Cowparsley53

Cowparsley53

I've seen an ad for a company that helps you gain money from your ex-husbands pension. Is it better to go through a company or can you do it yourself. Apparently if you use them there is confidentiality but of course you do have to pay their fee. Can anyone help me with this please?

mgdavid

'ex-husband' implies you are divorced, was a Financial order agreed at the time, and what did it say?
If a clean break agreement was made then there is no going back to ask for more.

atush

Basically, what happened re his pension when you divorced? Did you get half of it then? Or did you take other assets in lieu?

Or are you divorced, but didn't get a financial order agreed?

agarnett

Never say never.

I was completely coincidentally musing on this very same subject a week ago.

A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the last 10 years with regard to family law precedent.

10 years ago, where both divorcing partners had careers, there was hardly a thought about pension sharing unless one partner had very conspicuously a much better pension outlook than the other.

Solicitors barely touched on the matter when negotiating financial settlements (except in the obvious cases).

If you consider the most likely ages of divorcing partners (generally the bulk aren't close to retirement) then even the individuals concerned ten years ago might not even have dreamt of what wealth was latent within pension promises.

Employer pension promises were not even called pension promises. It was more likely that they were emphasised as not contractually enforceable ... the relative worth of a typical pension pot versus a house for example was barely worth worrying about for most divorcing couples ten years ago, and DB schemes were being unilaterally wound up left right and centre without any regulatory oversight worth the name. It was just another decade in the long saga of the wild west that is still the UK.

Where these couples were DB pension scheme members and even where they held some types of DC pension with guaranteed annuity benefits or built in growth guarantees, they were in the main, negligently overlooked by so called specialist family lawyers and by judges who had no proper qualification to be the judge of such matters i.e. what was the real norm and what was fair. Let's face it, on the other side of the street, husbands were being done out of a fair share in the family home for ever, even though the kids may only have needed the roof over their heads for a few more years. The wives then cashed in the family home when the kids left for university. Very few judges made provision for part of the asset of the family home to be returned to the husband after the kids had no further need of it.

So I am completely unsurprised about reports of another niche service such as that which seems to have reached the attention of the OP.

If she has been done out of a share in a decent pension due to the negligence and lack of foresight of so called professionals, then I say power to her elbow in furthering a claim against either her previous partner or the professionals involved in the so-called financial settlements.

jamesd

Cowparsley53 wrote: »

I've seen an ad for a company that helps you gain money from your ex-husbands pension. Is it better to go through a company or can you do it yourself. Apparently if you use them there is confidentiality but of course you do have to pay their fee.

It's probably an advance fee fraud. That is when a company makes its money from the fee it charges even if it knows that there is no real chance of the customer ever making money.

It is impossible to do this entirely confidentially because at a minimum all pension companies involved in the divorce settlement must be contacted with your details so they can be asked whether the is money from the divorce settlement held by them. You'd already know this if the pension was included in the divorce settlement but if you've forgotten or some paperwork from the divorce went missing and they didn't get the order of a court there might be something to do.

If the pension wasn't included in the divorce settlement the alternative step would be expensive: trying to get a court to reopen and adjust the divorce settlement, after coming up with some reason why the original plan was negligent in properly dividing the assets even though both parties at the time accepted it. Very substantial legal bills can be expected that have to be paid whether there was success or not.

agarnett

Jamesd is of course right to warn about the risk of advance fee fraud - sorry I did not pick up the emphasis on the advance payment of a fee, and of the daft suggestion that it could all be initiated confidentially - although who really knows given this past weekend's news about the availability of millions of pensions details apparently available for modest fee via private databases.

Thanks to jamesd for adding the necessary warnings.