Does a marital settlement agreement alter a prior annuity?

In the case of Stollmack v. Stollmack, 32 So.3d 756 (Fla. 2nd DCA 2010) held that nothing in the marital settlement agreement altered an annuity from a personal injury lawsuit.

During the parties' marriage, the Husband was involved in a motor vehicle accident. He filed a personal injury claim and the Wife filed a loss of consortium claim which they settled against the driver. The settlement was funded through an annuity which consisted of six scheduled lump sum payments to be paid to the parties jointly through 2010 and thereafter a minimum of 240 monthly payments commencing in 2011. The annuity provided that if the Husband died, the Wife would receive payment for her consortium settlement at a rate of fifty percent of the originally scheduled payments for the remainder of her life. If the Wife died before the Husband, however, the payment amount would remain the same and he would receive payments for the rest of his life. If both the Husband and Wife were to die before the 240 installment payments were made, the estate of the last person to die would receive the remaining payments. In 1993, the parties began dissolution proceedings. As part of their property settlement, the Husband agreed to waive his interests in the Wife's pension and stocks and the Wife agreed to give up her interest in the annuity during the Husband's lifetime. The Wife's attorney prepared an agreement stating that the Wife waived her claim to the annuity but which also stated in relevant part, "Wife shall remain the irrevocable beneficiary and shall be entitled to receive by the existing annuity contract any remaining benefits payable upon the Husband's death." The Husband's attorney struck this language and later tried to get the Wife to sign a release, giving up her right to annuity payments after the Husband's death. The Wife refused, explaining that she understood that the agreement would be read as if the stricken language never existed. The District Court held:

1. "[The Wife] testified that her intent with regard to the stricken portion of the property settlement agreement was that the document would simply be read as if that sentence did not exist. [The Husband] likewise testified that the meaning of the strikeout was that the sentence was to be deleted from the document. [The Husband] argued that by agreeing to remove that sentence, [the Wife] had waived her right to receive payments from the annuity after his death."

2. "We reverse the order requiring [the Wife] to relinquish her rights in the annuity upon [the Husband's] death as well as the order sanctioning her for refusing to do so. The parties' property settlement agreement included a provision addressing the disposition of the parties' rights under the annuity. In that provision, [the Wife] expressly waived her interest in the annuity payment during [the Husband's] lifetime, nothing more . . . ." 

3. "Absent a similar provision waiving her right to payments after [the Husband's] death, that right remained intact. When [the Wife] entered into the property settlement agreement she had a vested right to those payments by virtue of the annuity, and nothing in the property settlement agreement altered that right."