How Much Spousal Maintenance Will I Receive | Arizona
Arizona Dissolution of Marriage Law Implications
Hi. My name is Larry Hirsch, and I practice exclusively in the domestic relations group at Jaburg & Wilk. Talking about spousal maintenance, the great grey area in Arizona Dissolution of Marriage Law.
Spousal maintenance has no guidelines. It’s one of the keys that anybody has to understand. So, when a client asks me, what am I going to see receiving spousal maintenance, it’s almost impossible to tell them and there’s lots of reasons why but I want to relate a story. I help teach younger attorneys how to put on divorce trials. I remember one time we were doing this we had a panel of judges who came in to sit at our mock trial. We had five judges. We presented the exact same case, of course, to all five judges. All five judges had a different ruling on how much spousal maintenance the spouse was going to get and how long the spousal maintenance term was going to last. I like to tell that story because clients will ask all the time, how much am I going to pay in spousal maintenance? How much am I going to receive in spousal maintenance? The answer is always: “it depends”. That’s why we call it the great grey area.
There are a myriad of factors that play in to not only whether or not one is entitled to spousal maintenance but more specifically how much spousal maintenance one will receive and for how long.