Graham.Law Blog

Court Required To Allocate Debts As Part Of Marital Estate Upon dissolution, the family law judge must “equitably” allocate the marital estate, which includes not just assets but also the debts acquired during the marriage. But that does not mean the court has to accept what one party claims at…

Deviation From Child Support Guidelines Cannot Be Permanent With limited exceptions, courts are required to apply Colorado’s Child Support Guidelines when determining an appropriate amount of child support. And that means when parents sign a child support agreement, they too must generally adhere to the guidelines. And while parents may agree to…

Marital Property Includes Separate Property Increase in Value In a Colorado dissolution of marriage, an asset owned by a spouse prior to marriage remains the property of that spouse (per (2)). But that does not increase a separate property increase in value. Only the principal amount brought into the marriage…

Change of Custody & Retroactive Child Support Normally, the law does not allow retroactive child support – a support modification is only prospective – i.e. it applies to payments due after the motion was modified, rather than to past support. (1)(a) provides: “except as otherwise provided in subsection (5) of…

In 2014, Colorado’s maintenance statute was modified to provide trial courts with maintenance guidelines that set forth both an amount and duration of alimony based upon the parties’ incomes and duration of the marriage. Colorado has long had child support guidelines which create a presumptive amount of child support a court must…

Angelina Jolie Can’t Move Children In a reminder that the rich & famous are often no different from the rest of us when it comes to compliance with the laws, Angelina Jolie was recently in the news complaining that she was being blocked from moving out of the country by…

Man Requests Trial by Combat in Child Custody Case Our blog does not typically report on an out-of-state case, but then again, this is an unusual case, with one party requesting a highly unusual form of dispute resolution. The Des Moines Register reports that 40 year-old David Ostrom, who believed he had…

NOTE – On February 16, 2021, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and found that an Interspousal Transfer Deed does not create separate property out of a presumptively marital asset without satisfying one of the four statutory criteria. See our new blog post for more details. Interspousal…

The Colorado Court of Appeals just held that deferred compensation payments from an employer to a non-qualified plan (i.e. it’s not a retirement account under ERISA) do not count as income for purposes of child support. N.J.C. In the N.J.C. case, the father was a cardiologist, who earned a salary of $150,000/yr, plus…

Judges Need Educating Too! No matter how smart they are, judges have to learn family law somewhere (and at the risk of looking like I’m sucking up, I continue to marvel at how judges can retain so much knowledge about so many different areas of the law). Like any other…