Asset division gets the drama; maintenance pays the bills. For most families the monthly money question — who supports whom, with how much, for how long — shapes daily life more than any property order, and in asset cases it carries extra freight: incomes that flow through companies, wealth that sits in things rather than salaries, and the earning gap a marriage’s division of labour created. Here is the machinery, honestly.
No Tables, Real Ranges
Irish law has no spousal maintenance formula: the court assesses what proper provision requires through the section 20 factors — needs and obligations, incomes and earning capacities (including the career the marriage’s caring arrangements set aside — that cost is maintenance’s legitimate business), the standard of living, the children’s needs. Practice works in ranges built from real budgets and real incomes — so the work starts with schedules of actual outgoings and the payer’s actual means, which in company and self-employment cases means the forensic version: accounts, drawings, benefits through the business, lifestyle against declared income — courts know the gap between what owners pay themselves and what enterprises can sustain, and maintenance can be set on capacity. Interim support exists for the meanwhile — maintenance pending suit bridges the case’s duration, and if payments have stopped, it is a first-conversation topic.
Structure: Periodical, Lump Sum, Secured — Composed Together
The instruments solve different problems: periodical payments track ongoing needs and vary with life — and chain the parties together; lump sums buy separation and certainty — the natural fit where wealth sits in assets, and the nearest thing to finality Ireland’s no-clean-break law offers; security attaches where reliability is doubted. Real settlements blend them, and compose them with everything else — the pension adjustment, the property orders — as one structure. And durability is drafted: variation exists in both directions, so the deals that hold are the ones built on full disclosure and realistic terms, with review mechanisms anticipating the changes everyone can already see coming. Tax treatment of maintenance and lump sums routes to your accountant, always.
The Monthly Money Question?
Real budgets, real means, realistic ranges - and interim support where the gap is now. One confidential call starts the honest arithmetic.
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