Hello everyone. It’s Chris, Pritt back again with a new topic in West Virginia divorce. Today is a continuation of a series of videos that we are doing on the alimony factors under West Virginia law. We’ve gone through quite a number of them and we are going to continue to discuss two more today. Generally, this is what we do in this series, we discuss two alimony factor topics per video. The topic today is the financial or other contributions one person has made to the other that a court is going to factor into consideration as to whether the person should be awarded some alimony.
So let’s say that you have one person who has been taking money out of a 401k to fund the other person’s education. or let’s say that person paid all the bills while the other person was in school. That would be a factor in court when considering whether alimony should be awarded. That’s a very significant factor. A court is going to weigh that in favor of an award of alimony.
The next factor that a court is when you consider is the expense involved as far as the one person being able to receive further training to become independent and be able to get an award of alimony. So let’s say that the person wants to go back to school and they want to go back and get a degree that is not going to be as lucrative based on the price. Well, the court’s going to consider that. Let’s say the other person might not have the ability to pay for that particular degree. So the court is going to weigh those factors when it comes to whether to award alimony. The court is going to look at the overall cost of the degree that’s going to be involved.
So the court will consider these factors and weigh them with all the other factors. This is one of the important points I want to make here about the alimony factors, whether it’s the first one we talked about some time ago or the last one that we’re going to be talking about in the future. All of these factors are supposed to be weighed. When you go to court, the court has to make a decision given all of the factors. The judge must weigh in every one of these factors and it’s required based on the law that the court looks at every one of the factors when deciding whether to award alimony.
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 chris@prittlaw.com.
