Hello everyone. It's Chris, Pritt back again with a new topic in West Virginia divorce. Today, we are going to be continuing with a series we're doing on the alimony factors under West Virginia law. As we've discussed before, there are 20 different factors that a court can consider, and we're going through them one by one. Sometimes we're doing two in a day and other days we're doing one, but we're trying to get through all of the alimony factors that a court can weigh into their decision to award alimony in whatever way the court deems to be appropriate. The next factor we're going to be talking about today is the legal obligation of a person to care for another person or themselves. If somebody has a legal obligation to care for themselves or another person, this is a factor that the court can consider in whether to order alimony to be paid and for how much.

Let's say that somebody has a child from a different relationship. It might've been before the marriage or it might have been after. A court can consider this when assessing whether alimony should be paid. For example, let's say somebody had a child before the marriage and they have a child support obligation for that child. That could be factored into the alimony. Another factor that a court is going to consider is the legal duty for somebody to care for a child with mental or physical disabilities. For example, maybe one parent has taken it upon themselves to care for the party’s adult child, who has some sort of mental disability physical disability. For this example, let's say it’s the payor spouse. What the court could do is factor that into their decision as to whether that person should be paying alimony, because that person has all of those expenses associated with taking care of that individual. This can impact how much the person is going to be paying in terms of alimony or whether the court may negate any kind of alimony from being required to be paid

That consists of today's topic. If you have any questions at all, feel free to give us a call at (304) 720 4412 or email us at [email protected].