Family Law

Income from all sources is considered when calculating a monthly child support amount under the Pennsylvania Support Guidelines.  Some child support cases are complex because a party has different sources of income beyond W-2 wages.  Complex support cases require an analysis of all forms of income and may require an expert to provide an analysis of a party’s net income available for support.  The following streams of income are the 5 common sources of income in complex child support […]

Before you meet with an attorney for the first time to discuss your divorce or the possibility of a divorce, you should prepare for the meeting in advance to maximize your time with the attorney.  Here are five tips to help you prepare for that initial meeting: Gather your income information, including your most recently filed tax return and your current pay stub.  If you can, be prepared to discuss your spouse’s income information.  A good source for that may be your checking […]

Those of us from large firms sometimes read opinions where solo practitioners take a shot at an issue and force us to take notice. The facts in this Bucks County case litigated by a solo practitioner against a two lawyer firm are easy. Woman has a child in 1987. Woman and man marry in 1990. Child is never adopted. Woman filed for divorce in 2009 but never prosecutes or withdraws it. Couple stays together. Woman’s child dies in 2017 with a $3,400 IRA and four life policies which pay $633,000. […]

People often ask divorce lawyers how they do it. My stock answer is that it’s like any other financial transaction, except that the transaction is wrapped in layers and layers of emotion. Usually, that emotion has to do with the relationship and the breach of “trust.” But in markets like the current one, emotions related to financial insecurity and financial ignorance make matters even worse.             Year to date the market is down 13% as of the close today. […]

Extreme times produce irrational responses. A day ago, an unhappy orthopedic patient in Oklahoma decided it was time to kill his surgeon. He took three other lives as well as these people got “in his way.”             We are seeing this kind of irrational and largely self destructive conduct in the domestic world was well. A few weeks ago, the Superior Court decided a case where the books and records of the business were so bizarre that no sense could be made of them. In an odd […]

It’s not actually Aunt Fannie but her Chief Economist Doug Duncan who has concluded today that the party ended in March as interest rates spiked 200 basis points since January 1. Fannie Mae revised new homes sales for March down to 709,000 from an earlier estimate of 763,000. The numbers for April also reflect a continuing slowdown with sales estimated at 591,000. Duncan described this as a normal market response when the Federal Reserve increases borrowing costs to consumers while trying to […]

  This morning (5/17) presented an article by Michael Waters in the on-line edition of The Atlantic noting that only about half of Americans die with a will (i.e., testamentary instrument) and suggesting that many of the state laws that profess to divide assets where there isn’t a will are antiquated. That may be a fair point but the real problem in modern estate planning is the unspoken expectations of senior couples about how estates should be divided. Many of these couples are living with […]

This is an odd topic for a family law blog until I started to think about. Today’s on line Marketwatch website featured an article by Chris Farrell about whether retirees should consider rolling assets from defined contribution products into annuities. The law allows you to do so without the transaction being a taxable event at the federal level. The appeal of Farrell’s argument comes from the fact that your $100,000 IRA in an S&P500 index fund may have been $100,000 on December 31. But […]

A panel decision issued April 27, 2022 takes on an issue heretofore undecided in Pennsylvania but an issue of enormous consequence to many marital estates; the matter of student debt. Massar v. Massar involves a 20 year marriage that produced two children ages 23 and 19. During the marriage the eldest child attended Bloomsburg and Temple Universities and assumed $58,000 in student debt during the marriage, which Father guaranteed. In equitable distribution the husband asked the court to address […]

At the end of the day, divorce is a financial transaction wrapped in complex human emotions. Part of the divorce lawyer’s mission is to try to gently unwrap the emotion so that each party can walk away from a failed relationship with assets that make sense. Custody of children is the most difficult part of the problem. Each parent tends to see him or herself as the “better” or “more stable” parent. But custody disputes are often meshed with disputes over housing. Almost every parent […]