California Divorce & Life Insurance Considerations

Tim: Let’s talk life insurance. Alright! Now this is big. There’s a lot of moving parts to this.

Jon: Absolutely!

Tim: Right. This is probably going to be the most we’re going to have to talk about here. I mean some of this, there’s going to be an overlap but there are issues of support and potential that to protect people.

Jon: Right. So one of the key issues here, one of the things that people probably are thinking about is most likely those people have life insurance policies have named their spouses as the beneficiary.

Meaning that if there’s something happened to them their spouse will be the one to get the proceeds from the life policy.

Obviously, if you’ve gone through a Divorce and as you’re going through the Divorce, you may want to make this change immediately.

You might say, ‘I don’t want that person to be, well I’m going to pull them off my life policy.’

On California at least you’re not able to pull your spouse off as a beneficiary without their signature prior to Divorce.

Okay?

Tim: And I’ll add to that.

Jon: Okay.

Tim: When you file Divorce on the summons itself, there are what’s called the Automatic Restraining Orders. Automatic Temporary Restraining Orders are going to effect.

They’re called ATROS. And they are Restraining Orders to restrain you from certain actions.

And one of them is removing your spouse as a beneficiary off of any type of policy whether it’d be life, as a beneficiary changing even auto insurance policies, beneficiaries on investments, none of that can be done without signature, without their approval, and without their knowledge until the Divorce is absolutely finalized.

Jon: Right?

Tim: So—

Jon: And even when it is finalized because maybe there’s the Temporary Restraining Order by the time and the insurance companies themselves are going to look and see if it was a spouse, you send them a form, they’re going to ask you to either have the spouse’s signature on it or see that the Divorce has been finalized and a copy of the final Divorce paperwork…

Tim: Right.

Jon: …in order to justify it. So everybody is working on the same page.

Tim: To protect each other and make sure that people are doing things they shouldn’t be.

Jon: Right.

Tim: Yes.