Just Goes To Show You That Dissolutions Proceedings Have A Lot Of Legal And Equitable Issues, No Matter When You Get A Divorce At Any Stage Of Life.
Greene County, Georgia. Old couple who receive old-age pension assistance. Fall, 1941. Jack Delano, photographer. Library of Congress.
Murdock v. Murdock, Case No. B259694 (2d Dist., Div. 3 Jan. 26, 2017) (unpublished) is an interesting unpublished decision based on the span of germane dissolution issues, especially considering the case involved a divorce between a husband and wife who were California State University educators apparently parting ways in their 70’s. The case did involve a CalPERS retirement account issue given the parties’ ages. Maybe some of you readers are too young for this case, but some of us are not (other readers and blog contributors—blog contributors getting there).
What happened here is that ex-husband was hit with $17,500 for breach of fiduciary duty that he impaired community property interests, leading to an award of expenses under Family Code section 1101(a). Ex-wife was also awarded “needs based” fees to the tune of $35,000. Finally, ex-husband suffered a Family Code section 271 sanctions award, payable even from his exempt retirement accounts.
The appellate court reversed the community property impairment award, finding insufficient evidence supported it given that husband was dealing with separate property assets. The other two awards were affirmed, the needs-based award because the husband had superior cash resources but the 271 sanctions were improperly ordered to be paid out of husband’s exempt accounts.