Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I can only speak to my reality, which is that I am paying $40k/year to someone who never had kids, never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles).

I can try to reduce my payments, but lawyers say there's a risk they'll actually go up because I'm making more now(because I couldn't afford to live in my old town due to alimony). The other party has an inactive form of cancer, but the primary tumor was removed over 30 years ago while I was still in junior high school, and a vocational evaluation , which consulted with their doctors, found there is no reason not to work full time.

I've been paying for over 5 years now and there's no end in sight. The system is forcing me to pay a lazy person to sit at home all day long without any obligation to work.

View on HN

Is leaving the country an option?

And what do you mean no end in sight? Child alimentation stops at certain places after some age threshold is reached, certainly there must be a limit.

If your salary is 80gross or net and you pay half , do the math what you'd get in another country and leave if it makes sense.

If you make much more than that, I would suck it up.

> Child alimentation stops at certain places after some age threshold is reached

I think they don't have any kids. So the alimony is going fully to his ex? (what he is complaining about).

Yes I've considered leaving many times. I only have alimony, not child support(no kids), so failing to pay isn't serious enough to revoke my passport. Depending on how things work out, I may have to retire overseas.

Seems like a huge risk to marry someone when there is a big discrepancy in income and assets…

> never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles)

I'd say this was the bigger risk. But as with everything, it's always hard to say for sure from a distance.

It's a huge risk because the system makes it a huge risk, that's exactly the point under discussion. An unseen negative effect of alimony laws is that wealthy people are less likely to marry "beneath their station", which promotes and entrenches social inequality.

Alimony laws affect the lifestyles of the middle income earners, not the wealthy (who have ready access to legal advice).

I doubt alimony is a significant contribution to assortive mating among the then-wealthy.

I heard the actor Brendan Fraser got completely screwed by the alimony system.

He was ordered to pay 50k a month (900k a year) for 10 years. Not even many wealthy would be able to handle that type of alimony.

I’m curious about what circumstances stop payments to them? Does it require you to have zero income?

Id have to have a valid excuse for not working, like a medical condition.

If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.

if you stop working, what happens?

Contempt of court I believe. It's basically like defying any other court order. From what I hear, you go to jail for a bit and just keep repeating that cycle every few months until you start working and paying.

Have you thought about leaving the country? Plenty of cheap CoL places around the world to hang for awhile

Reply on news.ycombinator.com