On December 23, 2008, President Bush signed into law the “Worker, Retiree, and Employer Recovery Act of 2008.”(WRERA) .  This law was passed in response to the generally poor economic state of retirement savings acounts and offers “techinical clarifications” for the Pension Protection Act of 2006.  Prior to the new law, retirees were still under obligation to take out their required minimum distribution (RMD) from qualified plans and IRAs.  These accounts were already sufferring large drops because of the recession. If you are not already retired, you can just imagine the hardship retirees face of having to deplete a nest egg, even when it is at its lowest point in years. To alleviate this, WRERA suspends the RMD requirement for one year (2009).  The new law does not, however, relax penalty rules for early distributions. Obama has proposed allowing up to a 15% penalty-free distribution ($10,000 limit), for 2008 and 2009.  WRERA is just the first wave of legislation designed to help retirement plans, further relief is expected in 2009.

This is the first in a five part series regarding frequently asked questions (FAQs) that family law attorneys hear all of the time.  In any situation, there are many variables and facts that impact the advice you get from a lawyer, so never rely on statute provisions alone and certainly do not rely on blog entries!  However, we want to help point people in the right direction by providing some references to Utah Code provisions that may be helpful regarding questions that arise often. 

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Utah Code Annotated section 30-3-35 has been revised, effective May 5, 2008, to provide a different rotation of parent-time for Holidays as compared to the statute provision in past years.  In the code, “Custodial” generally is used as a reference to the parent who has primary custody or more parent-time and “non-Custodial” generally refers to the parent who has less parent-time.  Remember to refer to your current court orders as a reference because the statute changes may not apply to every situation.

The following is the new holiday schedule for custodial parents in even-numbered years and non-custodial parents in odd-numbered years:

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