Graham.Law Blog

The Colorado Court of Appeals recently issued a decision of first impression in Colorado – whether straight-line depreciation could be deducted from a party’s rental income for purposes of child support or spousal maintenance. After all, a property owner does not actually write a check for depreciation from the rental…

2023 will see large increases in pay for the military world. Unfortunately, it’s not due to a generous windfall from Congress, but to compensate for our currently-high inflation rate. Note that I’m consolidating the military COLA posts into one (this one) which I will update annually, rather than creating a…

This post was inspired by a reader who sent me an email questioning how Colorado can treat VA disability payments as income when federal law prohibits states from dividing VA benefits, and does not explicitly authorize states to count them as income. Every so often my firm receives profanity-laden emails…

The Colorado Court of Appeals just considered an issue of first impression, whether unrealized gains or dividends income in an investment account count as income for purposes of calculating child support and maintenance. And the answer to that was “no”, as mere “paper gains” are not included in a party’s…

Every so often a court decision can still somewhat surprise me, and a recent unpublished decision from the Colorado Court of Appeals did just that by holding that a spouse who worked a 30 hour/week part-time job was not voluntarily underemployed for purposes of calculating child support or maintenance. In…

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…

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…

Simply being unemployed at the time of a hearing does not necessarily make imputing income to that parent appropriate. And that’s especially true when the parent is enrolled in full-time education. In Settles, both parents were full-time students at the time of divorce: the father, a former medical doctor who…

The Colorado Court of Appeals last week issued a new ruling on the interplay between imputation of income and voluntary unemployment which will make bringing contempt cases for non-support more complicated. (Note that this particular case involved voluntary underemployment, not voluntary unemployment, but the analysis is the same either way)….