Wife Entitled to Dollar Value of Account as of Divorce, Not Percentage

Tennessee case summary on property division after divorce.

Kathryn Lynn Jones v. Gary Edward Jones

The husband and wife in this Tennessee case were married in 1990, and the wife filed for divorce in 2011.  A trial was held, and the case went to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.  The issue on that appeal was the status of an account that had previously belonged to the husband.  The appeals court agreed that the funds had become joint property due to comingling during the marriage.  It then remanded the case for the Coffee County Chancery Court to address other issues in the case.

After the remand, the husband had made a number of trades in the account, even though there had been an order prohibiting him from doing so.  The wife asked the lower court to award her the value of the account had the prohibited trades not been made.  Instead, the trial court granted her a share of the account’s value as of the date of the divorce.  The trial court reiterated that the wife’s award had been a sum certain as of the date of the divorce, and that the future trades were therefore not relevant to her share of the account.  The trial judge pointed out that in addition to percentages, the original order had specified dollar amounts based upon the account’s value.  The wife then brought a second appeal to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.

The wife argued that the order should have been interpreted as granting her a percentage of the account’s value, rather than a fixed dollar amount.  She argued that the lower court’s later clarification amounted to an impermissible modification of the order.

The Court of Appeals examined the original order and agreed with the lower court that there had been no modification.  In particular, it noted that the wife had been awarded a money judgment for a specific amount.  That amount was based upon a percentage of the value, but the dollar amount became fixed as of that date.  The lower court later clarified this part of the ruling, but the appeals court held that there had been no modification.

For these reasons, the Court of Appeals affirmed, and assessed the costs of the appeal against the wife.

No. M2017-01823-COA-R3-CV  (Tenn. Ct. App. Aug. 13, 2018).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see The Tennessee Divorce Process: How Divorces Work Start to Finish.