Graham.Law Blog

The federal government has required all states to enact the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act, or UIFSA, which is a law designed to sort out what was previously a jurisdictional mess between the states over who could impose, modify, or enforce child support or alimony obligations. Personal Jurisdiction – Basis…

Impute Income to Voluntarily Unemployed Spouse In most maintenance or child support cases, both spouses are working, or one has a legitimate reason to not be working, so the incomes for purposes of calculating family support are readily ascertainable. But in cases of “voluntary unemployment”, that is not necessarily the…

Colorado’s alimony statute has an expansive view of income – pretty much everything a person receives, including gifts, counts as income unless they are excluded under a provision of that statute – salary, commissions, bonuses, you name it: “‘Gross income’ means income from any source and includes, but is not…

Typically, courts have considered whether to award a spouse retroactive alimony back to the date of service of the summons, as that is the date the court acquires jurisdiction over the parties. But is that date written in stone, or can a court go back further? The issue of retroactive…

Per the Colorado child support statute, gross income includes “rents”, i.e. rental income. (5)(a)(I)(J). But surprisingly, there is little judicial guidance as to how exactly rental income should be calculated for purposes of child support or alimony. We last wrote about rent and family support exactly 3 years ago, when…

The Colorado Court of Appeals recently issued an unpublished decision where a successful surgeon testified he planned to pack it all in, sell his medical practice to his partner for $40K (the trial court found it was worth 44 times that value, or $1.76m), and forsake his compensation of $720K/yr…

If you have to litigate a case involving child support arrears, you are going to wish the payments went through the Colorado Family Support Registry, or FSR for short. The registry is a state agency which receives child support and alimony payments from the obligor (that’s the parent or spouse…

We’ve written about this before – simply proving that the other side failed to pay court-ordered support is not sufficient for contempt of court. The court must also find that he had the ability to pay during the time he failed to pay, and, just as important, that he has…

After a divorce in Colorado, one spouse may be ordered to pay the other periodic payments – with child support or spousal maintenance (i.e. alimony). And when there is a disparity in assets awarded to the spouses, the court will typically order a property equalization payment from the spouse with…

It seems the issue of what counts as a financial resource in a contempt or maintenance case still results in seemingly contradictory decisions from the courts. We recently wrote a post discussing the Sheehan case, where the Colorado Court of Appeals held that a trial judge could not find a…