Q. I’m getting divorced after six years of marriage. Our signed pre-nuptial agreement (PNA) says his printing business and potential large inheritance expectancy are his separate property. I didn’t waive alimony; and joint property is to be equally divided.
I’m an expert web developer. During our marriage, beyond my regular job, during evenings into early mornings and on weekends I worked another 40 hours a week developing his website. I believe I can prove that his income tripled during our marriage because of my efforts.
I should get half the equity in our house. But, because I earn a decent income, I’ll probably not get alimony in this relatively short marriage.
Can I get part of his increased income?
A. You need to hire an experienced family law attorney to carefully review the language in your PNA. Such agreements often have a clause which provides you waive your rights to claim any interest in your spouse’ business even if you help increase his income. If that clause is in your agreement, you’ll get nothing for your contribution to his company.
But, if the lawyers who represented each of you didn’t include that “no matter what” language – different story. You will need to hire a top rated business evaluator to value the business as of the start of and at the end of the marriage. Then argue – because of your sweat equity contributions to his company – you are entitled to half the increase in the value of the business.
Also ask for “reimbursement alimony.” If you didn’t kept time records, get an expert to clone and then see if those records are imbedded in your computer data. If so that expert can prepare a chart of the number of hours you spent. Then, by way of example, if you spent 40 hours a week for 45 weeks a year, that’s 1800 hours. Those hours times six years sums to 10,800 hours. If your work is worth $25 per hour, that totals the value of your time to $270,000. At $50 per hour the total is $540,000.
You also need to hire a labor-economist to testify about and back up your claim about the average value of the time you spent.
One roadblock is that reimbursement alimony is supposedly only for marriages of less than five years and for payments to be lump sums. So you need to ask the probate court to use its general equitable powers to: (1) find it inequitable for your husband to keep the fruit of your work; and (2) to calculate your time for just the first five years; and (3) order your husband to pay that money over the next few years.
And, you should also seek “term alimony”.
If he’s smart, once your husband sees your experts’ reports, he won’t want to spend money for lawyers and take time from his business. So he should agree to pay a somewhat lower lump sum to get you to go away quietly.