Attorney
When you’re a business owner facing divorce in Albuquerque, your focus is the future: keeping your company running, protecting your assets, and building the next chapter. Spousal support, which is commonly called alimony, can feel like a weight that is dragging you down and tying you to the past.
Reframing the payments as something akin to a severance package can help you escape this mindset. Just like a business might compensate a departing employee for their contributions, alimony is meant to recognize the time and effort a supportive spouse poured into your marriage—especially if those efforts are what allowed you to grow your business.
At Matteucci Family Law, we help negotiate spousal support agreements that embody this spirit so that our client and their former partner can both move forward with their lives.
What Is Spousal Support in New Mexico?
Alimony or spousal support is not a mandatory component of divorce. New Mexico family court judges do approve divorce agreements that do not address the topic at all. However, every divorcing couple must decide if it is something that should play a role in their relationship’s end.
These payments are often included in a divorce settlement in order to help a divorcee who could otherwise not afford their post-divorce footing. But they can also be used as a tool for helping a couple equally apportion the value of complex or impossible to divide assets like businesses.
Depending on its purpose, and how it is being funded, spousal support can take many forms:
- Transitional – This is money intended to supplement the income of the receiving partner for a limited amount of time. Funds earmarked for this purpose are usually awarded for only a short amount of time.
- Rehabilitative – This form of spousal support helps the recipient get the education or job training he or she needs to be financially self-sufficient after the divorce. It is especially helpful if the spouse’s career was put on hold during the marriage.
- Modifiable – This is money awarded to a spouse for an indefinite period. In many cases, it is paid until the receiving party remarries or dies, as well as when the paying party dies. However, it may increase, decrease or stop entirely depending on retirements or material and substantial changes in circumstances, such as changes to either person’s income or financial assets.
- Non-modifiable – This is money awarded to a spouse in set monthly payments for a definite period of time. During the period of time that non-modifiable spousal support is paid, if there is a substantial or material change in circumstances, (remarriage, increase or decrease in income, etc.), the monthly amount paid and the set number of months paid remains the same.
- Lump sum paid all at once – This is a fixed amount of spousal support paid all at once. This type of agreement typically cannot be modified.
Whether you are the paying or receiving spouse, Attorney Bob Matteucci can explain your different options. In the end, your spousal support agreement needs to uniquely suit you and your former partner’s needs.
If You’re Seeking Spousal Support
If you want to make the case that you deserve spousal support payments, you should be prepared to show that you need the funds in order to move forward.
Or you can argue that you are entitled to support because you put your career on hold in order to support your partner, helped build your spouse’s business (which you will likely be getting 50% of the value of anyway under New Mexico’s community property laws), or did a bunch of uncompensated labor to ensure your partner did not have to worry about the household while they built their empire.
The key is to demonstrate how your efforts enabled your spouse to thrive, even if those efforts were unpaid or behind the scenes.
If You’re Defending Against Spousal Support
As mentioned above, New Mexico’s community property law mandates the 50/50 split of the value of all marital assets — including property and businesses you may have thought were only owned by one of you. This is a difficult and often expensive process, but it allows both parties to walk away from the relationship on equal financial footing. Many people in the Albuquerque area are able to argue that alimony is unnecessary under these circumstances.
Serving Families With Dignity & Compassion
Whether you’re seeking spousal support or facing a request for it, it should be viewed as a tool that allows you and your former partner to part ways and move forward — like a severance package — not something that continues to tie you together.
Attorney Bob Matteucci and the rest of the Matteucci Family Law team are ready to help you decide if alimony should play a role in your divorce, and if so, what form it should take. Please contact Bob today to schedule a meeting.