Question

Accelerating alimony to get deductions earlier

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
September 25, 2023
1 reply
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I pay $36k/year in alimony that is deductible to me. I have 29 more payments of $3k/month to go for a total of $87k. I am going to have some large stock option gains this year. Am I allowed to prepay some of my alimony payments from future years and take the deduction this year to offset some of those gains?

O

Opus 17

Employee

In general, no. Alimony must be required by a court order, divorce order, and so on, and extra payments would be viewed as voluntary, and therefore not considered deductible alimony. I suppose that if you and your ex agreed to accelerate the payments, and got the court to sign off on the plan, then it would be an allowable deduction.