After getting married, many Tennessee couples decide that one spouse will continue working while the other will become a stay-at-home spouse and focus on maintaining the marital home and raising the children. While this arrangement can benefit many couples, there can be a number of issues if, for some reason, the marriage falls apart because the stay-at-home spouse hardly has any income or assets, which makes that spouse’s, as well as the children’s, future highly uncertain.
The problems arise because the stay-at-home spouse has been out of the job market for some time and with these gaps, finding a new job is often difficult. Fortunately, laws in Tennessee have allow for alimony in the event of situations such as this. With the help of experienced lawyers, a stay-at-home spouse may be able to establish that maintaining the home and raising the children resulted in the person being dependent and that the person’s circumstances after a divorce justify the demand for alimony.
Alimony in the state of Tennessee depends on a number of factors such as length of the marriage, the time spent outside the work force, the number of children, the need to go back to school for completing a degree and the other spouses ability to pay alimony. An experienced lawyer, like those at our firm, understands these factors well and therefore, that lawyer is able to justify why a stay-at-home spouse is seeking alimony and what should be an adequate amount considering the unique circumstances of that lawyer’s client.
In Tennessee, a court can award various types of alimony depending on the case. However, over time, as circumstances change, there may be the need to modify an alimony order. The change in circumstances could either be in the recipient’s life or in the obligor’s life. In fact, several earlier blogs describe the process for alimony modification in detail. Even in such situations, experienced lawyers know how to represent a case so that the client emerges from the court with the best possible result.