Why New Jersey Sucks Even More Than I Thought

I've been doing a little research on alimony in other states. Texas, for example, has very reasonable and enlightened rules on the subject:

(a) It is the intent of the legislature in this article to provide spousal maintenance primarily as a temporary rehabilitative measure for a divorced spouse whose ability for self-support is lacking or has deteriorated through the passage of time while the spouse was engaged in homemaking activities and whose capital assets are insufficient to provide support.

(b) It is the intent of the legislature in this article that spousal support should be terminated in the shortest reasonable time, not to exceed three years, in which the former spouse is able to be employed or to acquire the necessary skills to become self-supporting. Only in circumstances in which the former spouse cannot become self-supporting by reason of incapacitating physical or mental disability should maintenance be extended beyond this period.

This is exactly the way alimony should work -- a temporary rehabilitative measure to allow the spouse (the wife, in most cases) to get back on her feet -- nothing more. The amount is limited to the lesser of $2500 per month or 20% of the spouse' average monthly gross income per month.

Compare this to New Jersey's evil, twisted, bizarre construct in which a spouse (the man, usually) may be required to pay inordinate amounts of money to his ex forever.

This, of course, is the situation I find myself in. The alimony award to my ex-wife is permanent, and it's a significant fraction of my income -- not only of the income I now earn, but of the income I could ever hope to earn.

It's a horrible situation from my standpoint, but, as with everything else thrust upon me by this divorce, something to which I'll have to adapt.

Here's a link to information about alimony in Texas.

Life After Divorce

Is there life after divorce? And if there is, what is it like? Those are questions I now have to ask myself as my life undergoes enormous changes. Our situation is unusual in that even though we are divorced, we are still living together until we sell our house. (The good news is that we have accepted an offer and the contract is in the attorney review stage, so this phase should be over within 8 weeks or so.) During this period, we are sort of in limbo -- not really married, and not really divorced.

I've been married for 25 years, and returning to single life is going to be a very strange experience indeed. I was married so young that I don't really have much experience as a single adult. Much of the experience I do have is not applicable to the much older person that I am now.

My friends and family have been very supportive, so I think I will make it. I know it's a cliche to say I'm going to take things "one day at a time" (as if there were any other way), but that's just what I plan to do.

It's Over

I am finally divorced! We had had a settlement conference scheduled for last Thursday, but it was postponed for a week because my wife's attorney was late sending us the proposed Property Settlement Agreement. This morning we went to the courthouse early and spent a few hours hammering out the final agreement.

We have been having an amicable divorce, almost out of necessity, since financial considerations have required us to live in the same house. It's fortunate that we are able to live together so easily, since we will have to continue doing so until we sell our house. In the current housing market, that is a slow and difficult process with no assurance of success.

I don't really feel any different now that I'm no longer married, perhaps because nothing has changed in our physical situation, as opposed to our legal situation. I'm hoping single life will agree with me, since I'm being thrust into it (to use an appropriate term) for better or for worse. I never wanted to be anything but married my whole life, and now I find myself in exactly the situation I wanted to avoid by getting married a quarter of a century ago: adult and alone.

Alimony

Alimony was the most contentious issue in my divorce. My wife is a well-educated woman with a master's degree in teaching and a paralegal certification. Now she's going for a second master's degree, this one in school counseling. She worked on and off during our marriage. Despite all this education and experience, I am stuck having to pay her permanent alimony.

The way I see it (along with virtually everyone I've spoken to about the issue), alimony should be a temporary assist, a way for the lower-earning spouse to get back on her feet, get back into the workforce, and restart a career. It should not be a permanent subsidy. New Jersey, in fact, allows for this type of alimony, called "rehabilitative" alimony. New Jersey law also allows for permanent alimony in marriages over 10 years in length, but does not require it. My experience over the past year has shown me that, even though it's not required, it is almost a given in situations like mine, in which there was a long-term marriage (24 years) and a large disparity of earning capability between the two spouses. Virtually every lawyer who looked at or got involved in my case immediately considered it to be a permanent alimony case. That includes my lawyer, her lawyer, most of the lawyers I interviewed, the lawyer I went to for a second opinion, and the two lawyers on the Early Settlement Panel we attended last year. One of them said, "There's not a judge in New Jersey who wouldn't look on this as a permanent alimony case." I know I'm not going to be able to change New Jersey law or overturn its long-established legal practices, so I'm stuck with the situation as it is.

I don't know if such a situation pertains in other states, but from people I've spoken to in both New York and Indiana, permanent alimony is not typically awarded in those states, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the exception rather than the rule throughout the country. For any New Jersey man contemplating divorce, though, I'd give this advice: do it sooner rather than later (I waited too long and got hit very hard because of the long-term marriage), and get the hell out of New Jersey!

Lawyers

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to handle my uncontested divorce via mediation, rather than as adversaries. Since my wife wanted nothing to do with this, we each had to get lawyers. I interviewed about 6 or 7 of them before deciding on the one I used. Based on my interactions with my lawyer over the past year, plus what I have learned by talking to others who have gone through the divorce process, I would have to agree with the general perception that the lawyers are basically in the game for themselves, and they manipulate the situation in order to maximize the amount of the bill they can hand you.

My wife's attorney sent me hundreds of interrogatories which asked all kinds of questions, some relevant to our case, but many not. Some of these were ridiculously irrelevant; so much so that it would have been funny if it had not been costing us so much money. In some cases, there were typographical errors which made it clear that the documents had been prepared for another case, and then inexpertly adapted to our own. I believe that many of the 1,500 pages of photocopied documents I had to supply to respond to these were simply ignored, and just requested as a formality.

I believe my wife's lawyer was more of a bill-padder than my own. In addition to charging $350 an hour for his services (compared to $300/hr. for my lawyer), he billed everything his office did at his rate. My lawyer charged only $60/hr. for work done by a paralegal, and $40/hr. for work done by a secretary. My lawyer's interrogatories were far more concise and directly relevant to the case, and were far fewer in number.

Having said that, his services were far from perfect. While he was more efficient in his billing, I do have to admit that his office was not terribly well-organized and didn't always respond to my attempts to contact it, whether it be by phone, fax, or e-mail. I don't really think this made much of a difference in terms of the outcome of my case -- based on discussions with a number of lawyers, the eventual settlement would probably have been pretty similar no matter what lawyer I had or what we did. It seems that awards of alimony and property distribution are largely formulaic in New Jersey -- in other words, while the law does not prescribe or regulate property distribution as tightly as it does child support, the lawyers, mediators, and judges in the system all use rather similar formulas and methods to arrive at their rulings and recommendations.

Welcome

A little over a year ago I found myself becoming a statistic as my marriage crumbled and I filed for divorce from my wife of 24 years. I had been unhappy for most of those years, but for some reason I never thought it would end in divorce -- I was always too terrified of the prospect. In the end, three years of marriage counseling failed to help us reconcile our differences, and we mutually agreed to end it.

Neither one of us had any interest in a War of the Roses - type scenario. We were able to keep our interactions civil, which was enormously helpful since we had bought a big house a few years earlier and could not afford to set up another household on our income. Therefore we have both continued to live in the same house as our divorce process dragged on. Now, as the finalization of our divorce nears, it seems likely that we will actually be divorced long before we can sell the house and set up separate domiciles.

From the beginning I tried to convince my wife that we should go through a mediation process instead of the traditional adversarial divorce. I found this book in the library and it made a lot of sense. She was having none of it, though -- she felt that mediation was "experimental," that no one she knew of had ever gone through it, and she had no interest in trying it.

So, we went through a traditional adversarial process, paying lawyers thousands of dollars to waste our time with ridiculous discovery and "interrogatories," and ended up agreeing to a settlement suggested by a mediator after a year of sluggish legal wrangling.

Now, we have a settlement appearance before a judge in about a week, and I expect we'll be divorced on that day or soon after. I got the idea for this blog during the past year of being ground through the New Jersey divorce machine, but never acted on it until now, when I'm almost finished. I hope it will become a place for people involved in New Jersey divorces to discuss their experiences and exchange ideas and advice. I certainly could have used such a site over the past year; hopefully it will be useful for others going through the process.