If Hans Mills and Donna Mills were being judged by King Solomon and ordered to cut their children in half, Donna Mills strikes me as the type of mother who would go along with such a ruling... provided her ex were forced to pay the butcher fee.
Wading through the soggy mess that is the ruptured marriage of Hans and Donna Mills can leave one's head spinning and heart aching.
Hans, dubbed Canada's worst deadbeat father by some and hero by others, is a father of four no more. When faced with paying additional support, he chose to skip both town and country, leaving his kids and ex-wife behind for good.
Yet it's difficult to feel much sympathy for the ex-wife either. After reading all of the sordid details of this bitter split, one can't help but wonder what the woman was thinking.
She seems to truly hate her former husband more than she loves her children because most mothers I know, if placed in a similar situation, would figure that $2,235 in child support was probably enough. If money were tight, they would likely sell their $1.2 million dollar home (if they were lucky enough to own such an abode) and move to something a little less luxurious because kids don't actually need to live in a lakefront estate.
Most moms I know would be worried that if they hounded an ex for such an unreasonable amount of support, it would cause too much animosity and hard feelings, or possibly even drive their ex to contemplate suicide.
Divorce breeds a great deal of anger and resentment. I get it. And Donna Mills seems to have been dealt a bum hand. One child with Down syndrome. One with depression and another wrestling with a drug addiction. And the youngest, 10-year-old son, Steven, recently battled cancer.
At first glance, it's hard not to side with her.
But it's also hard to ignore the math.
Donna Mills was awarded the matrimonial house (valued at $1.2 million with $600,000 in home equity). She paid her husband a lump sum of $175,000 in order to keep the house and also waived the right to any spousal support. She did, however, receive $2,235 per month in child support, which her ex-husband appears to have dutifully paid (up until recently).
Afterwards, Donna decided that she wanted spousal support after all and claimed that she was "rushed and pressured and did not read" the documents before signing. She says she didn't fully understand what she was signing when she surrendered any further spousal support.
A judge apparently sided with Donna and Hans was forced to fork over an additional $1,537 per month in spousal support. Not to mention huge retroactive payments as well as his ex-wife's legal bills. Hans was earning roughly $100,000 per year.
Donna, on the other hand, has been receiving $2,500 per month in government assistance because of the health challenges faced by her two youngest children. The house also boasts a separate apartment, which reportedly generates nearly $2,000 in rental income. Add that to the child support once being paid by Hans, and it totals a fairly sizeable sum.
The fact that Donna would then seek additional support in the way of spousal support -- after already being awarded $425,000 by way of the house -- seems heavy-handed.
Hans apparently snapped and decided to head off for the Philippines with his new wife instead.
"The result of the legal instrument which you recently designed and implemented is that there is no possibility of a comfortable life or a (secure) retirement for me in Canada at all," he writes in an email to his ex-wife. "Therefore I have left the country to seek greener pastures elsewhere, and will never return. Well done Einstein."
I agree that our court system is stacked in the mother's favour. I agree that Canadian fathers all too often get the short end of the stick when it comes to custody or visitation rights and are required to pay what can sometimes be a punitive amount in support, especially if their employment situation has changed through no fault of their own.
However -- and there's really no getting around this fact -- Hans Mills is a first-class slimeball for not at least sending his monthly child support payments. Even if he can reason away the spousal support payments (and he has a good argument in that regard) he still has a responsibility to those children. His children.
If warring parents put half as much effort into trying to make things work as they do in trying to destroy the ex-spouse, children would be the better for it. Instead, too many parents choose conflict and children become the collateral damage.
Lydia Lovric is a regular contributor to The Hamilton Spectator, where this article originally appeared, and Urbanicity. www.lydialovric.com
That means the wife has to deduct the relevant income tax from those payments, so what she has to live on is not nearly as much as it sounds. Hans, on the other hand, would get any tax he paid on that money back again after filing...which on a high income, would be a real plus.
And what the home is valued at may not be what she can sell it for. Plus, can she buy something in the same area for less? With children with disabilities or illnesses, too much change can be more traumatic, and if housing prices are all very high in her area, moving might not be quite the picnic blithely referred to in this article.
I'd say that the stress in her household is probably maxed.
Try selling a house and buying another one while you have sick children.
It is nearly impossible for her to work.
600K of equity in the house means that she still has mortgage payments.
Moving causes as much stress on a family as divorce.
So I think your judgement that she is focused on the money is unfair. I can honestly see where the money would be needed and that she and the children would need to wait a few years before moving households.
There are solutions out there if she is willing to look at anything other than trying to nail her Ex to the cross.
After reading all of the facts of the case (the ones Donna felt necessary to highlight) I concluded that she was being greedy and vindictive.
Many people who get divorced down-size their home. It was unrealistic of Donna to assume she could maintain that house and her life-style based on an ex-husband who only made $100,000 (a decent income...but very few families with that income level could afford to own a million dollar home).
If you happen to have information that might sway the public's opinion, please share.
On the surface: My Dad was only giving my Mother 1200$ monthly in spousal support payments for three children, including an autistic son. She claimed that he had abused her, changed the locks, our phone number, and refused to let us see him for months for fear that he would "harm us".
The truth: She had recently broken his shoulder and his thumb while drunk. Won rights to the house. Abused her children, alcohol, and drugs. When she realized she wouldn't get more money, left us one night to go to British Columbia and never returned.
My father still had to pay her spousal support, even though she never came back. And she never paid him a day of child support.
Thank you Canada for my upbringing. Maybe it's time to change the one-size-fits-all family court system?
I agree that most people could and would sell the house, however she is dealing with 4 sick children. Maybe it is good judgement to wait to sell the house until the kids are in a better state of health.
It seems fundamentally unfair that this guy would be asked to pay
$2235 child support
$1537 spousal support
retro spousal support
all her legal fees
most of the house (he gets 175K out of 600K equity)
when he makes 100K gross (=6K per month after tax).
He basically has $2228 left over each month after [maybe more, not sure which of the support payments are tax deductible).
Given that his wife also got most of the house and gets 2500 a month from the government, the amount he has to pay to her relative to his income seems a bit out of whack. Chris Bosh is only paying $2600 a month in child/spousal support and that guy makes like 17 million a year.
Some friends of mine decided to split some years ago. They had very little in assets and both adored their little boy so they worked out custody and visitation and a fair split of what they had before they actually sought the divorce. Back in those days, there were no mediation lawyers so they each had to hire one. And promptly threatened to fire the lawyers without pay because the lawyers wanted to fight it out and cause dissent instead of abiding to what the couple had decided.
Another woman I know promised her he'd take her husband to the cleaners (which he couldn't because of the marital property act here) and then sat on his tush and didn't even file an injunction to prevent her husband from dissipating the assets. Even though she snuck into her husband's office and photocopied proof of embezzlement.