Divorce settlement or Court 21 December 2022 at 5:33PM in Marriage, relationships & families 17 replies 1.5K views

Alias_Omega

Have you been together for all of the pension earning stuff?

If so, your pension, plus her pension , divided by 2... that would the starting point..

mark5

Bradden said:

mark5 said:

There’s no children involved so the usual female advantage in splitting finances during divorce doesn’t apply. 

I would go to court personally be careful not to run up massive legal bills before you get there though.

Could you clarify this please. My understanding is that assets are split 50/50 as a starting point. With the OP having a larger pension fund this may result in a reduced share of the property to balance against the pension. She could of course request a pension sharing order instead of a "clean break". This is not dependent on whether their or children.. it's just dividing joint assests on seperation.

Op says she wants 60% of total pensions , I said I wouldn’t give 60% if it was me. 

There are no children involved which is the common reason for one side getting a bigger percentage so to me its everything 50/50.

I’m not sure where the lump sum she wants is coming from though maybe there is money outside of pensions not mentioned?

tightauldgit

mark5 said:

Bradden said:

mark5 said:

There’s no children involved so the usual female advantage in splitting finances during divorce doesn’t apply. 

I would go to court personally be careful not to run up massive legal bills before you get there though.

Could you clarify this please. My understanding is that assets are split 50/50 as a starting point. With the OP having a larger pension fund this may result in a reduced share of the property to balance against the pension. She could of course request a pension sharing order instead of a "clean break". This is not dependent on whether their or children.. it's just dividing joint assests on seperation.

Op says she wants 60% of total pensions , I said I wouldn’t give 60% if it was me. 

There are no children involved which is the common reason for one side getting a bigger percentage so to me its everything 50/50.

I’m not sure where the lump sum she wants is coming from though maybe there is money outside of pensions not mentioned?

Yeah that's the problem with most of these threads - unless you know all the details of the full list of assets its not really possible to say one way or the other. If there's 11k equity in the house/savings/etc and she wants 10k +60% of the pension that's very different to if there's 100k equity in the house and she wants 10k + 60%

dontknowwhattodonext

No house involved, have agreed 10k 50/50 pension 

Stateofart

As

dontknowwhattodonext said:

No house involved, have agreed 10k 50/50 pension 

Assuming you get 50% of her pension too?

TBagpuss

mark5 said:

There’s no children involved so the usual female advantage in splitting finances during divorce doesn’t apply. 

I would go to court personally be careful not to run up massive legal bills before you get there though.

Just for reference, there is no 'female advantage'. There is, however, still a fairly significnat male advantage.
Statistically, men normally end up in a better finacial position than women after divorce, womens are more than 3 times as likely to find themselves living in poverty following a divorce than men, for example.
(the only 'female advantage' is that women tend to have slightly better outcomes then men in terms of death rates in the years following divorce, although I haven't seen any detailed research as to whether this reflects women's longer life expectancy generally, or whether the rates are different in divorced people to those who were never married (I belive that there is evidence that married men live longer then unmarried men, and women who have never married live longer than those who marry, even in modern times when deaths rleated to childbrth are low. 

TBagpuss

jjj1980 said:

If the wife has been working full time and there are no children involved, I don’t understand why their respective earning potentials and pension pots should even come into things. 

If she had reduced her hours to look after children or be a housewife then I would understand it but if none of this applies, surely her lower earning potential is her issue, not his?

Split assets 50/50 yes but future earnings and pensions in my opinion should be completely ignored. 

Not necessarily. People do make compromises to accommodate their partners, so you can have a situation where a couple moves to accommodate one person taking up a job offer, which can mean that the other ends up with a lower paying job / slower path to promotion etc. But it is primarily that amarrige is ap artnehip, when you are together, you (ideally) make choices which will benefit you as a family unit, and it would be unfiar to then treat it as if those choices were made in the expectation of a split.  Had the parties never met, they might each have made different choices about their careers etc.

And bearing in mind that there is still a gender pay gap it's not unreasnable to try to achieve fairness despite that! 

Also, even in childless relationships it can be very common for one spuse to contribute more finacailly and the other to do more of the non-finacail things that benefit you as a couple, both are relvant in deciding what is fair 

If the couple always kept their finances separeate then there are situations where it is accepted thatit'sfairto continue to treat them separtely on divorce, but that is not the usual position or the way the law works, so even of you disagree, you are still bound by the law and a Judge will apply it if they are making the decision.