Posted by Nydia Streets of Streets Law in Florida Divorce

What is considered intentional waste or dissipation of marital assets? Sometimes spouses do not agree on how money is spent. For example, one spouse may not approve of luxury purchases, and may argue that a spouse’s spending habits caused marital waste. Would this be enough for a Florida divorce court to award more than half of the marital assets to the disapproving spouse? The matter of intentional waste or dissipation was an issue in the case Hearn v. Hearn, 2D20-2522 (Fla. 2d DCA November 30, 2022).

Two years before a divorce case was filed, the former husband was terminated for misconduct at work. Based on his employment contract, his employer required him to re-pay a bonus paid to him. The former husband refused and sued the employer approximately one year before the parties’ divorce case was filed. The former husband lost that lawsuit and was required to pay his former employer over $200,000 which he paid from his retirement account.

As part of equitable distribution, the former wife argued the former husband should be solely responsible for the amount repaid to his former employer, and that his misconduct which led to his termination should be considered intentional dissipation or waste of marital assets. The trial court agreed and assigned to the former husband in equitable distribution the amount repaid to his former employer, finding the former husband committed misconduct at work, that he “had pursued litigation against his employer without the former wife's knowledge or consent and that he had satisfied the Termination Judgment using marital retirement funds without the former wife's knowledge or consent.” The former husband appealed.

The appellate court noted at the outset: “We need not consider whether the evidence established that the use of the funds served a marital purpose because the trial did not find—and there is no evidence to support—that the former husband's conduct occurred at a time when the marriage was irreconcilably broken.” The court held “Absent such evidence, it was error for the trial court to assign the dissipated marital funds to the former husband. Cf. Zambuto v. Zambuto, 76 So. 3d 1044, 1046 (Fla. 2d DCA 2011) (holding that the trial court erred in assigning $90,000 to the husband to account for the money he had lost while gambling during the final two years of marriage at which time the marriage was intact).”

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