The Legal Issues 129
court gets around to deciding a final resolution of your case a year
or more later. In the meantime, pay your psychiatrist regularly!
Pensions and Retirement Plans
Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate.
—Oscar Levant
If either spouse was a participant in any kind of pension or retire-
ment plan during the marriage, then some part of that plan is
marital property. Unfortunately, it can often prove to be extremely
complicated and expensive to get at it. In any event, a marital
interest in any kind of pension plan must be dealt with as part of
the dissolution. This can be handled either via a waiver of that
retirement interest, or by way of a percentage computation of
each spouse’s fractional share therein.
The marital property interest portion of a pension plan is equal
to the number of years during the marriage when the employee-
spouse was a member of that plan, divided by the total number
of years of employed service at the time of retirement. On disso-
lution, each spouse is entitled to one-half of this marital property
interest portion of the plan.
Take, for example, the case of a military wife who was married
for ten years during the time her army officer husband was head-
ing toward his full vested retirement after twenty years of service.
Thus, this wife has been married to her husband during one-half
(i.e., 10/20) of the total time that he was actually accruing retire-
ment. As such, she gets half of the retirement that was incurred
during their marriage, i.e., one-quarter of his total retirement. She
usually receives it when he retires—at the same time and in the
same manner as he does.
Because of the extreme complexity that can be involved in iden-
tifying, valuing (an actuary may be required), dividing, and/or
paying out pension or retirement interests, they are sometimes
waived as part of an overall settlement that offsets the retirement
rights against cash or some other asset or property interest. For
instance, the army officer in the above example might say, “Okay,