(Righter, R-Mattoon; Andersson, R-Geneva) makes an effective date of January 1, 2018 for Public Act 100-520 that made three changes to the maintenance guidelines' statute in the IMDMA. The changes are as follows:
(1) It integrates the maintenance guidelines statute with the new income-shares (child support) that took effect July 1, 2017. It does this by raising the ceiling in the maintenance statute to make it parallel with the ceiling for the income shares statute. The maintenance statute would then apply to cases if the parties' combined gross income reaches $500,000 as opposed to the current ceiling of $250,000.
(2) It eliminates the 20 percent "cliffs" in the formula for duration of the marriage by gradually increasing the duration of maintenance (subject to the discretion of the court) by 4 percent until the parties' 20th anniversary. It makes no changes to marriages of less than five years or marriages or more than 20 years.
(3) It links the temporary relief statute (§ 501) with the maintenance statute (§ 504) so that an award of temporary maintenance under § 501 is a corresponding credit to the duration of the maintenance.
As originally passed in PA 100-520, these changes were to take effect June 1, 2018. All this new public act does is make them effective date January 1, 2018.
A more extensive discussion of the underlying changes may be found in a November issue of the Illinois Bar Journal at this link.