Court Opinion

ID: 9718474
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:24:58.518526+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:59.547219
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE LUND, specially concurring: I concur with Justice Cook’s results, but do not readily accept his suggestion that percentage awards of maintenance be discontinued. Percentage awards were approved by our court in In re Marriage of Stegbauer (1980), 84 Ill. App. 3d 83, 404 N.E.2d 1140. In my opinion, the following from the text of H. Joseph Gitlin on divorce suggests the benefits of percentage agreements and the problems with court-ordered percentage maintenance awards: “Certainly, the goal of eliminating the need for modification proceedings for an increase or decrease in maintenance is a desirable one. There is no reason why the parties, by agreement, cannot have automatic adjustments in the maintenance level based on the obligor’s income, the recipient’s income, a combination of the two, the Consumer Price Index, or such other creative conditions as agreed to by the parties. A function of a well-drafted marital settlement agreement is to avoid future litigation between the parties. Automatic adjustments in the maintenance level, as in the child support level, serve that function. The court, however, when it imposes its judgment upon the parties, is bound by different rules than are the parties when they make an agreement. Modifications in maintenance are governed by section 510(a), which requires that there be proof of a change of circumstances since the entry of the last maintenance order before maintenance can be modified. To support a request for increased maintenance, the recipient must show increased expenses and the ability of the obligor to pay an increased amount of support. The mere fact that the obligor’s income has increased substantially since the divorce is not a basis for the recipient to receive an increase in maintenance, since the life[-]style amount to which the recipient is entitled is measured by the life[-]style that was established during the marriage, and not the life[-]style in which the obligor can afford to keep the recipient after the divorce. Thus, basing an increase in support merely on the increased income of the maintenance obligor, as will occur when maintenance is based on a percentage of the income of the obligor, violates the rule that the wife must show an increased need.” (1 H. Gitlin, Gitlin on Divorce §15.12(F), at 359-60 (1991).) Perhaps in the proper case we should carefully reconsider Justice Trapp’s dissent in Stegbauer (84 Ill. App. 3d at 86, 404 N.E.2d at 1142 (Trapp, J., dissenting)).