Opinion ID: 2635296
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Equal Division of the Marital Estate

Text: Kelly next argues that the court should not have divided the marital estate evenly. We review a trial court's allocation of property for abuse of discretion and will not reverse the court's order unless it is clearly unjust. [9] Here, in determining how to divide the marital estate, the superior court simply noted: The parties agree that the estate should be split 50/50. Kelly disputes this finding. Although he seems to acknowledge that he never explicitly argued for an uneven division, he insists that he implicitly sought an unequal division by arguing that he owned eighty-nine percent of the equity in the family home: [I]t was clear that if the court held that the real property was marital [Kelly's] position was that an equitable division required that he receive a greater share of the marital property. Connie disagrees. She notes that nowhere in his trial brief or his testimony at trial did Kelly assert that he should receive more than fifty percent of the marital estate. Connie's observation has merit. Our review of the record reveals no backup contention by Kelly  implicit or explicit  that the court should divide the marital estate unevenly if it rejected his argument that eighty-nine percent of the home's equity was his separate property. Kelly nonetheless argues that he rebutted the presumption favoring an equal division [10] by presenting evidence showing that, unlike Connie, he had grave health problems, lacked earning capacity, had extremely poor financial prospects, and had never obtained a college degree. Kelly insists that under these circumstances the statutory factors governing equitable division [11] required the court to award him the lion's share of the marital estate. In response Connie points to the reality that Kelly has now been sentenced to serve a lengthy term in prison, so most of his material needs will be provided by the state. Further, she argues, Kelly's financial situation at the time of the trial was actually better than hers, and any financial woes Kelly now faces have largely been caused by his own criminal conduct. Our review of the record convinces us that Connie has the better argument on this point. As the superior court aptly noted, here both parties lived on low incomes which barely met their expenses. Although Connie's new nursing degree gives her an advantage in meeting her future needs, Kelly's lengthy prison sentence means that the Department of Corrections will be responsible for meeting his physical and rehabilitative needs in the foreseeable future. Since we find no compelling evidence in the record that would dictate an uneven property distribution under these circumstances, we see no basis for concluding that the superior court abused its discretion in evenly dividing the marital estate.