Legal Question in Family Law in North Carolina
According to our divorce decree, I am required to repay my ex for the payments he made on our lot. The lot has sold. Out of my proceeds I must pay 1/2 principal and interest he paid. What date do I use to start calculating the amount I owe him? The day we separated, the day I filed for divorce, or the date the divorce was final. This was not stipulated in the settlement.
1 Answer from Attorneys
The first part doesn't get much simpler than this "I am required to repay my ex for the payments he made on our lot". If that is in fact what the divorce judgment says, then any payment he made - you need to reimburse him. The date you use to calculate that is basically irrelevant. If he made a payment - you gotta pay him back no matter when it was paid. The other portion, 'Out of my proceeds I must pay 1/2 principal and interest he paid." really doesn't make sense and is likely not exactly what the order says because he normally would have paid no interest on proceeds you received from a sale. What you likely meant was you need to pay him 1/2 of the profit you received from the sale and reimburse him for any payments he made and any interest owed to him on the payments he made. The calculation of the interest will be the hardest because you will likely have to calculate an interest amount for each payment starting from the date it was paid until now. And of course, what interest rate should you use? It may be easier to do a ball park guess-timate and ask if he will accept that in full and final satisfaction rather than try and calculate everything down to the penny. Best of luck!