Educate yourself about alimony payments and know your options. Alimony, maintenance, and spousal support refer to the same thing. Attorneys tend to use the term maintenance, since its purpose is to maintain the receiving spouse’s standard of living for a certain duration of time after the marriage. The lay public tends to use the term “alimony.” The maintenance calculation was standardized in January 2016; the way it used to be allocated was less streamlined and too subject to judicial discretion. If there (more...)