Q. My ex is taking me back to court to change the support order – he wants more alimony now that our teenage kids have moved in with me full time and the court ended his child support.  He didn’t work and the judge attributed income to him at the time of our divorce.  He is now working but gets paid under the table so I will never be able to prove he earns more than what the judge concluded he could earn.  He just changed lawyers and his new lawyer sent me a complicated spreadsheet with all kinds of percentage calculations which seems to take into account child support and alimony and they suggest I pay more than double my alimony so that he can pay me $250 per week in child support which still results in my paying him $500 more per week than I have been since our divorce last year.

This makes no sense to me, and I do not have the money to hire a lawyer to try to sort this out.

A. Sounds like you are on the receiving end of a so-called Cavanagh Analysis.  There was a case a couple years back which addressed the interplay between child support and alimony.  Some judges feel they are required to do a Cavanagh analysis in all cases where child support and alimony are issues.  Other judges disagree.

Where your alimony obligation is a fixed weekly number and you did not mention a percentage-based calculation, I suspect at the time of trial the judge ran child support guidelines and looked at what your ex’s need is and chose an alimony figure that met that need and did not bother with a Cavanagh analysis.  The underlying premise for alimony remains that the recipient must establish a need and the payor must have the means to pay an amount that meets that need or, if unable to meet the need, an amount that the court deems the payor can afford to pay.  Go back and re-read the findings to see if you can understand why the judge set the amount of alimony that was set.

If, as I suspect, the alimony figure was set because it met your ex’s need when combined with the income attributed to him, you can tell his lawyer you are not interested in their analysis because the current alimony meets his need and he has not proven otherwise.  As for child support, you can suggest a lower alimony figure washes out child support and the judge will probably agree.

Email questions to whickey@brickjones.com