Divorce; Interpretation of a property settlement as a contract; In re Lett Estate; Binding effect of property settlements reached through negotiations & agreement by the parties; Keyser v. Keyser; Lentz v. Lentz; The trial court’s reliance on equitable considerations; Hagen v. Hagen; Sparks v. Sparks; Departing from the language of a properly executed consent judgment where the judgment is incomplete; Andrusz v. Andrusz; Weight given to the parties’ interpretation of a contract provision; North W. MI Constr., Inc. v. Stroud; Giving contract language its plain & ordinary meaning; Holland v. Trinity Health Care Corp.; Principle that marital assets are typically valued at the time of trial or when the judgment is entered; Woodington v. Shokoohi

The court held that the trial court erred if it relied on equitable consideration in awarding defendant-ex-wife $106,900 in satisfaction of the retirement benefits provision in the parties’ consent divorce judgment, and it erred in including contributions plaintiff-ex-husband made to his 401(k) after he filed the divorce complaint. It vacated the award and remanded for further factual development because the judgment was incomplete as it did not provide an ending date for calculating the retirement accounts’ division, “the date upon which the appreciation or depreciation should be calculated.” This constituted a void that the trial court must fill. Under Andrusz, “the trial court may rely on equitable concerns in determining how to fill the void” in this case, but it “must remain mindful of precisely what that void entails. That void is not a question of how much money is fair or appropriate to transfer, but rather, when to calculate the appreciation and depreciation.” The court found that the judgment did not provide any facially evident basis for choosing an ending date. Thus, it was ambiguous and the trial court “may ‘consider extrinsic evidence to resolve the ambiguity, but the overarching goal’” is to determine the parties’ intent. They seemed to have assumed that “appreciation and depreciation should be calculated as of the date of the motion to enforce,” but the court found no “indication that a motion to enforce was contemplated, suggesting that the parties had no such intention when they entered into the consent judgment. Conversely, marital assets are typically valued at the time of trial or when the judgment is entered when dividing property.” But the court noted that this timing is not mandatory. The trial court erred in “basing its award on equitable concerns.” Instead, it had to make specific factual determinations as to when the judgment required “any appreciation or depreciation to be valued, and then it must effectuate the parties’ consent judgment based on that determination.” The court noted that it was possible they intended appreciation or depreciation to be valued as of the date the judgment was entered, but on this record it could not tell and it would not assume.