be obligated, the obligor, my negotiating is gonna be that the other party is capable of earning a lot more money than they’re earning today. I’ll order a vocational evaluation for that party to say they’ve been educated and they have a master’s degree in some kind of valuable career like data processing, but they’re working as a barista or they’re working as a receptionist somewhere. I’m gonna have a professional vocational evaluator sit down with that person and interview them, look at their resume, look at their education and come to this court with a recommendation that says this person within three months could be up to speed making four times as much as they are making in their current job, and that of course is very important because the calculus of spousal maintenance in Minnesota is the ability to pay and the need. So, the more money the person who’s gonna be paying has, the more ability he has to pay, the less amount of money the other person has the more need they have. So, my goal for the obligor is to balance those incomes as closely as possible and make sure that he or she doesn’t have to pay through their nose for the rest of their lives.

Other trends in Minnesota is that permanent spousal maintenance, in other words you’re paying for life that’s something that I always try to avoid when I’m representing the obligor because say you’re married for five or seven years, you shouldn’t be supporting somebody for the rest of their life after you’ve been five to seven years it just doesn’t scan. So, I look at the length of the marriage, so does the court it’s a factor. On the other hand, if I’m representing the person who’s gonna be paid, the obligee then I’m going to make sure that I have detailed accounting for expenses of what it’s gonna take for her to have a living standard that’s as close to the marital standard of living as possible because that is one of the factors a court looks at. I’m going to run numbers through a software program that’s going to show the tax implications of what spousal maintenance will be and show what the system is capable of providing to the person who’s getting paid without causing undue and unbalanced hardship on the person who’s gonna pay. And all those things kind of go across the aisle as well.

I mean I do run the numbers, I run the software for the obligor as well. In the case of somebody who’s gonna be paid I do try to maximize the length of the award, but I also look at actuarial expectations how long somebody’s gonna be able to work, what happens when they retire. If I represent the person paying, I’m gonna look at them and say, when do you want to retire? Let’s make sure when we’re negotiating that there’s an out for you that you can retire at a certain age without a fining of bad faith, because if you retire and become suddenly or deliberately underemployed at the age of 54, the courts gonna look at you askance. At 54 they’re gonna say you shouldn’t have retired you have another 10 to 15 years of useful working.

So your motion to reduce spousal maintenance is really inappropriate at this time. And there’s also one other thing that is a very useful tool in Minnesota it’s called a Karon waiver, it comes from a case Karon v Karon, which is also been memorialized now in a statute that the parties can divest the court of any jurisdiction over modifying or changing spousal maintenance in the future. This would protect somebody who is paying, if they’re at a point in their career where they’re making say $100,000.00 a year and they’re gonna agree to pay $1,000.00 of spousal maintenance a month, we’re gonna divest the court of jurisdiction to change that order in the future because what if this person in 10 years is making $300, $400,000.00? Then the other party can come back and say well you know the money that I’m getting isn’t enough, I lost my job blah blah whatever it is – they can come back and ask the court to increase the spousal maintenance from this person. But with that Karon waiver in place they can’t do that in most cases, it divests the court of jurisdiction. So that’s another very useful tool in spousal maintenance.