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Finally, the MDA itself strongly suggests that the parties
did not consider Dr. Perkins’s potential postdivorce disability
benefits to be marital property. The parties went to great
lengths to divide their marital property, including household
furnishings, automobiles, Dr. Perkins’s profit-sharing plan, Dr.
Perkins’s medical practice, and the parties’ individual
retirement accounts. There is no mention of Dr. Perkins’s
disability benefits except in paragraph 14(f). In sum, we find
unavailing petitioner’s argument that paragraph 14(f) provided
for the division of a marital asset, or alimony in solido.
The parties were in the best position to specify how they
wanted the payments at issue to be classified for Federal income
tax purposes.7 Section 71 expressly permitted the parties to
specify that the payments at issue would not be treated as
alimony for Federal income tax purposes. See sec. 71(b)(1)(B)
(providing that a payment will not be alimony if the divorce or
separation instrument designates the payment as not includable in
7 In fact, they did just that in par. 14(d) of the MDA with
respect to temporary alimony paid to petitioner during the
pendency of the divorce action. Par. 14(d) provided that the
amount of temporary alimony paid was tax deductible by Dr.
Perkins. Although one could argue that the parties’ failure to
so specify in par. 14(f) means that the parties intended the
opposite with respect to payments made under par. 14(f), no such
inference is warranted. The bottom line is that the parties knew
how to designate payments for Federal income tax purposes and did
not designate the payments to be made pursuant to par. 14(f) to
be nonincludable/nondeductible.
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