I’ve never committed a crime of any sort; unless you count one speeding ticket in 2005 and three parking tickets. Yet a judge in the Maryland court system has decided that I need to be severely punished…all because my ex-wife wanted to get divorced.
Believe me, I know that anyone who has gotten divorced can tell you that it wallops your finances; splitting everything in half means…well…that you have half as much as you did before. A gut punch on both sides But I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never heard anything close to the judge’s ruling in my relatively straight-forward divorce.
In short, the judge ruled that I have to pay out more per month more than I actually earn. Seriously.
I’ll get to the details, but first want to explain that there were no extenuating circumstances. On my part, no abuse, no cheating, no gambling, no drugs, etc. I’ve worked a productive full-time job every single day for the 22 years that my kids have been alive and was a super active dad, driving the kids to umpteen activities (as many of you do) and doing almost all of the grocery shopping and half of the cooking. In his ruling the judge declared that “we both contributed equally to the success of the household”. So, the judge’s super harsh decisions had nothing to do with my actions or behavior.
I also need to emphasize that the severe ruling is not because I have oodles of cash laying around. I work for a nonprofit and have four kids in private schools or college. At the time of the divorce ruling I had about $30k in my bank account. The cost of the divorce itself wiped out my finances before the judge decided that I should suffer poverty and humiliation.
Without any explanation or justification (which is supposedly required), the judge ruled that I had to pay out $17,866 per month, representing a combination of child support, alimony, most of the mortgage of my ex-wife’s house, most of the kids’ tuition, my wife’s health insurance, and a good chunk of my wife’s legal fees. And that gigantic monthly obligation doesn’t even include the fact that I was also ordered to pay for my kids’ school activities, healthcare insurance and out-of-pocket healthcare costs.
So here’s where the ruling becomes truly draconian and unreasonable. The mandated payments are about $3,000 a month more than my net salary. And here’s the kicker: I have shared custody of my kids. So I humbly ask, how in the world am I supposed to provide an abode of any sort with a severely negative income? Three bedroom apartments in my city (Bethesda MD) start at about 3,000 / month, not including utilities and fees. And how am I supposed to pay for car insurance and gas, which I need to get to work? How am I supposed to pay for food for me or the kids? Clothes? Medicine? This judge and the courts as a whole couldn’t care less.
And to put things in perspective, while I was doomed to a negative income, my ex-wife immediately had a net income of over $13,000 / month (working part-time!) and her only mandated expenses add up to around $3k per month; essentially nothing in comparison to my punishing burden. So, despite the fact that the judge’s job—by law—was to create a relatively equal financial burden for both parents, he decided that my wife should live very comfortably with an annual net income of about $156k (with essentially no expenses), while I should be relegated to a negative annual income of about (– 36,000), not including any of my living expenses.
I’m sure that many of you have experienced or heard about really harsh divorce rulings, but I’m pretty sure this one takes the prize. And no one—including the judge—has explained why this ruling was made.
In the end, I was lucky to find a very small (and old) house to rent. It has one tiny bathroom and a crumbling ceiling, but at least it is near my kids. But it’s about $3200 a month before utilities. I’m not sure where the judge thought I would get this money.
When I have the kids with me, I try to be upbeat and pretend that I’m not financially strapped. I spend way too much even when we go to Chipotle or a mid-range restaurant, but I have to put up a front. But when the kids are not around I eat baked potatoes and bananas and entertain myself with jigsaw puzzles that I buy from thrift stores, because all of my earnings go to my ex. This despite that I work a really difficult full-time job with a very healthy salary. I just don’t get to keep a penny.
The disparity between my negative income and my ex-wife’s juicy income has real consequences. While she takes the kids on luxury trips abroad and pays for expensive outings and gifts; at my house we play board games and go for walks. Not quite as exciting. And I essentially had to stop paying for college for my two oldest, which has led to severe strain on our relationships.
I’ve also learned the hard way that there is absolutely zero accountability tied to a judge’s decision, no matter how extreme or misguided. It is really astounding.
Essentially my only option to the extreme ruling was to formally appeal the judge’s ruling. I did. I could no longer afford a lawyer, so I spent hours and hours in the law library and assembled my own case. (My ex-wife, swimming in money, of course had a lawyer for her response).
The appeals process took 15 months. All the while, I was still paying the full punitive payments to the ex-wife. In short, the Appeals Court noted and questioned my huge financial burden, but said that they could not overrule the judge’s discretion around awards. Really? They thought it was OK that I simultaneously had a negative salary and shared custody?
The Appeals Court did, however, decide that the judge’s rulings on the division of assets was completely wrong. I repeat, the Appeals Court put down in writing that the judge in my case was completely mistaken on the basics of how to determine the value of assets and how to divide them. And they completely voided his decision.
This was no surprise to me that the Appeal Court found the judge’s ruling to be point-blank wrong because the judge that presided in our case seemingly had limited experience in Family Law. He had a long (and probably prestigious) background as a criminal prosecutor. And let me tell you that criminal law and family law are about as similar as otters and elephants. And even during the course of our two-day hearing, he put our case on hold for hours each day so that he could attend to criminal cases he was also hearing.
The judge’s lack of knowledge in family law was on full display during the entire hearing. Both my lawyer and opposing counsel periodically had to school him on what judgements / decisions he could and couldn’t make, because he didn’t know. I sat there in stunned amazement. My ex-wife’s lawyer had to inform the judge that he could not make certain rulings, even though they would have advantaged my ex-wife! That’s how bad it was. And the judge asked both lawyers to prepare and deliver briefs for him (during the trial and afterwards!) on various topics because he seemingly didn’t have baseline knowledge of family law concepts and apparently no staff (or gumption?) to figure it out on his own.
The end result of the Appeal Court’s decision is that they “vacated” (canceled) most of the original ruling so now, two years after the initial ruling, we have to go back to court and start all over again. That may sound like good news, but it’s not. While waiting (likely months) for a new hearing, I’m still ordered to pay the original payments (now slightly lessened only by the fact that one of the kids “aged out”). And the only reason we’re going back to court–which will cost another arm-and-leg in legal fees–is because the judge in my case was incompetent, as determined by his peer judges.
But there is zero accountability. None. The judge will still work his six hour days and play a lot of golf, while I’m stressing about how I’m going to pay for a sandwich. No censure. No reprimand. Not even a slap on the wrist. He can completely screw up a ruling—and the life of a responsible, contributing citizen–but who really cares? Definitely not the court system.
In closing, I want to emphasize that I very rarely play the part of the victim. But in this case I am. I’ve been severely punished all because of a straight forward, no fault divorce. And there is essentially nothing I can do about it. The courts clearly protect their own and provide no mechanism to reevaluate even the most extreme outcomes that deviate from anything rational or reasonable.
The final irony is that through my state / county taxes, I have the “privilege” of paying the salary of the man that decided, without explanation, that I shouldn’t be able to keep even a dime of my earnings in order to support myself and my kids.
