(I'm sorry about deleting and re-posting the question, there are family details and the site was attaching my real name. I'm reposting using an email address that isn't linked to me.)
My father was married to his wife for over 20 years and she recently started a divorce.
He retired after many years in a higher paying job, as he had always planned to do, to focus on his acreage and business. The pension is quite decent, more than most people get. However she pressured him to make more money anyway, and since their rural area has few good jobs, so he tried working away from home, which he hated. But he explained to me that he had to work, or she might leave him.
Suddenly she divorced him. So he stopped working a second job, which he only did to make her happy. Now she is using his one particular past income statement to "prove" to the judge that he CAN make more money, just because he worked a lot that year.
Furthermore, he's the primary caretaker of their daughter because the mom left without saying goodbye, and the mother is not pursuing custody in any way.
The judge has ordered him to pay half his entire income to the mom.
That means each of my dad and my sibling have a quarter of the income to take care of them, while the mom gets half. This seems wrong to me.
The mom is also doing things like hiring expensive lawyers, which he is unwilling to do because it's whittling away at their savings, so she might win.
The full court arguments will be in months. In the meantime the court ordered a huge payment (50% of all income monthly).
The judge ordered him to "get a job," because "everyone else does," but that seems wrong to me for a retired single parent.
1) What happens if my dad just can't, realistically, pay the huge interim amount that was awarded to the wife? (50% of his income) Also he can't really get loans because of a lien
2) Is my dad going to be forced to work in the long run? Should he just "accept it" and start taking loans for a lifetime of huge payments to his ex-wife who doesn't even look after the daughter?
3) Does the court care that his ex-wife was pressuring him to make more money and it made him miserable? If she divorced him literally because they couldn't agree about his work, it seems unfair for her to use the courts to get her way.