Divorce Support Forums: $ Gift From My Parents / Kicked him out of house

He may be a bum for living off of you and getting his degree at your expense plus having an affair, but please don't diminish the cause of people who have really been the victim of violence by suggesting that arguments between you make you a victim because of "verbal violence" unless of course his verbal violence consists of actual credible threats to hurt you immediately... The problem with accusing someone of verbal violence that has never been backed up with physical force is that unless it's an actual credible threat of imminent violence, everyone who has ever been in a realtionship knows how easy it is to mis-construe things, take them out of context. A good friend of mine was accused of being verbally violent for... after his wife told him that she wished he was dead, he said something along the lines of, "what do you think, I should kill myself!?" She started the tape going and caught him later in the argument saying, "so now you're going to accuse me of being violent, aren't you? You know I'm not, but you want to take the kids from me and there's nothing I can do about it, so maybe I should? Maybe I should!"

Based upon this, she was able to get a judge to let her keep the children an dhim apart for a few months before he was able to get a therapist to confirm that this was ridiculous and the judge reversed the order. By that time the kids had been indoctrinated to thinking Dad was a bad person to stay with.

And the tragedy of an absentee father hits another set of kids... this time by the design of the mother.

I know that's not what you're suggesting, but that's the result of these accusations. Be VERY careful about even the suggestion of violence if there is not actual danger.

NOW, that said, he owes you a moral debt of $15,000 for the money spent in finishing his degree. You gifted it to the marriage by voluntarily using it to support the two of you during that time, so it's highly likely that he has no legal obligation to pay you back, but if you can keep your nastiness and accusations at bay and find a way to make him feel bad for being the crumb that he is, he might just agree to take on this moral obligation to pay you back.

If you are losing your house to foreclosure (or short sale), then I'm gathering that the two of you are otherwise insolvent? And you were employed while he was not employed during the marriage? Well, it's highly unlikely that he'll owe you alimony... generally even though in our grandparent's generation, if a woman paid for a man to go to school, she'd automatically get to get some benefit of that through alimony, this is no longer considered appropriate. Now that women are in the workforce and given equal opportunities, we're expected in general to support ourselves. If we have wrecked our own careers in order to support theirs, that's one thing we can get alimony for... but if we simply KEPT our careerand SUPPORTED him while he was not earning a lot in the hopes that we were investing in a marriage... what this is, is simply a bad investment.

YOu have no idea how many men would be getting alimony if the standard for getting it were simply "I supported her through her education and spent my own money to do that so she should pay alimony to me now"!

The standards for figuring alimony tend to be what your earning capacities were during the marriage. If he could only earn $12,000 a year as a grad student and you were earning $36,000 a year as a fully employed person, you might end up owing HIM alimony ... IF that were the ONLY standard. One of the other standards is whether you and he are able to support yourselves now that the marriage is over. And you will be able to say that his income should pop right up there now that he's finished with his degree so you should NOT owe alimony to him. Finally, there is the general principle that if you made your own career worse by helping his, then you may deserve to get something... but that's not what you said you did. All you said is really that you contributed money to his education.

And most particularly, if your own income during the marriage was higher than his, it's HIGHLY unlikely that you'll be RECEIVING anything labeled "alimony". "Alimony", is generally something used to temporarily equalize your financial backing for your life. It's really mostly used for very long term marriages where the wife sacrificed her career in order to raise babies and maintain the household. It's often though of as some sort of "severance" pay for the job of housewife... or a bridge-the-gap type pay for someone whose job suffered because of the marriage and who needs a bridget in order to get her OWN education, get up to speed in her own career, etc.

Alimony is NEVER a clear thing just because we're women. The right to equal opportunities in the workforce put an end to the days when we could say that his vows to us meant that he was going to be our supporter forever rather than our parents (and that those were our only viable choices for a real income)!

Which is not to say that you might not deserve some kind of equalizing payment on a property/debt settlement for having essentially supported him in a way that he didn't need to take out an extra $15K in loan money over. That's property settlement, though... not alimony!

Sadly, as an investment, this partnership was a bad choice. Like many small business owners, you put more money into the investment than you would have done if you had known he'd be walking away as soon as he was able to make it on his own. So you may not be able to force him to give the investment back to you through the law. That would depend upon the laws of your state regarding property distribution, supporting each otehr through getting degrees & such...

BUT you have a chance at getting back the $15K or maybe half of it if you can convince him to be amicable and do the right thing by you. Becasue this is clearly a moral debt that he has to you.

Be very careful that your anger at him for being a jerk does not come out in a way that makes him want to do somethign that's not the right thing. He owes you this debt... morally.

But you were asking if he owed it to you legally. I think probably not for the reasons I mentioned here... which kidn of means that you need to be even more careful to negotiate this amicably rather than angrily.