Incomes over $350,000 and the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines

You may have heard about Child Support Guidelines (both federal and provincial). They are mandatory in their application. On a daily basis, both before the Courts and in the context of out-of-court negotiations about child support, they are used to calculate amounts payable by parents, one to the other, based on their respective incomes for child support purposes, the children's residential arrangements, the children's activities and many other relevant factors. 

What about spousal support? How are those amounts calculated?

Setting aside for the moment the issue of entitlement to spousal support (being the preliminary issue which needs to be determined), we now have the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines, which came about after years of government-sponsored studies on appropriate spousal support levels and fair methods of calculating them. The SSAGs, as they are known, are not mandatory in their application. Rather, they are a guideline. They remain "advisory" to the Court - hence the use of the word in the title.

The SSAGs have many very interesting features and deserve a lot of comment. There will be future postings in this blog about them. 

For the moment, I comment on whether or not they are applicable to incomes (in the payor's hands) of over $350,000. The Guidelines themselves say that they "may not apply" in such situations but increasingly, Courts have applied them, particularly to incomes materially in excess of $350,000. One of the arguments made is that if the parties were still together, all of the income available would be used for their benefit - there would be no artificial "cut-off" after $350,000. So why should the same scenario not apply once the parties are separated, assuming the spouse claiming spousal support is able to establish entitlement in the first place? 

For more information on this issue, and for a more in-depth discussion on how the law may apply to the specific circumstances of your case, speak to a family law lawyer.

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