Brooklyn QDRO Divorce

A Brooklyn QDRO divorce attorney is someone you will need to have on your side to assist you with appropriate preparation of documents if you are splitting pensions in a divorce.

Since the pension may be the only way for you to get through retirement now that you’re getting divorced, you need to make sure your lawyer fights as hard as possible for this in the equitable distribution of property. Even if you’re filing no fault divorce, which is the most common, you still deserve to work with a lawyer who can help you ensure a proper and fair award so you can move on with your life at the end of a divorce. The pension is likely a big aspect of the property distribution.

A Brooklyn QDRO divorce lawyer will tell you that the divorce decree in and of itself is not enough to support that you are entitled to a spouse's pension benefits. For qualified retirement plan, you must go the additional step of having a qualified domestic relations order that is thoroughly drafted to minimize your risks and filed with the necessary retirement plans.

Every plan administrator on the associated qualified retirement plans must accept the terms of the qualified domestic relations order but they may have their own rules about how they intend to do this. That is why it is important to ensure that your attorney drafts this document with careful consideration of the many issues that can affect you and does his or her due diligence to minimize the risks you may face down the road. Unfortunately, all too often, people find themselves in the position of discovering that the plan administrator never accepted the qualified domestic relations order.

Without hiring a divorce QDRO attorney in Brooklyn, you may expose yourself to the risk of not getting access to the assets that you intended to support you during your own retirement.

Many parties are entitled to pension funds and qualified retirement plan funds being split in a divorce because those that are accumulated over the duration of the marriage are classified as marital property. However, even though the divorce decree may clearly state that you are entitled to a specific percentage or dollar amount of these benefits, without a plan administrator officially accepting your qualified domestic relations order, you cannot take legal action to recover them. It is very important at the time of your divorce that you have a QDRO divorce attorney in Brooklyn to review all of the language inside these documents and follow through to see that it is accepted by the plan administrators.

Without this crucial step, major mistakes may occur and if your former spouse passes away before you are able to rectify them, you will have little to no recourse. It is important to protect your interests because retirement plan assets, particularly those inside qualified retirement plans, can be significant. You may have been counting on these to support you in your later years and without an attorney who has extensive experience protecting the rights of those entitled to these benefits, the sudden death of your former spouse can represent a very difficult period in your life as you have to make financial adjustments often after the point that you would be able to generate additional funds to support yourself. Given the high stakes involved in a case like this, you deserve a lawyer who takes qualified domestic relations orders very seriously and one who will walk you through every paragraph inside the document to verify that you understand how this will affect you now and well into the future.