Scott and I had different views on the amount of alimony he would pay me. No surprise: his number was MUCH lower than mine. Since our negotiations were a failure, our judge would rule on my alimony. His decision would depend on Scott’s ability to pay (his income) and my expenses and lifestyle (my need). A major part of my trial testimony focused on describing, in exhaustive detail, our household expenses. The Financial Statement each of us was required to file with the court listed the appropriate expense categories. My approach to this task was to collect a year’s worth of financial data (bank statements and credit cards) and categorize each outflow (credit card charge, check, direct bank payment and cash withdrawal) by expense category. I thought this was the most accurate way of calculating my needs, namely, here is what I spent and exactly how I spent it. During the trial, my lawyer began her questions about my expenses:

Marianne:

You list on your financial statement weekly expenses of 900 -sorry, $9,237 per week. How did you arrive at that figure?

 Gail:

For this figure, I took the time period from 12/15/2013 to 12/15/2014 and I was able to download all of the bank records from our joint account, which means downloading into Quicken, downloading the checks that were written, the deposits that were made, the ATM withdrawals that were made and so forth, So that went into a Quicken spreadsheet account. And then I was able to download all of my credit card — two different credit card bills, and that went in. And then I went through that 12 months’ worth of data and categorized all of the line items as to what category they were so that I could fit them into these buckets.

The bank accounts also included cash withdrawals, so I–I couldn’t necessarily say when I–there was a certain amount of cash withdrawal, what was done with it, but I labeled that as cash. So for all intents and purposes, the way I was paying family expenses was either through checks, through direct payments from the joint checking account or through the credit cards, or through cash. So I was able to take in line item detail, meaning charge by charge, check by check, in from those financial institutions and then categorize it and then spit it back out.

I then answered questions from Marianne and the judge about every single line item in the expense portion of my Financial Statement. There were 48 expense line items. That portion of my testimony took a day. Weirdly (at least it seemed so to me), I couldn’t have my spreadsheet or any backup analysis with me on the witness stand so I was required to answer all questions about my historical expenses analysis solely from memory. Many of these questions came directly from the judge. This quirk in the legal system actually played in my favor because I have a great memory and could clearly explain how I did the analysis.

I expected Scott’s attorney to try to pick apart my historical spending approach and was surprised when he asked relatively few questions. It didn’t mean Scott agreed with the overall number however. When asked by his attorney why he didn’t believe my expense analysis, he gave his analysis

Duff:

Going back to your analysis, the analysis you had referred to, what did you determine, if anything, through your analysis of Dr. Ortmeyer’s expenses–or needs?

Scott:

The analysis I did was because I didn’t feel I could rely upon the information provided me, I instead said–well,I–if and Ms. Ortmeyer had testified to and I had known that the contribution that had come from my K-1 income into the joint B of A account, as she had testified to, up through September 30th, 2014, had always been sufficient to meet the family needs and pay her credit card bills off every month, and meet all the family needs. I said, okay being what I can look at is look at is time periods. I took a year. In fact I matched the year of the records that I’d been finding in Quicken, which was 4/1/2013 through March 31st, 2014. And I said if I look at the total amount of funds that went into the joint B of A account from my K-1 income and subtracted from it things that had been taken out of that, that weren’t need-based, like the disputed withdrawals we talked about, as well as subtracted from it the expenses I paid for my personal self, the amount left would be the amount that was actually consumed for family expenses from my K-1 income in the joint B of A account. So that’s the analysis I did. And I went through the analysis and found those amounts. And those amounts were substantially less that what was reported here.  

Confusing testimony, but Scott’s argument was about inputs (our combined income), mine was about outputs (the actual expenses paid). He maintained our combined income (revised for deductions like his living expenses) was less than the actual spending I had laboriously catalogued, in accordance with the Court ordered Financial Statement. As a result, he argued my bottoms up expense analysis had to be wrong, though he consistently was at a loss for where the mistakes were. That didn’t make for a compelling argument.

Scott conveniently refused to acknowledge a key input: every year we tapped our non-retirement investment account to pay for federal and state income taxes – this in anticipation of his yearly bonus, which was received later and then put back into the investment account. I pointed this out to the judge, who, by this time, looked to me for clarification of our financials.