“As already mentioned, the [Spousal Support Advisory] Guidelines, while not binding, should not be lightly departed from. This is in large part because, without them, it is very difficult to establish a principled basis for arriving at a figure for spousal support. In my view, the motion judge erred in departing from the Guidelines for the reasons he did: namely, the good luck associated with the husband’s early pension pay-out opportunity (at para. 140) and his finding that the wife was “mismanaging her affairs” (at para.150).
In the face of a very strong compensatory basis for entitlement to support, as well as an income increase arising from the very same job that the husband occupied throughout the 23-year-long traditional marriage, there was simply no reason to conclude that “the underlying assumptions of the SSAGs [were now] less helpful” (para.151).”