Temporary spousal maintenance in New York is intended to give the less affluent spouse in a divorce immediate access to funds necessary to live. This prevents the poorer spouse from feeling pressured into taking an unfair settlement just to get any money at all. New York State spousal support guidelines give a method to calculate the support but doing the math isn’t always easy.
Manual Calculations = Errors
At first you might think it’s a fairly simple calculation so you pull out your ancient adding machine and start pounding keys. It’s 30% of the payor minus 20% of the payee and then 40% of the..wait, or was that 20% of the payor…no it was right the first time…and then the payor income is…um, no that’s not right.
Not as easy as you thought, is it? Not only that but you have to be sure you include all sources of income listed on the NY statement of net worth, all valid deductions and remember to cap the income. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.
Online Calculators = Errors
You can find countless pages with quick little New York family law software calculators that offer to do the work for you. We looked at a few of these and were surprised by how many of them were inaccurate, sometimes quite startlingly so. Some of them take only lump sum net incomes so you still have to manually calculate all sources of income and deductions. If the regulations change, how do you know if the calculator has been updated? More importantly when you are done, you have no paper trail to show where you got the information. If the calculator is wrong, who gets into trouble for it? You do.
New York Divorce Lawyer Software = No Errors
Dedicated family law software like EzSupport-NY includes an accurate temporary maintenance calculator that automatically pulls information from your case file. You don’t have to enter the information twice. You don’t have to worry about making sure you’ve tracked all income and deductions because they are listed for you right there. You don’t have worry about updates because we keep our software current with the latest New York divorce law changes. It’s fast, easy and accurate — what more could you ask for?
If you aren’t convinced then try it for yourself. Download a demo of EzSupport-NY or any of our attorney practice management software titles and try them as long as you like. Once you see how easy it is to calculate temporary maintenance, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
