Life Insurance Can Secure Spousal Maintenance

 Posted on May 20, 2019 in Alimony / Maintenance

You and your spouse may have paid for life insurance during your marriage to financially protect each other in case one of you died. Now that you are getting divorced, what you need from a life insurance plan has changed. It makes sense to remove your spouse as a life insurance beneficiary because you do not want him or her to profit from your death. You can make your children the sole beneficiaries of the plan or cancel the plan if you do not have children. However, keeping a former spouse as a life insurance beneficiary can provide financial backing for spousal maintenance payments after a divorce.

Monetary Security

A court awards spousal maintenance when one spouse was reliant on the other to pay for their accustomed standard of living. If you will receive maintenance after your divorce, being a beneficiary on your former spouse’s life insurance policy will assure that you will be financially supported in the event of his or her untimely death. Your former spouse may change the life insurance plan to reflect the fact that you are divorced, such as:

• Reducing the benefits that you would receive so that it would be no greater than what you would be owed for spousal maintenance; and
• Switching from a long-term plan to a short-term plan because the maintenance payments may be temporary.

Enforcing Life Insurance

A spousal maintenance payor may reject the suggestion of also paying for life insurance to benefit his or her ex-spouse. As long as the children are financially protected, the payor may not care about a former spouse’s financial security. As the maintenance recipient, you can request that the court require your former spouse to have you as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy. 

However, you may still worry about whether your former spouse will maintain the account on his or her own. It will be too late to enforce the life insurance provision of your divorce agreement if you do not learn until after your former spouse has died that he or she allowed the policy to lapse. Your solution is to become the owner of the policy, which would notify you if your former spouse stopped making payments.

Contact a Kane County Divorce Lawyer

Spousal maintenance can have a pre-determined end date, depending on how long you were married. You will no longer receive payments if you remarry or do not make a good-faith effort to financially support yourself. A St. Charles, Illinois, divorce lawyer at Goostree Law Group can make sure that your spousal maintenance payments meet your financial needs. Schedule a free consultation by calling 630-584-4800. 

Source:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/112515/how-life-insurance-works-divorce.asp