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How are employee benefits affected by divorce?

Employee benefits are affected in several different ways by divorce proceedings. First, initially, you consider things like health insurance or life insurance. The court will conjoin the part frequently from discontinuing those benefits in order to preserve the status quo so that if someone has a catastrophic illness during the divorce or something happens to one of the parties, the status quo is preserved. The marital assets are basically protected. After the divorce the court will allow the person who doesn't have the insurance to be removed, but will frequently order that the children remain on that policy.

The court will certainly decide that one of the parties needs to provide benefits such as health insurance for the children. If it's a 401K or a pension, those assets are valued. When the court is trying to determine what is a just and right division of your property, you'll have to decide whether the 401K or the pension was developed during the marriage, making it a community asset, or if it was something that was solely one spouse's property before the marriage, then that would be considered separate property. But in any event, those benefits are going to be valued and possibly divided during the analysis. At the final end.

When you're doing the final decree of divorce, they can be divided in several ways. Might be split based on percentages for example. A pension would be decided based on perhaps the length of time somebody has a pension, or maybe it would be awarded to one party and the other party would be given an equivalent amount of money. Another benefit might be stocks or stock options, and the court will, as with a 401K or a pension, value those items and decide which party should receive those benefits in the end. In its analysis of division of the assets story, stock options can be transferred.

Sometimes if they can't be transferred, then the court is still going to value that and it'll Ward the other party an equivalent amount of money in terms of reaching a just and right or an equitable division of the assets.