Maintaining my Former Spouse’s Life Insurance after Getting Divorced

In most cases, life insurances maintained by both parties post-divorce and with regard to the payor spouse, we like to see the payor spouse maintain life insurance in an at least amount sufficient to cover the child’s support payments from the date of divorce to the date we anticipate the child will be emancipated. Now, obviously, there are many other costs that go into what that spouse would be responsible for paying during that time period such as uninsured medical bills, maybe college tuition, cost expenses and so forth. That’s just a little bit of a rule of thumb that I generally try to apply. So if I calculate the child support out and depending of course at the age of the child and the anticipated date of emancipation, if it comes to $250,000, then I’d ask for $250,000 life insurance policy and I also think it’s important to check because I don’t see others checking this all the time is the term of the policy.

You want to make sure that whatever policy they have is going to last until the emancipation of the children if that’s the factor that you’re using. That can also be an employer provided policy but obviously, nobody can guarantee that they’ll be with that employer until the child is emancipated so if the spouse at least during a certain time period, say when they’re employed by that company, is going to rely upon their employer provided life insurance policy to meet the requirements of the agreement.  I also put in that it doesn’t have to be just an employer provided policy that the policy has to maintain regardless of whether the person is employed. Now, we just talked about the payor spouse and how you would judge a policy for the person paying child support. With regard to the recipient spouse, their services to the children also have a value so if you have a stay-at-home spouse or stay-at-home parent, you have to think about what it would cost to replace that spouse’s services in the event of a death so you’ve have to look at anticipated day care cost and any other services that person does whether mowing a lawn, you know, cooking the meals and sort of figure out what the actual needs of the children will be.

Obviously, evaluation of that aspects is little hotter than evaluating the anticipating child support payments. In most cases, what we do is look at what one spouse maintains the other spouse has to maintain. Another factor in life insurance is whether they already have life insurance policies and as I said, how long the term is with those life insurance policies and the amount of those policies. If the parties felt that they needed life insurance during the marriage that generally wouldn’t change by either the parties or the court for that matter because if they needed it during the marriage, then they need it post-divorce as well.

This informational blog post was provided by Cynthia Hanley, an experienced Massachusetts Divorce Attorney.