Money After Divorce?

floss2

OP, best thing to do is to read your mum's settlement papers and try to determine whether there was a clean break or not. If not, then maybe you could find a 30 minute-free appointment with a different solicitor to establish whether there is any claim to be made, then your mum won't incurr any further costs.

Don't take too much notice of the snipey comments about your mum's situation - it's an open forum

rpc

There may be an angle, even if there is a clean break, that the stepdad misled the court.

If those shares genuinely had no value at all, then tough.

On the other hand, it was the stepdad that produced the evidence that assigned them nil value. If (big if) you can show that actually the shares did have some value or that this was forseeable then the order could possibly be set aside. Even if this was the case, I think it would be damn near impossible to prove. You say that the valuation was probably fair at the time, so this is probably a non-starter. But the buyout could have been on the cards at the time of the divorce...

It would have been better to have done the settlement different and taken half the shares anyway, but that's water under the bridge. Probably best to leave it be and get on with life.

Fire_Fox

GemBlueTopaz1984 wrote: »

It does feel like he ripped my mums life apart left her with nothing and is skipping off into the sunset with the new wife while my mum struggles everyday to make ends meet, can't afford much for birthdays and christmas, and stepdad is "best dad in the world" cos he is buying the youngest a new car. she really tries to just get on with it but I can tell it bothers her. I have gained so much respect for my mother in the last couple of years with how well she has coped.

But this is not directly your stepfather's fault, your mother was not living within her means so had no spare money. I don't mean that critically but as a statement of fact. She continued to live in a (presumably substantial) property but on a massively reduced income, I can imagine the council tax and utilities are crippling. By contrast your stepfather is living within his means so has a disposable income.

Courts prefer clean breaks in cases of no children or adult children because mothers can work and support themselves. Your mother didn't just get the equity in a house, she got maintenance for herself and her daughter. Really this all hinges around the fact that the house didn't sell, that there was a recession, the house was overpriced for the market, that reducing the asking price was too little too late. If the house had sold your mother would have had a lump sum AND seen her maintenance in cash not interest on the mortgage AND not had crippling bills each month - she would have been rolling in cash with the same divorce settlement. The estate agent and your mother should have agreed at an earlier stage to drop the price, the solicitor and your mother should have asked for the settlement to be based on the sold price, or held off on the divorce until the property sold.

Maybe your mother has been naive, maybe she has spent 25 years letting others make financial decisions for her, maybe she is a little weak not standing up to her daughter, daughter's friends and her ex husband. Again I am not blaming her but I don't think it's helpful to blame everyone else either, maybe your mother needs practical support with her confidence levels and financial acumen?