Another big asset in many marriages is pension, profit sharing, 401 (k) or retirement plans of one or both of the parties. Potentially a lot of money is involved. What happens if the husband and wife are both relatively young, say in their thirties, and one or the other already has accumulated some benefits. No one can use them for years. One option is for one to buy the other out but, generally, neither party has that kind of money available. We use what's called a Qualified Domestic Relations Order, QDRO for short, to split up that type of property. A QDRO is essentially a separate order entered by the court which directs the administrator/trustee of the plan to pay out the benefits in a certain way at some point in the future. Often, this point in the future is twenty years or more. While it might be tempting to worry about the future later a QDRO is a way of protecting the future and is very common in divorce cases. In the past the only major drawback is that QDROs were not available in many state and local government pension situations but we now have Qualified Illinois Domestic Relations Orders (QILDRO) which can divide pensions with some few but significant drawbacks. First and foremost is that your spouse has to agree to the division via QILDRO and that surviving spouse benefits are not available. Both QDROs and QILDROs can take a very long time (six months or more) before it is approved and binding, since the pension fund has a very long time to approve the form of the order. But at least we now have QILDROs and there is some protection for the spouse of a civil servant. There can be direct pay of municipal pensions to the other spouse as there has been in privates pensions for years.

Remember, you're always entitled to do discovery to find out exactly what your husband or wife has. You also have the right to have an expert appraiser value real estate to get an idea as to exactly what a piece of property is worth and an actuary or accountant to evaluate pensions or businesses. Only an expert in finance can really tell you what things are worth today.