Turney v. Turney
| Decision Date | 02 December 2022 |
| Docket Number | 2201007 |
| Parties | Stacy Turney v. Amy Turney |
| Court | Alabama Court of Civil Appeals |
Stacy Turney
v.
Amy Turney
No. 2201007
Alabama Court of Civil Appeals
December 2, 2022
Appeal from Madison Circuit Court (DR-19-900485)
ON APPLICATION FOR REHEARING
THOMPSON, Presiding Judge.
This court's opinion of August 19, 2022, is withdrawn, and the following is substituted therefor.
Stacy Turney ("the husband") appeals a judgment of the Madison Circuit Court ("the trial court") divorcing him from Amy Turney ("the wife").
We affirm the judgment with regard to the awards of an attorney fee, past-due child support, and periodic alimony; we reverse the judgment with regard to the requirement that the husband maintain a life-insurance policy to secure the periodic-alimony obligation awarded to the wife; and we remand the cause.
The parties were married in 1991. Three children were born of the marriage, with the youngest child attaining the age of majority in October 2020, during the pendency of the underlying proceedings.[1] In 2018, after the husband had admitted to engaging in several extramarital sexual encounters, the parties separated. On June 17, 2019, the wife filed a complaint in the trial court seeking a divorce. A pendente lite order was issued that same day. That order provided, among other things, that the parties were to preserve all financial assets in their present form and that they were to maintain the status quo and continue to pay expenses in the same manner as before the filing of the divorce complaint. The husband filed an answer and asserted a counterclaim.
On April 13, 2021, the trial court conducted a trial and received ore tenus evidence. The husband testified that he was 50 years old and that he and the wife had been married for almost 30 years. He stated that, after he graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve and served a five-month deployment in the Gulf War. When he returned from that war, he married the wife, enrolled in an online theological course, and worked in a Christian bookstore. From 1998 through 2017, the husband served in various churches. He stated that the wife had been a good mother to their children, had supported his ministry career, had been an asset to his ministry, and had supported his decision in August 2017 to end his ministry career.
The record indicates that when the husband retired from his ministry career, he had not secured other employment. He stated that he and the wife discussed his future employment opportunities and that they decided that the family would move to north Alabama and he would seek permanent employment after their middle child graduated from high school in May 2018. Thus, upon retiring from his ministry career, the husband went to work for one of his former parishioners, and, in December 2017, the husband accepted a position as a financial planner
with Edward D. Jones & Co. The husband stated that he had planned on studying for and taking his licensing exams to become a certified financial planner in Dothan and then opening a financial-planning office in north Alabama after the family had moved there.
According to the husband, in February 2018, he became fearful that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease and informed the wife that since 2015 he had engaged in several anonymous extramarital sexual encounters. The husband also informed the wife that he had engaged in a sexual encounter with a masseuse.
Upon learning of the husband's extramarital sexual encounters, the wife asked him to leave the marital residence. The husband decided to move to north Alabama ahead of the family and to live with various relatives. Hoping that he and the wife could reconcile and that the family could be reunited, the husband signed a lease for a house in Madison.
In late May 2018, the wife and the children moved into the house that the husband had leased. The wife, however, refused to let the husband live with her and the children because the husband had engaged in additional extramarital sexual encounters after moving to north Alabama. The husband testified that, despite his lack of faithfulness to
the wife, the wife never spoke derogatorily about him and that he accepted full responsibility for his actions, which, he said, contributed significantly but not entirely to the breakdown of the parties' marriage.
Evidence was presented indicating that during the marriage the husband was the breadwinner for the family and the wife was a stay-at-home mother who had also worked part-time at the various churches where the husband had worked. According to the husband, when he retired from a career in the ministry and, consequently, resigned from his position with a church for which he was working, the wife, who also had worked for that same church but in a part-time position, lost her part-time position. The evidence indicated that, at the end of his ministry career, the husband earned the equivalent of $102,500 per year in salary and benefits. When he entered the Edward Jones training program, the husband received an initial salary of $70,000 per year. He testified that, because he had subsequently passed his licensing exams, over a five-year period his salary would decrease incrementally and the percentage of his commissions on the accounts that he managed for Edward Jones would increase. The husband explained that, as he increased his client base and acquired new accounts for Edward Jones, he would also earn
bonuses. He stated that he had been given an $8,000,000 account of a retiring broker to manage and that, in January 2021, he had started receiving a commission from that account.[2] As of April 2021, the husband had received $23,108 in income from Edward Jones for the year, and he stated that he expected his gross income for 2021 to be $92,000. He further testified that he received disability benefits in the amount of $661 per month from the Department of Veteran's Affairs ("VA") due to injuries he had suffered while on active military duty.[3] The husband testified that his VA disability benefits would be reduced when the divorce judgment was entered because he would no longer have a spouse.
According to the husband's testimony, his W-2 tax form for 2019 indicated that his gross income was $74,955 and that he had invested
$7,300 in a health-savings account ("HSA").[4] The husband testified that his W-2 form for 2020 indicated that his gross income was $66,527 and that his HSA contribution was $7,344.[5] The wife's exhibit number 23, which was admitted into evidence, indicated that each month in 2020 the husband had received $486.69 in benefits from the VA. The husband further testified in his deposition that in the past year he had received approximately $30,000 from the VA, consisting of VA disability back payments and a refund. The husband admitted to cashing most of the checks from the VA without sharing any of those funds with the wife. Specifically, he explained that, in January 2020, he had received a check from the VA in the amount of $2,250 and that, in February 2020, he had received a funding-fee refund in the amount of $1,628 due to a VA application that he had submitted approximately 8 years earlier while he was married to the wife. He further testified that, in October 2019, he
had received a check from the VA in the amount of $24,293. He admitted, however, that he had not deposited that check until after his July 2020 deposition in the divorce action. When asked during the deposition why he did not deposit that check when he received it, he responded: "I wasn't about to put that amount of money in [a bank account] and it be considered in any way that she would take some of that or require some of that." He stated at trial that only $3,600 of those funds remained. When asked specifically how he had spent $20,693 of the $24,293 from the VA lump-sum payment, he stated that he had used approximately $9,000 for legal fees, $5,625 for work on a driveway located on his father's property, and $4,500 for cellular telephones and accessories for the adult children.[6] The husband admitted on cross-examination that, when his Edward Jones compensation, the value of the benefits he received from the VA, and other income were combined his gross income for 2020 was approximately $102,734.
Regarding support for the wife and the youngest child, the husband testified that, after the entry of the pendente lite order, he had paid the rent on the Madison house and all the bills for utilities, the groceries, and miscellaneous expenses. The husband acknowledged that, for the first 16 months of this litigation, the youngest child was under the age of majority and lived exclusively with the wife. The husband admitted that in July 2020, after the two-year lease on the Madison house had expired, he stopped depositing his paycheck into the parties' joint account. He stated that, rather than giving the wife money, he had given large amounts of cash to the children and had continued to pay for his adult middle child's vehicle. He explained that he had stopped supporting the wife because "I paid and paid, and I never knew anything." The husband further stated that, even though at the time he no longer had any minor children, he had written checks for cash in the sums of $900, $1,300, $6,000, and $950 in November 2020 and had given those funds to the children. The husband insisted that, although he could produce evidence demonstrating that he had spent only $16,381 on the wife and the youngest child in 2020, he had actually spent much more than that amount on them.
The husband admitted that in June or July 2019 he had removed $11,500 from a retirement account. The husband also admitted to large withdrawals from his personal account from September 2020 through November 2020 and insisted that the withdrawn funds had not been invested elsewhere but had been used to pay for nonreimbursable business expenses. The husband, however, did not provide...
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