Questions about equitable distribution in Virginia.

[Just Blue]

When the math is done, wife paid an extra $870 a YEAR in bills. Personally I wouldn't make a stink about it to a Judge.

 

[LdiJ]

When the math is done, wife paid an extra $870 a YEAR in bills. Personally I wouldn't make a stink about it to a Judge.

Where did you get that? No snark of any kind, I just don't understand where that came from.

Never mind, you divided 20k by 23 years to come up with that amount. However, I expect that the 20k involved probably did not result from the wife paying slightly more annually towards expenses over the life of the marriage. I suspect that it came from something more tangible. I could be wrong of course.

 

[Just Blue]

Where did you get that? No snark of any kind, I just don't understand where that came from.

Never mind, you divided 20k by 23 years to come up with that amount. However, I expect that the 20k involved probably did not result from the wife paying slightly more annually towards expenses over the life of the marriage. I suspect that it came from something more tangible. I could be wrong of course.

OP said in the opening post that wife spent 20k more that her soon to be ex on mtg and other bills...over the 23 year marriage it works out to be about 870.00 a year. If the wife was on here we could ask her to clarify how the 20k was applied to the bills...lump sum or just a bit extra a month over their 2+ decade marriage.

 

[zddoodah]

There can be offsets as long as each party walks away in a relatively equal position.

I disagree. "Equitable" does not mean "relatively equal."

Even with unequal contribution and effort by one party?

Here's a link to the Virginia statute that discusses the division of property and debts in a divorce. In a nutshell, "equitable distribution" means that the court allocates to each party what it determines to be equitable (i.e., "fair") based on the eleven facts mentioned in sub-section (E) (the last of which is "other factors as the court deems necessary or appropriate to consider in order to arrive at a fair and equitable monetary award").

While I recognize that part of my prior response was a bit snarky, I was quite serious when I wrote that this cannot be intelligently assessed in a vacuum. If your friend and her husband are getting divorced, she needs to be obtaining advice from the best divorce attorney she can afford.