A Singapore court rejected a Chinese wife's claim for S$10,000 monthly maintenance, assessing her reasonable expenses at S$2,559 and finding her current resources sufficient.
Tags:Source: OT-Team(G), 新明日报
A Singapore court has rejected a 56-year-old Chinese woman’s application for S$10,000 in monthly interim maintenance from her 72-year-old Singaporean husband, after finding that her reasonable monthly expenses were S$2,559.
The couple, who have a 16-year age gap, married in China in 2012 and have no children. The wife currently lives in Shanghai, while her husband remains in Singapore.
According to the judgment, the woman applied for S$10,000 in monthly interim maintenance, with the payments backdated to October 2024. She said her husband had previously covered all their living expenses when she stayed in Singapore on a visit pass at a large house owned by his parents.
She later returned to Shanghai after her husband was unable to act as her sponsor.
The woman said that after she returned to Shanghai at the end of 2013, her husband transferred S$3,000 to her every month for living expenses. When they met or traveled together, he would also provide another S$7,000 for shopping and travel expenses. She therefore argued that her standard of living had effectively amounted to more than S$10,000 a month.
Her claimed expenses included food, clothing, a domestic helper, beauty treatments, travel, jewelry and musical instrument repairs.
However, from September 2023, her husband stopped traveling to China to see her and only continued transferring S$3,000 per month. From October 2024, the amount was reduced to just S$600.
The husband acknowledged that he had given his wife S$3,000 a month during the COVID-19 pandemic, but denied ever providing additional cash or supporting a lifestyle costing around S$10,000 a month.
He currently receives about S$1,629 a month from his Central Provident Fund (CPF) income and said he had set aside about RMB3,000, or approximately S$570, each month for his wife.
During the hearing, the husband eventually acknowledged, under repeated questioning from the wife’s lawyer, that RMB3,000 a month would indeed be insufficient given her spending habits.
The wife argued that this amounted to an admission that he had failed to provide adequate financial support.
Judge Rejects Application
The judge, however, rejected the application, stressing that an oral admission made during a hearing was not by itself conclusive.
The court noted that interim maintenance is intended to meet a party’s immediate basic living needs, rather than fund all of their claimed lifestyle expenses.
After excluding what it considered non-essential expenses, the judge assessed the wife’s reasonable monthly expenses at S$2,559.
The court also took into account the wife’s rental costs and retirement income, together with the approximately S$570 provided by her husband. It found that these resources were sufficient to cover her reasonable expenses.
As a result, the judge concluded that the wife had failed to establish that her husband had neglected or refused to support her, and dismissed her application for S$10,000 in monthly interim maintenance.
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