California Divorce : STRS & PERS Pensions Included In Judgment

California Divorce : STRS & PERS Pensions Included In Judgment

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com with this video we are talking about if you have a STRS or PERS pension, so we’re talking state teacher retirement system or public employee retirement system pension.

You want to make sure that you do include those on your divorce judgment, whether your case is amicable or not. Let me give you a for instance, many of our clients call us when we are handling their divorce and say they have no assets or debts and when I inquire further they say well we do have assets and debts but they are each in our own names and that’s fine, a lot of people keep their own assets or debts but we still want to include those on the judgment so you guys are protected.

Now, when it comes to certain pensions, in this case we’re talking about STRS and PERS, they are going to require that those assets appears specifically on your divorce decree on your judgment showing that you are receiving 100 percent of your pension, so even if you’re going to say no assets, no debts, at a minimum you need to include that you will be keeping your own STRS and or PERS or vice versa or whatever the case may be because when you go to take your ex spouse off of your, remove them as beneficiaries they’re going to say well show us that you have received or been confirmed in the divorce as your sole and separate property, your STRS and PERS pension.

So the point of this video is make sure you’re including at least those on your judgment, otherwise you’re going to need to file an amended judgment and usually in the form of a stipulation, which we recently had to do for a client who omitted an asset by mistake and when he called STRS they said sorry we can’t confirm this to you, you know we need to have it as part of the divorce decree and so we had to file an stipulation confirming the omitted asset to him as a sole and separate property, fairly easy fix it’s just better to make sure you’re listing your property because had he not listed this or forgot that he omitted it, the PERS and STRS basically said we can’t help you until you get this on there.

The asset was unconfirmed to either party so it kind of left the door open for division of that asset, so it’s just important to make sure you guys are declaring and confirming to each of you your sole and separate property. In this case specifically the STRS and PERS when it comes to pensions.