To Support or Not to Support

When you said I Do, one of the vows was to support each other (assuming you did not write your own vows). This support each other was through the good and the bad, through thick and thin, through health and sickness. The state of Texas does not require you to live up to that promise, however, because the state does allow you to get a divorce. Currently you can get divorced on the ground of insupportability, meaning the marriage cannot survive through no fault of either party. That ground may change in the future as the legislators are trying to make it more difficult to divorce, however, that is not the purpose of this article today.

Even though the state has provisions to allow for a divorce, the support of your spouse is still ingrained throughout the Texas Family Code. One area where that is relevant is in Chapter 8 which determines Spousal Support. There are many factors that go into calculating spousal support which are: (1) length of marriage, (2) earning capacity of spouses, (3) ability to support the other spouse, (4) ability of the other spouse to earn income, and (5) whether there was domestic violence.

The first and foremost important factor is the spouse’s ability meet his/her minimum reasonable needs. If a spouse can do that then, unless you agree, that spouse is not entitled to spousal support no matter what. The items that the Court considers in determining the minimum reasonable needs are: (1) employment of the spouse, (2) employability of the spouse, and (3) property of the spouse (including separate property). Minimum reasonable needs, however, is very subjective and thus not easily defined. What is reasonable in one situation may not be reasonable in another.

The next factor is how long was the marriage. The length of the marriage determines how long one spouse could receive spousal support. If there was domestic violence, the length of the marriage is not a factor, otherwise, typically spousal maintenance is not awarded unless the spouses were married for at least 10 years. The other exception to this rule is if there is a fully disabled child which requires the spouse to not work so that he/she can care for the child.

Lastly, there is a cap on how much spousal support one spouse can receive. It is limited to the lesser of $5,000 or 20% of the other spouse’s average monthly income.

So while the state of Texas may allow you to divorce, your spouse may be entitled to spousal support as part of that initial commitment to support one another.