Our personal experience with QDRO process
LIFE LESSONS LEARNED FROM BITTER EXPERIENCE
If you are in the process of going through a QDRO settlement, you have found out one inescapable fact of life. While you may have thought that marriage was mainly a union with emotional and physical bonds, if you are dealing with a QDRO then you likely did not find that to be the case for your particular situation. What you have found is that in our legal system marriage is mainly a business partnership, and dissolution of a marriage requires equitably dissolving that business partnership. One of the most important things to realize early on is that each party is an equal partner in this business partnership so that any assets accumulated during the period of the marriage are normally equally shared between the two parties. You may feel this is not fair or that your former partner did unethical things or contributed almost nothing to the business partnership, but we will give you some sage advice that will save you a lot of grief. Let go of that thinking!! It will only waste your time, energy, more of your money and leave you hopelessly frustrated. Your state will treat your marriage as a business partnership no matter how unfair you think that is. If you doubt this, please talk to your lawyer about it. Having a good family lawyer whom you can trust and who will help guide you through the divorce and help you understand all the legal aspects involving QDROs is important.
The best thing you can do is to figure out what is a fair 50/50 share of the marital assets that have been accumulated during the time when you were married. That is not always a simple thing and it can create a very time consuming, expensive and argumentative process, especially when the parties have been arguing about everything else for a long time. With that discord can come untold worry, unhappiness and bitterness. We hope this product will help mitigate the latter issues for you, particularly those related to the QDRO process.
We have seen all these negative aspects of a divorce and what a large waste of time, money and emotional health they can be. Everyone wants to get past the pain of a divorce as life does return to a more stable and happier state when that happens, but dissolution of the business partnership has to be worked out first. The courts know how hard this division can be and since the largest accumulated assets often consist of retirement accounts, they have instituted the QDRO process to try to make it easier to divide up these accounts. Your settlement will often include a QDRO division into your property settlement to deal with such things as splitting 401 or IRA accounts.
Agreeing on the financial split of a QDRO can remove long and tortuous arguments and in doing so it removes huge barriers to getting a settlement done. Note that both parties must still agree to the details of the account split before everything is totally finalized and your accounts become unlocked- having an understandable calculation can speed this up.
