Whose Career Is It Anyway? Divorce and Professional Assets

Forgotten assets can cost you thousands in your divorce settlement. While houses and retirement accounts get plenty of attention, your spouse's career—that law degree you helped them earn, the executive position you moved cities for, or the tenure track you supported them through—often gets overlooked completely.

Career assets represent significant value that you helped build during your marriage. From company cars and expense accounts to health insurance benefits, advanced degrees, stock options, and performance-based compensation, these benefits directly impact your spouse's financial position after divorce. Even unvested benefits deserve consideration when dividing marital assets fairly.

Working with financial experts who understand divorce can help quantify these complex assets. They can analyze everything from the present value of future earnings to the true cost of replacing employment benefits you'll lose access to after divorce.

Remember, your ex's career isn't just their individual success story—it's part of your shared marital economy that deserves fair treatment in your settlement. You deserve recognition for your contributions to building that success, whether direct or indirect. Take the time to understand these often-overlooked assets and ensure they're properly addressed in your divorce proceedings.

To schedule an appointment with Jacki for an initial complimentary consultation, use the link below. https://calendly.com/roessler-jacki/30min?month=2024-03

Visit us at https://www.roesslerdivorce.com/ to learn more about Jacki's practice and to find valuable resources for your case.

The Divorce Rich podcast is proudly sponsored by Center for Financial Planning: Striving to Improve Lives through Financial Planning Done Right! https://www.centerfinplan.com/

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro to Divorce Rich Podcast
• 2:31 What Counts as Career Assets
• 5:00 Getting Information Through Attorneys
• 7:03 Valuing Advanced Degrees
• 9:15 Getting Expert Help and Conclusion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Welcome to the Divorce Rich Podcast. I'm your host, jackie Ressler. I've been a certified divorce financial analyst for 28 years, helping clients and their attorneys navigate the often complex and confusing financial issues in divorce. If you're in the process of, or considering, divorce, now is the time for you to take a deep breath and give yourself permission to find clarity on the financial issues you're facing. Rich means many things to many people. I believe the best definition of being rich is someone who has access to many resources. Along with my guests on this podcast, I will be bringing you a wide variety of information so that you can make sound and informed financial decisions for your financial future. Hey, if you're recently divorced or still in the middle of it, you already know that life can feel like it's been turned upside down and, let's be honest, the financial part it's overwhelming, confusing and often the last thing you want to deal with. That's why I want to tell you about the Independent Wealth Management Team at Center for Financial Planning. Their team of certified you want to deal with. That's why I want to tell you about the independent wealth management team at Center for Financial Planning. Their team of certified financial planners specializes in helping people just like you navigate life changes with confidence. Whether it's assessing your new financial circumstances, creating or updating your retirement plan or helping you adjust to the new normal, they'll work with you to get a clear, customized plan to feel in control and move forward with confidence. So if you're interested in working with a financial planner who you can trust to have your best interests in mind and you're ready to take the next step, visit centerfinplancom that's centerfinplancom and schedule a conversation. Center for Financial Planning live your plan. Securities offered through Raymond James Financial Services Inc. Member FINRA. Sipc. Investment advisory services offered through Center for Financial Planning Inc. Center for Financial Planning Inc. Is not a registered broker-dealer and is independent of Raymond James Financial Services.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Divorce Rich Podcast. This is Jackie Ressler and today's episode is what I like to call a Divorce Rich Snack episode. It's a quick piece of information that you can listen to when you're in your car or you're doing something else and you just want to boost some knowledge on your divorce case. Now, normally on this podcast, we talk about dividing up houses. We talk about dividing up retirement accounts. We talk about child support and spousal support. But what's often missing? Support and spousal support, but what's often missing your spouse's career, the law degree that they earned during your marriage, a tenured teaching position, an executive job with equity. That didn't just happen and chances are you helped build it. Maybe you moved cities for your spouse's job or stayed home with the or supported them when they went back to school. That's an investment and that's value, and, yes, it does matter in a divorce.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Okay, so let's take a look first at what counts as a career asset. What types of things are we talking about? That could be a variety of things, but if I were to make a list, I would start off with does your spouse, for example, get any perks that you don't receive as a stay-at-home parent or in your own job? Do they receive a company car, for example? Do they have an expense account? Those are career-type assets. If your spouse has their health insurance covered through their work and you don't have that, or you don't have the same benefit amount, or you're going to have to pay for your own insurance after the divorce, that's also a career asset. An advanced degree is a career asset. Earning bonus income or the ability to earn bonus income, earning stock options, performance-based composition, non-qualified deferred comp those are also considered career assets. Those are things that you don't get in certain jobs. In other jobs you do receive them, even those types of assets that haven't vested yet. So a vested asset is an asset that you are entitled to take with you whether you leave, that it's fully transferable with you when you leave. There are some assets, such as stock options or other awards that are granted performance awards to an employee that may not vest until the employee has been there for a certain amount of time, or they may not fully vest until several years after they've first been started to be earned. Those types of assets could also be considered career assets and valued in a divorce case. Bottom line here is that there are quite a few things that could be considered career assets that should be taken into consideration in some way in your divorce matter.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Some of these career type assets you need to get more information about them through your attorney. If you have an attorney working on your case, you're going to want to discuss with your attorney whether or not they think it's worthwhile to subpoena your spouse's employer to find out all of the benefits that they have. Sometimes, when people are cooperating during a case, it's simply a matter of asking your spouse to turn over that information. But, to be fair, sometimes your spouse doesn't know all. They don't know all the benefits that they have, and oftentimes it's easy for an attorney to just go directly to the employer and send out a subpoena that asks for all of the information that you're looking for that the employer could provide, such as is there a company vehicle provided and what are the terms? Is gas money supplied? Does the employee have an expense account that covers expenses that you might have to handle on your own, such as your lunch every day? Maybe their lunch is covered every day? Those types of things can be subpoenaed from the employer and your attorney should have a detailed list that they can send out. Beyond putting this into the context of getting concrete information from an employer, let's suppose that you assisted.

Speaker 1: 7:03

There was a concerted family effort to get your spouse an advanced degree during the marriage. That means that the non-degree earning spouse might potentially have an equitable claim to compensation for their contributions to that degree, even though the degree itself, of course, isn't considered a divisible asset in the traditional sense. In my state in Michigan, there is case law that supports that you can actually put a value on a graduate degree, a medical degree, an advanced degree that one spouse earns, and in order to do that there has to be, again, a concerted family effort that involves financial support. So one spouse would be working to support the family while the other attends school. It could be emotional support, it could be household management taking on a larger share of the household duties to allow the other spouse to focus on their studies. There is a formula that can be used to quantify that in my state.

Speaker 1: 8:04

However, again, in some cases, in the vast majority of cases, that might be too expensive of an exercise to go through to actually put that value on a postgraduate degree. I've been involved in cases before where we have done that and oftentimes just the conversation about putting a value on that degree again frames the overall settlement conversation between the parties in terms of what is fair and what is an equitable division of marital assets that are easily divided, as well as a conversation about spousal support. You know again. So there are all different kinds of factors in my state, in Michigan, that would be taken into consideration the cost of the degree, the marital funds that went towards that, how many years going forward into the future that spouse can expect that working spouse can expect to get earnings from that.

Speaker 1: 9:01

I think that the classical example would be a situation where one party they've been married, let's say one person is in medical school. The other party is supporting them with a job, maybe supporting them at home with taking care of child care and other home-related expenses and tasks while that person is getting their advanced degree in medical school. They graduate from medical school, they meet someone else. They immediately get divorced and remarry someone different and I know I've heard of situations like that. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have and then that person, who is the non-degreed spouse, has what would be considered an equitable claim in the future earning potential of the spouse that got the degree. So these are all worth a conversation with your attorney.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Again, I always recommend that if your case is complicated meaning you have children, you have retirement assets, you have an income earning disparity between the parties or you have any assets at all that you have to have an attorney involved in your case and especially when we're talking about a situation like valuing a career asset in some way, it's really important that you have these serious conversations with your attorney to see if your situation is a good candidate for that.

Speaker 1: 10:35

Of course, I have to mention that, in addition to potentially having a lawyer help you with this, this is also the type of situation when there are career assets involved and it can be really helpful to have a financial expert involved, someone that knows how to put a value on some of these things, whether that means even just looking at a payroll stub and trying to figure out what portion of someone's career benefits that they're being paid get added to their income for purposes of support, and how you quantify that.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Again, having the right team of professionals involved in your situation is often the key towards getting a good settlement and getting what would really you consider to be a fair settlement in the long term. So remember, your ex's career isn't just their success story. It's part of your marital economy and it should be treated that way. You deserve transparency, you deserve recognition and you deserve to walk away from the process of divorce knowing the full picture. If this episode gave you some clarity or courage, please share it with someone going through divorce and don't forget to leave a review so we can help more people like you get more information on this crucial financial time in their life. Until next time, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen to Divorce Rich Podcast. If you like this podcast, please follow us on Apple or anywhere that you download podcasts, and share this link with any friends or family that you think might benefit from this information.