Can I stop work so I pay less maintenance?

As far as stopping work to reduce your income, that can have an impact obviously on child maintenance or indeed spousal maintenance and it is certainly something we hear talked about quite a lot but it is something that doesn’t tend to happen in reality for obvious reasons.  But if it did happen, if a party did decide to stop work in order to defeat a claim, the Court is going to look at what their income potential is as opposed to what the reality of their income is.  So if historically they have been working with a certain level of income, that is really the figure the Court is going to look at when deciding on how to apportion the various assets and the income of the family.