When the Court of Appeals reviewed a case in which it looked, at least from the appellate record, as though the husband had been guilty throughout the marriage of the shoddiest economic behavior, and the wife had always gone the extra mile to be more than fair in the financial area, the appellate judges did not have much trouble deciding that the trial judge had not exceeded his authority. That judge had awarded this wife credit for half the fair market rental value of the former marital home where the husband had stayed. It did, however, hold that the judge was out of line when he awarded this wife credit for the tax payments she had made for the couple with marital funds.
These parties owned the house without a mortgage and husband excluded wife from it, and yet, as the Court of Appeals tells the story, refused to take responsibility for a tax debt the parties incurred through his refusal to pay taxes on time. This was a debt that wife used her separate funds to reduce, just as she used her separate funds to pay rent elsewhere when thrown out of the house. The divorce had been pending a long time, and during that time the husband had had exclusive use and possession of the house, and thus the wife deserved to have almost $20,000 in rental value. During the marriage she earned a regular salary and the husband did not, and he insisted on several expenditures that ended up costing the family a lot. Husband claimed as well that the expected payments on two loans he had made were his separate property, but the trial court properly found that he had utterly failed to even begin to trace the loans to his separate funds. It is not enough to show that at one point in history one has deposited in a bank account 60% of the funds that were used to make such loans. As for the tax payments wife made, she certainly was entitled to credit for the payments she used her separate funds to make. However, the Court of Appeals said the judge below erred in giving her credit for $18,500 in payments that she made with marital funds. 23 VLW 434 (9/16/08).