Buggelli v. Buggeli

Syllabus

The plaintiff, whose marriage to the defendant had previously been dissolved by a judgment rendered by a New Jersey court, appealed from the trial court's denial of her motions seeking reimbursement from the defendant for extracurricular, healthcare and college expenses incurred on behalf of their minor children. The plaintiff claimed, inter alia, that the court improp- erly denied her motion concerning extracurricular and healthcare expenses because it misinterpreted the parties' settlement agreement, as incorporated into the dissolution judgment and as modified by a postjudgment consent order. Held: The trial court improperly construed the modified settlement agreement in determining that the plaintiff waived her right to seek reimbursement for the claimed extracurricular and healthcare expenses on the ground that she did not provide the defendant with the purported requisite notice, as the consent order, in clear and unambiguous terms, removed the notice require- ments of the original settlement agreement with which the plaintiff originally had to comply in order to be entitled to reimbursement from the defendant for extracurricular and healthcare expenses. The trial court improperly construed the modified settlement agreement to require the plaintiff to submit reimbursement requests for extracurricular and healthcare expenses to the defendant by email, as, pursuant to that agreement, the defendant's obligation to reimburse the plaintiff for extracur- ricular and healthcare expenses was not dependent on the plaintiff's provi- sion of either notice to the defendant of said expenses or the submission of reimbursement requests for said expenses to him by any particular method of delivery. The trial court's articulation, issued following the filing of the plaintiff's appeal, did not modify its original decision denying the plaintiff's motion for contribution toward college expenses, as the articulation provided that, pursuant to Newburgh v. Arrigo (88 N.J. 529), the