Court Opinion

ID: 9717800
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:10:31.585443+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:55.501347
License: Public Domain

NANCY STEFFEN RAHMEYER, Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result but write separately to note that this decision was driven by the facts of this case, particularly the evidence before the trial court that Husband secreted money and was not forthcoming with the financial information necessary for the court to make its decision. I am concerned with several aspects of the trial court’s decision being used as precedent in a later case. My first concern is the interplay between the property award and maintenance: Husband was awarded his military pension of $2,757 per month; that pension was never valued at trial. The only other major items of marital property awarded to Husband were the investments that had been cashed after the separation (which Husband claimed were no longer in existence but the trial court could have found to be hidden in various accounts) and one-half of the DRS pension, which I will discuss in the next paragraph. The trial court specifically noted the monthly retirement benefits when discussing Husband’s ability to pay maintenance and imputed $4,500 per month in income to him despite the fact that Husband lost his job through no fault of his own,1 was fifty-seven years old, was working minimally as a firefighting instructor, and had his own health issues. I am troubled by the assumption that Husband must continue to work at his age at the same level and income despite the fact that he has already retired from two different jobs. Neither the courts nor the legislature have addressed the issue of when the person paying maintenance should be allowed to retire, and this may not be the appropriate case in which to do so, but at some point that issue simply must be addressed. Equally troubling is the fact that the asset that Husband was awarded is also considered as income in determining maintenance. If more than one-third of awarded pension is awarded to Wife as maintenance, then Husband’s property award is *436considerably less. As I noted earlier, the only reason I concur in this is because no value was given to the pension at trial and the trial court could have found that even two-thirds of the pension to Husband amounted to an equitable distribution of property.
My second concern is the DRS pension. Husband and Wife were each awarded one-half of the pension from DRS Technologies; however, there was absolutely no evidence of how the present value of the pension was determined. There was evidence that if Husband tried to collect the pension benefits during the year of the divorce, he would receive $447.32 per month; if he waited until he was sixty-five years of age, he would collect $813.31 per month. Furthermore, he was only guaranteed five years of benefits should he die prior to the initial five-year period. In this case, he would be paid a minimum of $26,839.20 if he collected at age fifty-six and $48,798.60 if he started collecting benefits at age sixty-five. Despite the drastic difference in the pension benefit analysis, the trial court valued the pension at $119,174 and awarded wife a judgment of $59,875 for those benefits. Also troubling is that there is no such liquidated asset for the DRS pension account in the amount of $59,875; that judgment will bear a nine percent interest rate.2 I am mindful that when our Supreme Court held that pension plans may often be the most valuable asset belonging to a married couple, it also noted that it is not mandatory that pension benefits be divided between spouses, whether they be fixed or otherwise, where other assets are available. Kuchta v. Kuchta, 636 S.W.2d 663, 664, 666 (Mo. banc 1982). In this case, it will take Husband over twenty-two years to pay the judgment of $59,875 plus interest from the pension benefits if he takes the benefit at the earlier age and has his entire DRS monthly pension benefit as the sole asset from which to pay the judgment. If he defers payment until age sixty-five, why should Wife benefit in those interim years? In most cases, that is not an equitable division of the pension benefits. The only reason I concur in this result is the specific finding by the trial court that there may be other assets hidden by Husband available to pay that judgment. For these reasons, I concur in the result of affirming the trial court ruling but note caution in doing so.

. The trial court found that Husband would be eligible for other employment at DRS, should he choose to apply, but that finding is unsupported in the record.

. That rate was mandated by the legislature in 1979, and while it no doubt acts as an incentive to pay the judgment, it no longer represents a reasonable return on investment in the today’s economic climate. Although the question of post-judgment interest is best left for the legislature, in a case such as this when there is no liquidated debt, trial judges should be aware of the issue.