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

Oh hey, lots of people in the negotiating phases want to make suer they get more than their due if something happens to the ex. My husband's ex was trying to demand that he keep a huge life insurance policy on himself payable to her if he ever passed away... like, 100 times more than she'd EVER get grand total if all the things he owed to her were paid in a lump sum. if he could FIND someone who would insure him to that amount, it would have been crazy expensive. He & I had just met when she was talking about this and I was a bit freaked out about it... like she was planning to kill him for the insurance or something... He had just kind of asked me, "gee, this sounds odd"... as if he was maybe considering actually AGREEING to it... All I could think of was all those people who die during divorce proceedings or soon after ... or disappear and are presumed dead... and their spouses or former spouses collect HUGE insurance checks... and of course are the biggest suspects in their murders... It was downright creepy. I think her lawyer tried to tell her that. By the time she switched to her third lawyer, I get the feeling she understood that she was never going to get to become a million-heiress just by having her ex die, because she stopped demanding that and was just holding the children hostage instead.

Sigh... the things people think up when they're getting divorced... if they couldn't become a millionaire with a life of leisure while married, they want to figure out a way to make that happen through the divorce... Some people are just nuts.

I think the real question with WWIL though is not whether or nto he names her as beneficiary, but whether she will name him or any heirs he may get. She's been disabled for 8 years since the accidents and has not complied with physical therapy properly so that instead of recovering as her docs say she should have done, she ahs gone downhill and her psychological situation seems to have gone downhill with it. People who do that to themselves are chopping thier lives down by HUGE numbers of years, so... barring a freak accident, she is likely to pass away well before the entitlement to a pension even starts... not to be cruel about it, but his presence in her life, constantly picking up for her, organizing things, thinking and doing the work of running the household, even buying her junk food and cigarettes, playing nursemaid when she needs it... it has been holding her back and is probably slowly killing her.

I've seen couples like this before... something happens and one member of the couple starts realizing they like the attention they get from being sick, so they have no incentive to STOP being sick. The other member feels like a charitable and good person by being the caretaker, so they allow it to continue, and by the time one or the other is fed up or bored or drifted so far apart emotionally that it won't work... well... the sick one has a much bigger hole to dig themselves out of, sad to say. Given the situation they're in, she's kind of nutty to be negotiating for a big piece of the pension... if she gets it, her fair half, through a QDRO, it seems she'll never get it... and getting that will probably mean she gets LESS value out of the house, cars, hot tub, etc.

Given the likelihood that she'll be gone before the entitlement kicks in 20+ years from now, WWIL would be smart to negotaite for her to take her fair half of the pension so that he'd have to give her LESS of a lump sum equalizing payment on all the other STUFF he wants... because he sure wants to keep all the STUFF.