Rightfully Yours. Gary A. Shulman
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RIGHTFULLY YOURS:
Past-Due Child Support, Alimony, & Securing Your Share of Your Ex’s Pension
Gary A. Shulman, JD
Self-Counsel Press
(a division of)
International Self-Counsel Press Ltd.
USA Canada
Copyright © 2012
International Self-Counsel Press
All rights reserved.
Preface
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.)
1
Did Your Divorce Decree Grant You a Portion of Your Ex-Husband’s Future Pension? (It Should Have!)
You’re in the middle of a bitter divorce. The attorneys are jockeying for position as they attempt to divide your marital assets. Just who will end up with that old gun collection, anyway? Who will be the lucky party that gets Aunt Ethel’s original, hand-made Christmas ornaments? And let’s not forget Poochie, your 12-year-old, one-eyed Pekingese. As with all divorces, it seems that certain assets acquired during the marriage just seem to belong to your husband. It’s almost a given. You know, the “manly” items, such as the gas grill, power tools, pool table, subscription to Guns & Ammo, and let’s not forget that fine collection of remote controls. Of course, the wife usually gets to keep all of the cooking and cleaning supplies. After all, what’s the husband going to do with these items? So, while he gets all the neat stuff, you end up with the Eureka vacuum cleaner, the Farberware, spice rack, and of course, Aunt Ethel’s original, hand-made Christmas ornaments with a value placed at $10,000 by your husband’s divorce attorney.
1. Don’t Forget the Pension
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