Court Opinion

ID: 9529133
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:47:55.342874+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:41.591354
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE UNVERZAGT, dissenting: In this case, a board-certified medical doctor and spouse were married for 24 years and had one 19-year-old daughter, who was a college student. The doctor had made a high gross income of $80,000 and made a gross of just under $70,000 in 1983, the year prior to the hearing on property division. The spouse had not been employed outside the home since 1972. Since that date the spouse had taken care of the home, answered the phone for the doctor, checked invoices, and prepared their tax returns. At the time of the hearing both parties, who were around 60 years old, claimed ill health. The doctor maintained an expensive Oak Brook shopping center office, a billing service, an answering service, and was on the staff of Mercy Hospital, Good Samaritan Hospital, Glendale Heights Hospital, and had recently joined the staff of Loyola University Hospital. After the hearing the trial judge awarded virtually all of the marital assets to the doctor. One is incredulous to accept the result. The trial court based its lopsided division of property on its finding that the homebody spouse dissipated funds in excess of $2 million. The majority accepts this finding. The trial court was incorrect in finding a dissipation of assets. The trial court displayed a basic misunderstanding of what it means to dissipate marital assets. Dissipation of marital assets occurs when a spouse uses marital property for his own benefit for a purpose unrelated to the marriage while the marriage is breaking down. Klingberg v. Klingberg (1979), 68 Ill. App. 3d 513. The recent cases concerning the dissipation doctrine are instructive. In re Marriage of Sevon (1983), 117 Ill. App. 3d 313, the court determined that there was no dissipation of marital assets where the money in question is spent for purposes which were necessary and appropriate, legitimate family expenses. The court found there was no evidence in the record that the money in question was spent for purposes unrelated to the marriage. In re Marriage of Lord (1984), 125 Ill. App. 3d 1, the court found that the husband had dissipated marital assets in cashing life insurance policies just prior to separation and withdrawing a large sum from a joint savings account following the separation of the parties. In re Marriage of Greenberg (1981), 102 Ill. App. 3d 938, the court found dissipation where the husband sold the parties’ major long-term investment of jointly held securities, without accounting for the proceeds of sale. Based upon these three cases, the husband in the case at hand cannot be guilty of dissipation of the marital assets worth $2 million. The record is clear that the funds at issue were jointly invested by the parties. The husband did advise what investments to make. The husband did the tax planning for the parties and did it so that in many years, the wife testified, she was able to give over for investment a sum greater than she declared for income tax purposes. The wife kept a journal of funds she earned which were used for investment. Some 40 to 50 pages of this journal show that the wife made checks to brokers for the purchase of investments. For this college-trained, board-certified psychiatrist to claim she was the unwitting Trilby to her homemaker husband’s Svengali is ludicrous. She kept a journal of the investments. She wrote the checks to brokers for investments. Two years after she filed suit for divorce she was aware that the margin account they owned with Fidelity Brokerage Services, Inc., was valued at over $1 million. She was in suit; nonetheless, she never asked for an injunction to halt the investments or any other court order to preserve the property. She was content at that time to ride out the gamble. The margin account later rose to almost $4 million with a $2 million loan and then rapidly lost ground to less than $100,000. Both of the parties rolled the dice; both deserve to suffer the loss, and it is not fair to allocate all of the loss to the husband by the device of calling it a dissipation of assets. For this error it is my opinion the rest of the property distribution is fatally skewed and the case should be sent back for another hearing. I therefore dissent.