Divorce Support Forums: pension...do you get it back if spouse dies

OK, I'm going to go a little different direction for a minute, but bear with me:

It's VERY common for a decree to state that one partner or the other must maintain INSURANCE on thier life to benefit the other spouse if they die, in an amount consistent with what the child and spousal support would be, until the time for collecting child and spousal support are over.

It's meant to guarantee the support is paid.

This is one of the things the court will keep jurisdiction over for years to make certain it's maintained, because the ongoing obligation to support the ex and raise the kids will keep THAT part of the case open.

What you are asking for is a clause that will similarly pay you off if she dies, causing your pension to revert back to you. It's an interesting idea, and makes a lot of sense, so you might be able to get that to happen... but your idea does not have any of the reasons behind it that are compelling (ongoing need to support a person who has been determined to be needy), and in fact would cause you a financial windfall if she died (the insurances maintained for ex spouses for those other reasons are NOT intended to be in excess of the amount that might be due via normal support, for the purpose of making certain it is NOT incentive to bump off the ex). And you are asking for a portion of the decree of divorce to be executed at some point in the future after all otehr portions of the decree were resolved.

Your idea is more along the lines of what's called a "will contract", which is where people make a contract to write their will a certain way. Think of a person who comes to work for an elderly wealthy person and earns a lower wage than reasonable, but in thierh contract for employment is the promise of a big bonus if they're still working as of the date of the elderly person's death. In some states, a will contract is valid. In other states, they say it's against public policy to bind someone to terms of a will when the terms of the contract are not verified in the same way (witnesses, notaries, formalities) as a will. NOW, you will NOT have to actually argue about whether this is a will contract or not, but a similar reasoning is there.

All that said, I'm sure the court will allow it if you and she agree to it. Creating the QDRO might be interesting, though, so you'll wnat to check with your pension plan administrator and find the form of QDRO they use, get them to send you a copy (you'll need one anyways), and take a look at it. Is it POSSIBLE under their form to make this happen? Or are you going to have to enforce her naming you as beneficiary?

If you have to enforce her naming you as beneficiary, you might want to have her continued alimony dependent upon her providing you with a current beneficiary designation as of January 1 of every year.

And heck, you might want to negotiate away your right to name a beneficiary of your pension if YOU die... like promising to name her so long as she promises to keep YOu named.

Enforcing it, if it's done that way, through keeping each other's beneficiary designation on each other, is not a guarantee... the way it would be if you could simply draft the QDRO to say that... but from waht you say, with YOUR wife, it sounds like she doesn't take care of business, so she might not ever get around to thinking that she could bother to re-name a beneficiary, and all you'd have to do is make certin it's done at the start and she'd probably never get around to changing it even if she WANTED to.

I'm curious to find out if you figure out a way to do this. It sounds sensible to me, particularly since neither of you has kids that you want to leave stuff to... ti would make sense to leave it to each other.