Читать книгу Rightfully Yours - Gary A. Shulman - Страница 5

While your attorney is racking up a bill at the rate of $200 to $400 an hour, it’s no time to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. As the saying goes, don’t sweat the small stuff. It may not be cost-effective to waste thousands of dollars in legal fees over the “stuff” that accumulated during the marriage, especially when the value of your husband’s pension benefits is typically the largest marital asset. It may be many times more valuable than your home. That’s right. Unknown to you, while your husband was giving you grief over the past 20 years (except for that one evening in June of ‘94 that sticks out in your mind), he was silently building a marital fortune through his pension benefits at work. At the time of his retirement, the pension benefits could be worth $500,000 or more.

Throughout the United States, the vast majority of large employers and even many smaller employers offer their employees some sort of retirement plan coverage. It could take the form of a 401(k) savings or profit-sharing plan, or it could be a pension plan that provides a monthly pension check for life on retirement. Many companies even sponsor more than one pension plan for their employees. For example, employees may be covered under both a 401(k) savings plan and a pension plan at the same time during their careers.

Before 1984 it was very difficult, if not impossible, for a divorced spouse to receive her marital rights to the pension benefits earned by the husband during the marriage. As a result, if your divorce occurred before 1984, it’s very likely that your divorce decree did not mention your ex-husband’s pension benefits at all. Both the decree and your separation agreement were probably silent on this issue. And even if the divorce court agreed that you were entitled to a portion of your ex-husband’s pension benefits, it was still almost impossible for you to realize these benefits. Pension plan administrators were reluctant to send (and even prohibited by law from sending) former spouses a portion of the pension earned by their employees before 1984.

However, in 1984, a new federal pension law was enacted that made it much easier for former spouses to receive a portion of the pension benefits earned by their ex-husbands. These were referred to as the QDRO laws. Today, it’s well-settled law that the pension benefits earned by your spouse during the marriage are considered marital property subject to equitable distribution on divorce. In essence, most domestic relations courts consider the nonparticipant spouse to be a co-owner of the pension benefits earned during the marriage by the husband. Beginning in 1984, former spouses of plan participants became eligible to receive their rightful share of the pension benefits directly from the plan administrator each month without having to rely on payments from ex-husbands. Imagine that. Upon the ex-husband’s retirement, a former spouse could receive a pension check for life mailed directly to her home each month, just as if she were the plan participant. These new QDRO laws became part of the major federal pension law known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).