Court Opinion

ID: 9762982
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:34:54.546452+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:38.432349
License: Public Domain

*383FLAHERTY, Justice,
concurring.
I join the majority in this fact specific case.
The parties were ordered at equitable distribution to share equally a $35,000 debt that had accrued jointly during their marriage. Wife paid the debt in full in order to preserve her credit and her job, and husband was ordered to pay his one half share of the debt over time by making monthly payments of $300 per month for forty-eight months. The trial court unfortunately labeled this monthly obligation “alimony.” Husband took exceptions, which were denied. Husband took no appeal from the denial of exceptions. When wife remarried two years after equitable distribution, husband sought to terminate his monthly payment on the joint debt, relying on Section 501(e) of the Divorce Code, which mandates that alimony shall terminate upon remarriage.
Section 501(b) of the Divorce Code, which contains factors for a court to consider in awarding alimony, has as its general purpose the effecting of justice. This is consistent also with Section 3102(a)(6) of the code, which states that the policy of Pennsylvania is to:
Effectuate economic justice between the parties who are divorced or separated and grant or withhold alimony according to the actual need and ability to pay of the parties and insure a fair and just determination and settlement of property rights.
(Emphasis added.) It is also consistent with this court’s opinion in Bold v. Bold, 524 Pa. 487, 574 A.2d 552 (1990), where we approved the award of “equitable reimbursement” of a wife who had helped to put her husband through medical school, and where we observed that:
Whether the award is called equitable reimbursement or reimbursement alimony, the considerations determining the existence, the amount and the duration of the award are the same. Ultimately, the only criterion for fashioning the award under either analysis is fairness.
524 Pa. at 497 n. 7, 574 A.2d 552. (Emphasis added.)
If the husband in this case believed that the “alimony” award is unfair, his remedy was to take an appeal. This he *384declined to do. He now seeks to litigate through the back door the appropriateness of sharing the marital debt. If we were to allow the husband to evade payment of his share of the marital debt by reliance on the trial court’s misplaced use of the term “alimony” to describe what he had to pay, when it is plain from this record that the husband’s monthly payments are reimbursement of debt, not payments to effect rehabilitation, our decision would be unfair and we would have abandoned our duty to effect economic justice between the parties and insure a fair and just determination of property rights.1
NIX, C.J., and PAPADAKOS, J., join this concurring opinion.

. This result is also consistent with Section 401(c) of the Divorce Code, which provides:
In all matrimonial causes, the court shall have full equity power and jurisdiction and may issue injunctions or other orders which are necessary to protect the interests of the parties or to effectuate the purposes of this act, and may grant such other relief or remedy as equity and justice require against either party or against any third person over whom the court has jurisdiction and who is involved in or concerned with the disposition of the cause.
To terminate husband's monthly installment payments on debt repayment on the grounds that the payments were mistakenly called “alimony,” which must terminate on remarriage, would be to elevate form over substance and to ignore our obligations to effect equity and justice.