Transcript
Part two of the individual monthly expenses for the Wake County financial affidavit includes those expenses that may change from month to month.
This is where if you are the dependent spouse and it’s an alimony trial, you need to spend a lot of time and energy researching these numbers and making sure that they’re very accurate.
Once again, you’ll see that there is the date of separation column as well as the current.
The law states that in North Carolina, for alimony purposes, the dependent spouse is technically allowed the standard of living of the marriage, and sometimes that’s why we need to have both a date of separation as well as the current. Because at the time of trial, sometimes the dependent spouse does not have the ability to pay some of the expenses that are listed here, and so therefore has cut back on some expenses, but at the date of separation may have had a standard of living which is higher, so the court needs to take that into consideration. One of the first things that often can be very different is the medical insurance premium. For a dependent spouse, this number was often included potentially in the supporting spouse’s paycheck and was withdrawn from the paycheck.
So one of the things that the dependent spouse needs to do even if he or she is unemployed is to go ahead and find out from a health insurance broker what would be the monthly premium amount for medical insurance, and try to get try to figure out what would be a comparable plan. So you wanna look at what the deductibles were under the current plan, and and try to figure out what’s the premium cost monthly for that. Also for dental and vision, we’d want to know, well, was there dental and vision? Of course, not always is there dental and vision, and if so, what would it cost?
Uninsured medicals, these would be the deductibles, the co pays.
This we would include, we would really wanna look back and see, well, year to year, are there ongoing expenses? Did you always hit the deductible? Do you have, you know, you know you’re gonna have a certain number of co pays if you have certain specialists?
What is the history? And then of course, the history might be different from what’s happening on kind of an ongoing basis.
It could be medical needs change, and so we’d want to include both of those.
Now keep in mind, the health insurance premium for the children, if there are minor children, is generally going to be included as a part of the child support number. So you want to make sure that if you are the dependent spouse and you’re working on this, that you’re very clear on exactly which piece of this relates to your own individual health insurance premium, as well as uninsured medicals, and what relates to the children. Because the children’s column is most likely going to be provided for in the child support calculation, and the alimony number is most likely gonna come from this self category here.
Lisa is a leading figure in North Carolina’s family law field, dedicated to guiding clients through challenging times with compassion and expertise. As the President and Owner of Rosen Law Firm, P.A., Lisa has built a successful practice specializing in divorce, child custody, child support, alimony, equitable distribution, and domestic violence. She has been a North Carolina Board-Certified Specialist in Family Law since 1998.
