Legal Question in Family Law in California

My sister has been living independantly living from her husband for the last 22 years (since 1988). They were married in 1975. As she was raising her youngest son and he begged her not to make his father live on the streets. Throughout this time he often stayed in her appartment. He of course never helped financially. He has been in jail, drug rehab and is a complete loser. He now lives with his girlfriend (his old boss) in CO and has decided it's time for a divorce. He filed for divorce as though he was living at my sister's house in CA. He of course doesn't want to work and wants alimony. She is still employed and knows she will have to give him part of her 401K as he will have to cough up some of his 401K but some interesting things are he has withdrawn, without her knowledge, some of his 401K and although he says he can't work he has been making monthly deposits in his savings as if he had a job. As his youngest son used to work with him he will testify that they got paid under the table. Anyway my question is, will she really have to pay alimony after this length of time? What is reasonable?


Asked on 2/15/10, 7:12 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys

Although you lay out a lot of detail in your question, very little of it is relevant to answering your question, and a great deal of information that would be necessary to answer it is missing. Your sister needs to talk to a family law attorney about this and go over all the details. If you review my past answers you will see that I almost always point people with family law issues to self help resources, but in this situation you need to get an attorney involved. Most family law attorneys these days will accept limited scope representation, where the client does as much as he or she can, and only uses the attorney as necessary. Your sister should find an attorney who can help her on that basis, unless she wants to just turn it over to an attorney in a traditional attorney/client arrangment of course.

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Answered on 2/20/10, 8:15 pm


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