Importance of New Jersey Lifestyle Analysis: Crews v. Crews

Video Transcript 

My name's Robert Bonavito, New Jersey forensic accountant. This video is part of a series of videos where I discuss forensic accounting topics for educational purposes only. If this was a litigated matter, I would take a different approach, have different conclusions based on different facts and circumstances.

And today's topic is gonna be Crews versus Crews, which is a case involving alimony. The reason this case is important, because in court cases precedent set in other cases affect how you testify or how you treat things, not because it's written in stone, but it's important to realize that if the court ruled a certain way in a certain case, maybe you can apply that to your case if the facts and circumstances are similar. But listen, you know, we do sometimes go against court cases, but it's important to know court case, and the Crews versus Crews was a divorce in 2000, where a wife wanted to go in and change her alimony. And what the courts did was they went in and she lost, and they appealed, and they appealed, they finally won.

And what the courts basically said, was that if you can prove that your lifestyle has changed, your alimony should change. And it also said that developing a lifestyle analysis is very important. But the interesting thing is that alimony at this time is changing in New Jersey. And it may affect this case, but I think this case is still relevant because what it says that if you were getting divorced, okay, what you need to do is make sure you can develop your lifestyle analysis. For example, if you have a lifestyle that is $10,000 a month, or $20,000 a month, or a million dollars a month, okay, if you can prove that lifestyle and you've been married for a certain amount of time, there's no reason you cannot go after the moneyed spouse to keep you in that lifestyle. If you can prove he can support you in that lifestyle. Naturally if your spouse is making $100,000 a year and you have a $20,000 a month lifestyle, it's not gonna work out. But if you have a very wealthy spouse, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to establish that, or a forensic account can establish what your lifestyle is and go after that money. My name's Robert Bonavito. If you have any questions on this video, feel free to call me or email me.