Callender v. Callender

In Callender v. Callender, 7th Dist. No. 03-CA-790, 2004 Ohio 1382, at P19-20, the trial court found that for the first two years of the parties' marriage, the husband was unemployed and the wife was the primary provider of financial support for the family. It noted that while the husband testified that he was the primary caregiver, at the time, the parties only had one daughter and she was already school age. The trial court further found that the husband gained employment in 1998. He then grossed approximately $ 26,500 per year while appellee grossed approximately $ 37,100 annually. The court noted that during the marriage, the wife handled all of the family's finances and paid the bills. The parties had one checking account from which the bills were paid and into which the wife's wages were directly deposited. The court found that the husband only contributed $ 5,400 in 1998, $ 4,900 in 1999, $ 2,400 in 2000, $ 3,500 in 2001, and $ 5,700 in 2002 to household expenses. The court noted that the husband's deposits/contributions were substantially less than half of his available income for those years. The trial court found that while at some point, the husband made truck payments and had a Pennsylvania child support obligation to pay (in an unknown amount), his contributions of only $ 21,900 over five years was "certainly suspect if not pathetic." The court concluded that this "irresponsible behavior in not supporting one's spouse and two (2) minor children to the fullest extent possible should not be rewarded," and amounted to financial misconduct. Thus, the court determined that the wife was entitled to some compensation for appellant's mismanagement. In dividing the martial property, the court applied its finding of financial misconduct and awarded the wife her 403(B) retirement account of $ 6,141.87 in full. The Court reversed the trial court's finding of financial misconduct noting that there were no allegations that the husband had personally profited from his actions or engaged in misconduct in order to defeat the wife's distribution of marital assets. This Court also noted that the husband's alleged misconduct occurred during the entire marriage, not simply the time prior to the divorce. More particularly, this Court focused on the following facts when it concluded that the trial court acted unreasonably in finding that the husband engaged in financial misconduct. The husband testified that he did not know a lot about the family finances, but that the wife did. The wife testified that the husband kept what he wanted from his paycheck and deposited the rest into the family checking account. She stated that she did not know where the money that the husband kept out of the checking account went. The court recognized that the husband paid a truck payment and a child support obligation. While it was not clear how much these payments were, there was some indication in the parties' bank records that the husband may have paid $ 111 for child support and $ 386 for his truck payment. It was also unclear whether the husband paid child support biweekly or monthly. The Court concluded that these two expenditures accounted for a sizeable portion of the husband's spending.