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Any woman who has been divorced or is thinking about divorce must read this book. It can mean the difference between a lifetime of receiving pension benefits and child support income or receiving nothing. This book will make available to you the most powerful tool in collecting past-due child support and alimony without wasting thousands of dollars in legal fees.

This book focuses on two important issues: how to secure your share of your ex-husband’s pension benefits earned during the marriage, and how to obtain past-due alimony and child support payments from your ex-husband’s pension, profit-sharing, or 401(k) savings plan. It explains the best kept secret under federal law: the Qualified Domestic Relations Order (QDRO). By using a QDRO, you can secure your share of the pension benefits awarded to you at divorce. And you can tap into your ex-husband’s retirement benefits for child support or alimony arrearages. Millions of divorced women are unaware of this powerful tool created by Congress in 1984 to help protect the financial rights of former spouses and children.

Unfortunately, many divorce attorneys are not familiar with QDROs and cannot provide appropriate guidance. Even worse, perhaps your own divorce attorney failed to prepare the necessary QDRO in your case. Remember that even if your divorce decree awards you a portion of your ex-husband’s pension, profit-sharing, or 401(k) benefits, you will receive nothing unless a proper QDRO has been filed and accepted by your ex-husband’s employer. And even if your attorney did draft a QDRO for you, did it include appropriate survivor language to protect your share of the benefits in the event of your ex-husband’s death? Failure to include appropriate survivor protection in the QDRO is a common mistake.

A QDRO is the legal document necessary to obtain direct payments from your ex’s retirement plan(s). If you were awarded a portion of your ex-husband’s pension benefits or if he is currently delinquent in his child support or alimony payments, this book will be an invaluable resource. If you don’t understand QDROs, you risk losing your rightful share of your ex-husband’s pension benefits. Hundreds of thousands of women throughout the United States will discover to their horror that they will never receive the pension benefits awarded to them in their divorce decree or separation agreement because a QDRO was never prepared and implemented.

Throughout the United States today, there are millions of “deadbeat dads” who have refused to honor their child support or alimony obligations. This book will reveal how QDROs are the perfect vehicle for obtaining this past-due child support and alimony. Most employers, large and small, offer some form of pension or savings plan for their employees. If you think your ex-husband may participate in a pension or 401(k) savings plan, you can take immediate advantage of the federal QDRO laws and often you can get your past-due child support or alimony immediately in a single lump sum payment.

Even though QDROs have been around since 1984, these documents still confuse many in the legal community. As the country’s leading authority on QDROs and as the author of four QDRO textbooks for attorneys, I felt compelled to write this book for divorced spouses to help them secure what is rightfully theirs. Whether you were granted a property interest in your ex-husband’s pension benefits at divorce or are seeking to recover years of past-due child support or alimony payments, this book is for you. It’s critical to your financial future that you understand the best-kept secret in the land — the QDRO. Through easy-to-understand examples, anecdotes, and model forms, I will take you on a step-by-step journey through the QDRO process so that you can recover your money now.

If you are an aggrieved husband whose former wife owes you alimony or child support, forgive me for my use of the female gender in most of my examples. Rest assured that you too can take advantage of the wonderful world of QDROs to recover past-due child support or alimony payments from your ex-wife’s pension or savings plan. (I often use the male gender in this book to identify the “participant” and the female gender to identify the “alternate payee” because this usage represents the most common divorce scenario and minimizes the use of the cumbersome “he or she” and “his or her” writing style.)