A 27-Year Marriage, a Relocation, and a Spousal Support Compromise

The situation

Ngozi and Kwame had been married for 27 years when a hospital several hours from Tillsonburg offered Ngozi a surgical position she had been quietly hoping for since her mid-career years. It was the kind of opportunity that does not come twice, and she wanted to take it. Kwame did not want to go. He had spent almost three decades building a construction company from a two-person outfit into a business with steady commercial contracts, and he was three or four years from winding it down and retiring on his own terms. Moving meant selling a business he had built his adult life around; staying meant Ngozi turning down the position of her career. Neither of them was willing to bend, and by the following spring they had agreed to separate rather than force the other into a decision they would resent.

They had no children still at home, which simplified some things. But 27 years is a long marriage by any measure, and Ontario family law treats long marriages differently than short ones when it comes to spousal support — the kind of ongoing payment one spouse may owe the other after separation, distinct from child support and separate from the division of property. Ngozi came to Treadstone Law wanting to understand two things: what she might owe, and for how long.

What made this case hard

Three things complicated the support analysis, and each one mattered.

The first was the length of the marriage itself. Under the framework Ontario family lawyers use to estimate spousal support — the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines, a set of federal guidelines that are not binding law but are used by nearly every family lawyer and most judges as a starting point — marriages of 20 years or longer are generally treated as open-ended in duration rather than tied to a fixed number of years. That does not mean support lasts forever automatically, but it does mean there is no simple formula that caps it, and it shifts the negotiation toward what is fair given both spouses' circumstances rather than a countdown clock.

The second was that Kwame's income was not a single, stable number. As the owner of his construction company, his personal income for the past several years had been drawn partly as salary and partly as dividends, timed in ways that suited the business more than they reflected a clean annual figure. Determining a self-employed spouse's income for support purposes is one of the more technical parts of family law — it usually means adding back certain business expenses, averaging income over several years, and sometimes bringing in an accountant to produce a defensible number rather than relying on a tax return alone.

The third was the retirement itself. Kwame was not simply a lower-income spouse who would stay lower-income indefinitely — he was actively planning to sell or wind down the company within a few years, at which point his income would drop sharply, likely from roughly $180,000 a year in recent years to something closer to $70,000 once he stepped back to part-time consulting on a handful of legacy contracts. Any support arrangement fixed to his current income would be badly out of date within three years. Any arrangement that ignored the coming change would be unfair to Ngozi, who was being asked to plan around a number that both of them knew was temporary.

Underneath the support question sat the property division. Ontario's Family Law Act requires spouses to equalize the value of what each of them accumulated during the marriage, separate from support. Between the matrimonial home, Kwame's company, and both spouses' retirement savings, the couple's combined family property came to roughly $2.3 million — enough that getting the business valuation and the equalization payment right mattered nearly as much as the support figure itself.

What we did

1. Obtained a proper income determination for Kwame's business, not just his tax returns. We worked with an accountant to average his income over the prior three years and identify which business expenses were genuinely necessary versus which reduced his reported income while still benefiting his personal life — a common issue with owner-operated businesses. This produced a defensible income figure for support purposes rather than a number either side could credibly dispute as understated or inflated.
2. Ran the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines using both current and projected income. Because the guidelines produce a range rather than a single number, we calculated two ranges: one based on Kwame's current business income, and a second based on his projected post-retirement income. This gave both sides a concrete starting point for negotiating a support figure that could reasonably change over time instead of arguing from scratch later.
3. Proposed a step-down support structure tied to a defined event rather than an open-ended review. Rather than leaving Kwame's retirement as a vague future trigger for renegotiation — which invites disagreement about whether and when it has actually happened — we proposed language tying the reduction to the sale or wind-down of the business, with a fallback date if that had not occurred within a set number of years.
4. Coordinated the business valuation with the equalization calculation. Kwame's company needed to be valued for two different purposes at once: as a source of income for support, and as a family asset for equalization. We made sure the valuator's report addressed both, so the parties were not paying for two separate valuations or arguing about which number applied to which calculation.
5. Negotiated the equalization payment separately from support, in writing. Kwame kept the company; Ngozi received a larger share of the matrimonial home equity and retirement savings to offset it, along with an equalization payment paid over two years rather than as a single lump sum, which eased the cash flow pressure on both sides.
6. Built a formal separation agreement rather than relying on an informal understanding. Given the size of the estate and the moving pieces in both the support and property terms, we drafted a full agreement with independent legal advice on both sides — a step that makes an agreement far harder to challenge later and that both spouses wanted given how much was riding on the numbers holding up.

The outcome

The two sides did not land where either had started. Kwame's initial position was support at the top of the guideline range for as long as he lived, treating his retirement as none of Ngozi's concern. Ngozi's initial position was a support figure that would drop the moment she relocated, treating her new job as the only relevant change in circumstances. What they settled on was a compromise that reflected both realities honestly.

Ngozi agreed to pay support of roughly $6,200 a month for the first three years — near the middle of the guideline range calculated on Kwame's current business income — stepping down to approximately $3,200 a month once the company was sold or wound down, whichever came first, with a firm three-year deadline if neither had happened by then. On the property side, Kwame kept full ownership of the construction company; Ngozi received the larger share of the matrimonial home equity and a greater portion of the retirement accounts, plus an equalization payment of roughly $140,000 paid over two years, to balance out the value of the business staying with Kwame.

Neither party got everything they wanted. Kwame gave up the higher, open-ended support figure he had initially sought, and accepted that his retirement timeline — not just his current income — would define what he received. Ngozi accepted a support obligation higher than she had hoped for in the near term, in exchange for certainty about when it would fall, and for keeping the equalization process out of a courtroom. The agreement was signed roughly seven months after they first separated, well short of what a contested trial over both support and a business valuation would likely have taken, and at a fraction of the legal cost either side would have faced arguing the business income figure in court.

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