Imagine you are getting the children ready for school and your husband or wife says, "I issued divorce proceedings online last night. You will receive information from the court."
Your world has just fallen apart. Your husband or wife has actually fallen in love with someone else and there is nothing you can do to stop the proceedings. Welcome to the wonderful world of No Fault Divorce. I call it Not Your Fault Divorce.
Within a matter of months your husband or wife could be re-married to someone else. Someone who will expect to make financial arrangements with them, who will expect a share of their pension either upon death or retirement.
Unfortunately you have very little time to gather yourself, to get over the bombshell. You need to act much faster than you would like to in order to preserve the financial future of you and your children.
This is no time to try to sort out your divorce yourself. Yes the government have made it much easier to become divorced but nothing has changed relating to a Financial Settlement on Divorce. This is still the most important thing to attend to. It will govern how you are able to live both now and in the future.
Sorting this out directly with your spouse could literally leave you living in poverty in years to come. What if the boiler blows up, will you be able to afford to have it fixed? What if you become very ill in the next decade, have you obtained enough pension from your Settlement so that you have something to fall back on if you can no longer work? Given that most of our divorce clients are over forty this is a very real risk.
Are you trying to sort out your divorce financial settlement yourself?
If so you might be getting it all wrong when it comes to pensions.
Do you think it’s ok just to split a pension on a 50/50 basis, it’s never the right thing to do!
Pensions need to be valued properly. One with a value of say £50,000 may pay out £200.00 a month but another much better scheme, also valued at £50,000, may actually pay out £400.00 per month!
Why not use Offsetting instead. By way of example, if Eric is a consultant doctor he may have a pension pot worth £1.5million. Unfortunately, he is now going to be facing extra taxes because of the value of his pension. This is a fairly recent problem following changes to the taxation of pension schemes.
It may be far more beneficial for Eric to give more than half of his pension to his wife if she doesn’t have a pension. In return, Eric could take a greater share of other family assets than he might previously have taken. He will be better off tax wise, and his wife will be better off in her later years. If she is in her fifties, she could obtain her new pension in the not too distant future.
Why do you need a solicitor for your divorce?
No Fault Divorce is new and everyone thought it would be a great idea to go online and start divorce proceedings. However, less people took advice from a solicitor when doing so.
So what? We saved money. Or did you? The divorce itself is the simple bit.
We are now seeing clients in our office who have no Financial Settlement. That’s the really important thing, sorting out your finances.
Some examples of where it has gone badly wrong;
You have come into an inheritance and discover that your ex-spouse is now claiming their share.
You have been left with no maintenance to feed you and your children and you can’t pay the mortgage.
Your ex-spouse re-married one week after your divorce was finalised. You haven’t made any claims against their pension. You aren’t even aware that their pension is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Why we no longer offer legal aid in divorce cases
We feel that it is far better for clients if we can just get on with their case without having to wait a long period of time just to obtain very limited cover under the legal aid scheme. This has become even more important since the introduction of No Fault Divorce.
It used to frustrate us that we could only offer limited advice before having to send the case off to mediation in order to try and reach a settlement. In 95% of cases mediation failed.
Now we are able to advise our clients on an urgent basis, we can cover all aspects of their case including writing a new will, protecting the family home, obtaining maintenance and most importantly of all, arranging for our clients to see their children.
And guess what, we still use mediation. But when it is appropriate, not just to obtain extra legal aid. And it tends to work, keeping clients away from costly court proceedings.
The sting in the tail for legally aided clients is that they eventually have to pay all of their solicitor’s costs back to the Legal Aid Agency in any event if they have recovered or preserved assets.
Because we don’t deal with so much legal aid form filling each client receives a far better level of service and usually a much faster outcome. We have put in place means and ways to help you pay for your Settlement including an application to the court that your spouse should be responsible for payment of your costs.
