Court Opinion

ID: 9741421
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:55:23.029279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:24.009786
License: Public Domain

KIRSCH, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
Negotiated maintenance provisions are only one part of a negotiated property agreement. In exchange for such provisions, a party may give up other property claims or may agree to such a provision solely because of tax consequences of such a provision. Thus, modifying a negotiated maintenance provision implicates the entire division of the marital estate. Moreover, modifying the provision in effect adds a term to the parties' contract for which they did not bargain and for which they neither gave, nor received, consideration. Here, the parties could have made maintenance conditional on wife's satisfactory educational progress. They did not.
Parties are free to negotiate a provision for future modification of such agreements. Indeed, the parties here negotiated and agreed to a provision for modification of the maintenance provision in the event that Husband employment changed. They did not agree to the modification here ordered. I think it is error to modify such a provision in the absence of such an agreement.
In Voigt v. Voigt, 670 N.E.2d 1271, 1280 (Ind.1996), our supreme court held that a trial court should not modify a maintenance provision in a negotiated property settlement agreement where it could not have ordered such a provision in the absence of the parties' agreement. I would extend that holding to include all negotiated property settlement agreements.
I would reverse the decision of the trial court.