How Does The Court Impute Income To Someone Whose Job Skills Are Obsolete?

Technology changes quickly.  If you doubt this, ask a young person to drive a stick shift or show your kids a picture of a VHS tape or rotary telephone and see how perplexed they look.  If your kids are young enough, they have probably never even seen those GPS devices that people used to mount on the windshields of their cars in the first decade of this century, before GPS navigation apps came standard on every cell phone.  This is all quite entertaining unless you are in the business of manufacturing picture tubes for television sets or repairing analog clocks.  If your only employable skill is operating a mimeograph machine, then you are probably feeling the financial strain even worse than everyone else is these days.  This is no one’s business except yours, unless you get a divorce.  In that case, a judge can judge you about your outdated job skills and tell you what you should be doing to earn money instead and how much you should earn doing it.  A Birmingham alimony lawyer can help you get enough marital property and alimony to reestablish yourself financially after divorce if you have not been in the workforce since the cassette tape era.

Judge Orders Former Homemaker to Learn to Use a Word Processor

A young couple married in 1984; the wife had just begun a career teaching at a vocational school, where she taught students how to type on a typewriter and write in shorthand.  After the parties’ daughter was born in 1987, the wife left the workforce.  The husband earned enough money to support the family on his income alone, but he often expressed a desire for the wife to return to the workforce, but she never did.  The couple divorced in 2010 after the wife had an extramarital affair; by this time, the couple’s daughter had gotten married and was living in England with her husband.

During the trial, the parties disagreed about how much marital property and how much alimony the wife should get, since her infidelity had caused the breakdown of the marriage and since she would need considerable job training before reentering the workforce.  The judge determined that the wife would only need to take a few courses on the computer applications currently used in secretarial work, which she would naturally have to do in the course of renewing her teaching license, and she would be able to find another job at a vocational school.  Another complicating factor in the case was that the judge was a Facebook friend of the couple’s daughter.  The judge refused to recuse himself, because virtually all current and former residents of the small Alabama town where the family and the judge lived, within a certain age range, were Facebook friends with each other, which means that a Facebook friend connection does not imply a close personal relationship.

Contact Peeples Law About Alimony Disputes

A Birmingham family law attorney can help you if your ex blames everyone but herself for the divorce and her poor financial situation.  Contact Peeples Law today to schedule a consultation.

Source:

scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2651485851349393839&q=divorce+workforce&hl=en&as_sdt=4,61,62,64&as_ylo=2013&as_yhi=2023