Brown v. Brown

Citations

• 199 Conn. App. 134

Syllabus

The plaintiff, whose marriage to the defendant previously had been dis- solved, appealed to this court from the order of the trial court requiring her to reimburse the defendant a certain prorated portion of unallocated alimony and child support that she received in the year in which she remarried. The parties' separation agreement, which had been incorpo- rated into the dissolution judgment, required the defendant to pay the plaintiff a specified percentage of his gross annual compensation in any calendar year, which payments were to terminate on, inter alia, the plaintiff's remarriage. In the year in which the plaintiff remarried, the defendant paid the plaintiff 40 percent of bonuses and severance pay- ments he received from a former employer a few months before her remarriage. The court granted the defendant's postjudgment motion for order requesting reimbursement, in which he claimed that, when the plaintiff remarried in August of a year in which she was entitled to receive unallocated support, she was only to receive those benefits, specifically the bonus and severance payments, on a prorated basis. In the plaintiff's objection to the motion for reimbursement, she claimed that, because the separation agreement did not contain a provision for prorating unallocated support, she had no obligation to refund any part of the unallocated support she received that year. The parties, upon the plaintiff's remarriage, stipulated to the defendant's monthly child support obligation, which was entered as an order of the court. The defendant filed a cross appeal from the trial court's denial of his motion for modification of child support, in which he claimed that a reduction in his earned income constituted a substantial change in circumstances from the date when the court entered the parties' child support stipula- tion as an order of the court. On the plaintiff's appeal and the defendant's cross appeal to this court, held: 1. The trial court improperly granted the defenda