When a financially comfortable couple splits, divorce attorney Lowell Sucherman gets blunt.
“Look I’ve been doing this for 50 years,” he says early in the negotiations. “I know how this case is going to come out within a few dollars.”
Find a fair way to settle quickly, he says, and you can save enough in legal fees to send your kid to college. Or, you can fight tooth and nail, he adds, “and I’ll send my grandchildren to college.” His warnings only work some of the time.
This year though, as Bloomberg reports, some estranged spouses have a more powerful incentive than ever to call a truce: President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul eliminates the deduction for alimony payments—for divorces finalized starting in 2019.
For many wealthy couples, reaching a deal by Dec. 31 could mean tens of thousands of dollars in tax savings every year. That’s pushing more of them to finally follow Sucherman’s advice and cooperate as the deadline nears.
Divorce often means war for the top 1%, though. The richer you are, the more homes, possessions, investments and businesses there are to fight over.
In a single-income family, the non-earning spouse can be worried about being cheated by the earning spouse. The result is often expensive negotiations that stretch on for years, as each party tries to inflict maximum damage on the other.
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