When people in Ohio get divorced, they may need to address issues pertaining to both health insurance and life insurance. In many couples, one person has the family on an employer-sponsored health insurance plan. This means that after a divorce, a person may need to look into coverage from COBRA or another plan.
Life insurance may be particularly important if one person is receiving spousal support. A risk with alimony is that if the payer dies, payments to the spouse also end. Life insurance can cover those payments. Getting life insurance can be made a condition of the divorce settlement, but it is important to put it in place before the divorce is final. If a spouse turns out to be uninsurable, the couple may come to a different arrangement about asset division in order to make up for it.
Another danger with life insurance is that the payer might not keep up premiums. For this reason, the alimony recipient might want to take ownership of the policy and be responsible for making the payments.
There may be other insurance-related issues as well as larger financial issues that couples need to address as part of the overall process of separating their lives. For example, people may need to remove themselves from their former spouses’ auto insurance policies. Couples who have joint accounts may need to close them and reopen their own individual ones. The divorce settlement may declare how debts and property are to be divided, but there might be additional steps that still must be taken. Some assets, such as vehicles, might have to be retitled. If one individual is keeping the family home, the mortgage might need to be refinanced, so the other spouse is no longer financially responsible for it. If possible, debts should be placed in the name of the spouse who has agreed to pay it off.