I would have thought the court would be very reluctant to alter a freely negotiated and agreed term in a prenup unless there were very extreme and unforseen circumstances (payer becomes permanently disabled and unable to work etc). Just because Ioan no longer wants to pay her or thinks she should have found employment or be self supporting I don't think is enough to make this lifetime maintenance obligation go away.
Nope, it has happened very often, and as I said the freely negotiated prenup states the same ("unless the court orders otherwise"). The prenup is basically just the actual law, except that they added this evil 6 months cohabitation bit in there. The whole point of spousal support is to support someone until they have made the transition to supporting themselves. The difference between long term marriages and under 10 years marriages is just that for the latter they have an exact amount defined no matter if you have managed by then to support yourself (half of the marriage length). Of course it then depends on the judge but generally speaking no judge thinks it takes 10 years to support yourself (especially if the kids are by then adults)
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It would be interesting to estimate how much he has overpaid her by over the last three years....I'm sure we can work this out by what the spousal support would be and what we know he has been paying
For spousal support that would be
2021: 58.8k
2022: 5.2k
2023: 16.2k
80.2k
Then there is child support, this will be based on the earning we know of them...
2021: 51.2k (50 % custody), 71k (sole)
2022: 5k (50 %), 7k (sole)
2023: 15k (50 %), 20k (sole)
77.2k-98k
So Alice was obligated to get the past three years something between 157k and 178k, depending on how the court would see the custody issue. We know that this has to be the minimum she actually received because she and her lawyer would never sign a document that calls the current payments "advanced payments" otherwise.
She specifies her monthly costs at 19k since the move. The rent is similar to the mortgage of their house so it will be similar throughout. This makes over 3 years 684k. This is without considering costs for lawyers, most of which have been covered by Ioan.
What has Alice earned? She earned 40k in 2021, 15k in 2022 and until the con 8k in 2023, this makes 63 k, let's say 70k with the con. She also got 110k from the house (which is also mostly Ioan's money because 750k of the house was his seperate property going into the marriage, but since we dont know their savings at the time of seperation it's also possible that she is entitled 110k from community property savings). So in the most generous calculation Alice has 180k seperate property, some of this will have gone into paying lawyers (Ioan has already paid at least 150k to her lawyers), but for the sake of simplicity let's leave this out.
684k-180k makes 504k, that's 320k over Ioan's obligation at least. Of course it's possible that some poor sucker gave her a few thousands on top of her GFM, but I doubt it were 300k.
Of course in crazy land support is only hard cash, and this may actually be not that much, but her living rent free 28 months while he was paying most of the bills will come back biting her here.
I'm sure he will pay child support, but I think Alice wasted pretty much any spousal support she would get for the next few years