Alimony, Marital Lifestyle, and the Calculation of Support in a Divorce
Sep 11, 2025 | Written by: | Share
It is not unusual that in an acrimonious divorce litigation case, one spouse may be “forced” to live differently than he or she claims to have lived during the marriage. This is often why there is motion practice to establish temporary support and other obligations/restrictions/etc., to try to control the chaos during the pendency of a final decision in a divorce case. Sometimes this is a strategy to attempt to create a false narrative of income and available funds, especially when alimony is an issue.
This issue was addressed by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the matter of S.W. v. G.M., 462 N.J. Super. 522. In that matter, the Appellate Court reminded the trial judge that a dependent spouse’s forced frugality during litigation does not redefine the established marital lifestyle. The ultimate alimony award has to be based on the standard of living enjoyed during the marriage, not the one imposed by the divorce process itself.
In this case, the parties were in a long-term marriage that produced three children, all of whom were emancipated. Both parties were college educated. The defendant/wife ceased her employment decades ago, following the birth of the parties' first child. The plaintiff/husband was the sole breadwinner as a Senior Managing Director of a boutique restructuring firm.
The plaintiff's aggregate compensation was capped at $2,000,000 per year. His income ebbed and flowed, exceeding the cap in several years and declining far below it in others. The Supreme Court upheld the trial judge's calculation of the plaintiff's net income at $1,313,000 per year by averaging the five years of earnings prior to the complaint.
In or around 2018, the trial judge ordered the alimony payable at a rate of $22,000 per month from the plaintiff's draw and $186,000 per year payable from his bonus, for a total yearly obligation of $450,000. The judge made alimony taxable to the defendant and tax deductible to plaintiff. The judge ordered the plaintiff to maintain life insurance of $4,000,000 to secure his alimony obligation.
In 2020, the Supreme Court reversed the alimony determination and, as related to the issues raised on the appeal, stated:
Although the judge's descriptive findings regarding the lifestyle were adequate, we are unable to correlate his findings regarding the parties' expenditures with the alimony award. Indeed, the judge ordered plaintiff to pay defendant permanent alimony of $450,000 per year based on an income of $1,313,000, but without a numerical finding of lifestyle, we are unable to determine how the alimony figure was derived. For these reasons, we reverse the alimony award and remand for the trial judge to make a numerical finding of the marital lifestyle and then explain whether and how the alimony award meets it.
In the decision for the Court (and providing an important overview of the alimony laws in New Jersey), Judge Mawla wrote:
The importance of finding the marital lifestyle cannot be overstated. It is at once the fixed foundation upon which alimony is first calculated and the fulcrum by which it may be adjusted when there are changed circumstances in the years following the initial award.
Alimony is an "economic right that arises out of the marital relationship and provides the dependent spouse with 'a level of support and standard of living generally commensurate with the quality of economic life that existed during the marriage.'" Mani v. Mani, 183 N.J. 70, 80, 869 A.2d 904 (2005) (quoting Stiffler v. Stiffler, 304 N.J. Super. 96, 99, 698 A.2d 549 (Ch. Div. 1997)). . . . "The basic purpose of alimony is the continuation of the standard of living enjoyed by the parties prior to their separation." Innes v. Innes, 117 N.J. 496, 503, 569 A.2d 770 (1990) (citing Mahoney v. Mahoney, 91 N.J. 488, 501-02, 453 A.2d 527 (1982)). [Quinn v. Quinn, 225 N.J. 34, 48, 137 A.3d 423 (2016).]
The goal in fixing an alimony award "is to assist the supported spouse in achieving a lifestyle that is reasonably comparable to the one enjoyed while living with the supporting spouse during the marriage." Crews v. Crews, 164 N.J. 11, 16, 751 A.2d 524 (2000). "The standard of living during the marriage is the way the couple actually lived, whether they resorted to borrowing and parental support, . . . [or] limited themselves to their earned income," Glass v. Glass, 366 N.J. Super. 357, 371, 841 A.2d 451 (quoting Hughes v. Hughes, 311 N.J. Super. 15, 34, 709 A.2d 261 (App. Div. 1998)), or if they chose to accumulate savings. Lombardi v. Lombardi, 447 N.J. Super. 26, 36-37, 145 A.3d 709 (App. Div. 2016).
In contested divorce actions, once a finding is made concerning the standard of living enjoyed by the parties during the marriage, the court should review the adequacy and reasonableness of the support award against this finding. That must be done even in situations of reduced circumstances, when the one spouse's income, or both spouses' incomes in combination, do not permit the divorcing couple to live in separate households in a lifestyle reasonably comparable to the one they enjoyed while living together during the marriage. [Crews, 164 N.J. at 26.]
In Hughes, the parties spent more than they earned and relied on borrowing and parental support to meet the marital lifestyle. 311 N.J. Super. at 34. The trial judge discounted these additional funds and determined the lifestyle using only the family's earned income, which the judge termed the "real" standard of living. Ibid. We held "[t]he judge . . . confused two concepts. The standard of living during the marriage is the way the couple actually lived, whether they resorted to borrowing and parental support, or if they limited themselves to their earned income." Ibid.
In many cases, parties live above their means or spend their earnings and assets to meet expenses. In such instances, a finding of the marital lifestyle must consider what the parties spent during the marriage and not merely offer a nod to a bygone, unattainable lifestyle. In this case, the trial judge overlooked the lessons from Crews and Hughes and our instruction to find, numerically, the marital lifestyle. To the extent Crews and Hughes implicitly required that marital lifestyle be determined numerically, we now explicitly state a finding of marital lifestyle must be made by explaining the characteristics of the lifestyle and quantifying it.
Here, the trial judge disregarded the marital budget altogether and instead supplemented defendant's current budget with some expenses she once enjoyed during the marriage. This methodology is problematic because it ignored the judge's own findings that the marital lifestyle "subsumed" the entirety of plaintiff's earnings. By application of this logic, if the judge determined the net yearly income was $1,520,2684 or $126,689 per month, the alimony award allotted defendant disposable income of $36,7925 and plaintiff $89,897 per month without explanation. This was a misapplication of law because it ignored Crews and N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b)(4), which requires a judge consider "[t]he standard of living established in the marriage . . . and the likelihood that each party can maintain a reasonably comparable standard of living, with neither party having a greater entitlement to that standard of living than the other."
To be clear, N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b)(4) does not signal the Legislature intended income equalization or a formulaic application in alimony cases, even where the parties spent the entirety of their income. Had the Legislature intended alimony be calculated through use of a formula, there would be no need for the statutory requirement that the trial court address all the statutory factors. The Legislature declined to adopt a formulaic approach to the calculation of alimony.
The portion of the marital budget attributable to a party is likewise not subject to a formula. Contained in most marital budgets are expenses, which may not be associated with either the alimony payor or payee, including those associated with children who have since emancipated or whose expenses are met by an asset or a third-party source having no bearing on alimony. There are also circumstances where an expense is unrelated to either the payor or the payee but is met by that party on behalf of a child. And, as is the case here with defendant's photography hobby, there are expenses which only one party incurred during the marriage. Therefore, after finding the marital lifestyle, a judge must attribute the expenses that pertain to the supported spouse. Only then may the judge consider the supported spouse's ability to contribute to his or her own expenses and the amount of alimony necessary to meet the uncovered sum. Crews, 164 N.J. at 32-33, 751 A.2d 524.
For these reasons, the Supreme Court again reversed and remanded the alimony computation and directed the judge to numerically determine the marital lifestyle and apportion it.
This is a helpful case on the issues of alimony and lifestyle. Less than 2% of cases go to trial, let alone multiple appeals, reconsiderations, and remands. Although highly unusual, the amount of support and calculations were so significant that the parties believed this level of litigation to be necessary.
The litigation is still continuing, as the parties were dissatisfied with the results of the remand(s) and continue to be enmeshed in this litigation. Candidly, this writer questions what these parties have spent in legal fees and costs as compared to the amounts received or paid in support.
Diana N. Fredericks, Esq., devotes her practice solely to family law matters. She is a Certified Matrimonial Law Attorney and was named to the NJ Super Lawyers Rising Stars list in the practice of family law by Thomson Reuters from 2015 through 2021, to the NJ Super Lawyers list in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and to the New Leaders of the Bar list by the New Jersey Law Journal in 2015. Contact Diana for a consultation at 908-735-5161 or via email.
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