Pensions
WISCONSIN: Waln v. Waln, ___ Wis. 2d ___, 694 N.W.2d 452 (Ct. App. 2005).
The trial court erred by holding that a state pension plan was not marital property. The plan's spendthrift provision prohibited division by means of payments from the state, but it did not prohibit division by means of payments from the owning spouse.
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ALASKA: Tanghe v. Tanghe, 2005 WL 1491760 (Alaska 2005).
The trial court did not err by dividing survivor benefits by deferred distribution, rather than by immediate offset of their present value. The result was to leave the wife with benefits of greater value because of her longer life expectancy but that fact arose from preexisting gender-related differences in life expectancy, and not from the trial court's order. The trial court erred by using a time formula to classify the parties' 401(k) plans, rather than tracing the actual separate property contributions to the plans.
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INDIANA: Beike v. Beike, 805 N.E.2d 1265 (Ind. Ct. App. 2004).
When the husband's employer went bankrupt, his monthly payment from his defined benefit retirement plan was reduced to only 62% of the amount he had previously anticipated. The trial court did not err by construing a previous QDRO to award the wife 36% of the husband's benefit, rather than the absolute amount of $353 per month, so that the wife would share proportionally in the loss attributable to the employer's bankruptcy.
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NEW JERSEY: Panetta v. Panetta, 370 N.J. Super. 486, 851 A.2d 720 (App. Div. 2004).
A defined benefit plan is properly divided as of the date of actual retirement and not the date of classification in the divorce case. When one spouse participates in the Social Security system and the other does not, the court should reduce the amount to be paid by the spouse who does not participate. The amount of the reduction is the first spouse's actual Social Security benefits, and not the hypothetical benefits which the second spouse would have earned if he or she had participated in the Social Security system. No reduction was made upon the facts, however, because the husband, who would otherwise have benefited from the reduction, had wrongfully failed to name the wife as beneficiary of his survivor benefits.
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ALABAMA: Brasili v. Brasili, 827 So. 2d 813 (Ala. Civ. App. 2002).
A 401(k) plan is a retirement benefit for purposes of the extreme Alabama statute allowing the division of retirement benefits only after marriages of 10 years or more.
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MISSOURI: Woodson v. Woodson, 92 S.W.3d 780 (Mo. 2003) (en banc).
A state statute provides that teacher retirement benefits are not subject to equitable distribution. The statute is constitutional, and the wife's retirement benefits are nonmarital property. But the trial court properly relied on the wife's nonmarital retirement benefits as the basis for awarding the husband 60% of the marital estate.
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MAINE: Murphy v. Murphy, 816 A.2d 814 (Me. 2003).
The husband's premarital retirement plan was entirely separate property. Separate funds did not become marital merely because they were placed briefly into a joint account, where it was understood that the funds would be used for a separate purpose, and the funds were withdrawn after a short period of time.
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INDIANA: Hendricks v. Hendricks, 784 N.E.2d 1024 (Ind. Ct. App. 2003).
Operating under an all-property division system, in which property acquired before the marriage is subject to division, the trial court properly included a period of premarital cohabitation in computing the coverture fraction for the husband's pension. The parties resided together for the "vast majority" of the period, although they did not reside together for the entire period. Where the trial court concluded that the wife was entitled to 15.5% of the pension, but its actual award gave the wife only 15.5% of the marital share of the pension, so that the final division of assets did not match the 56/44 division which the trial court claimed to be making, the trial court's division of property contradicted itself. The case was remanded with instructions to correct the error.
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INDIANA: Case v. Case, 794 N.E.2d 514 (Ind. Ct. App. 2003).
A divorce decree awarded the wife $50,000 and the husband $40,389 from the husband's 401(k) plan. The plan then dropped in value, so that it was literally impossible to award each spouse the amount stated in the decree. In postdivorce proceedings, the court converted the award into percentages, based upon the value at the time of divorce, and awarded each spouse the stated percentage as of the date of actual distribution.
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FLORIDA: Gaetani-Slade v. Slade, 852 So. 2d 343 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2003)
The trial court erred by failing without explanation to consider the husband's retirement benefits as marital property. Where marital funds were used to make mortgage payments on separate property, the court erred by failing to recognize at least some marital interest in the property. Because marital funds were used for improvements, the burden of proving the size of any partial separate interest would be on the owning spouse. The court also erred in classifying inherited antique furniture and jewelry as marital property and in valuing the personal property.
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