Valuation of asset from a past date

Farside71

Hi, I need to value assets for a divorce, and as we are in Scotland, need to use a date from last year.

Does anyone have experience of getting valuations of assets for a specific date in the past?

I know I can do this for a DB pension, but will also need to value ISAs, bank accounts and  DC pensions.

If I have to work it out from statements and number of units and prices, then I am guessing that is possible although a bit of work, but I don't know if any institutions are capable of doing that automatically.

eskbanker

Farside71 said:

If I have to work it out from statements and number of units and prices, then I am guessing that is possible although a bit of work, but I don't know if any institutions are capable of doing that automatically.

You could obviously ask the institutions concerned but if they've already issued statements (for current or savings accounts) then these should be self-explanatory and will usually have a running total for the balance, so it's just a case of reading one line from each?

Calculating from number of units and prices will probably be needed for investments inside or outside pensions though, but ought not to be onerous unless held by frequent traders?

Farside71

eskbanker said:

Calculating from number of units and prices will probably be needed for investments inside or outside pensions though, but ought not to be onerous unless held by frequent traders?

Yes, by writing the OP, I think I have convinced myself that will be necessary, and no it won't be really too onerous.  Only issue is taking account of movements as statements are only quarterly for instance.  Again, not a massive deal but requires a bit of working out and evidencing.

eskbanker

Farside71 said:

eskbanker said:

Calculating from number of units and prices will probably be needed for investments inside or outside pensions though, but ought not to be onerous unless held by frequent traders?

Yes, by writing the OP, I think I have convinced myself that will be necessary, and no it won't be really too onerous.  Only issue is taking account of movements as statements are only quarterly for instance.  Again, not a massive deal but requires a bit of working out and evidencing.

I don't know what the divorce valuation rules are but there could potentially be detail issues around dividends, i.e. if the date you're using happens to be in between an investment's ex-div date and the resultant payment date, should the dividend value be included or not, given that it's 'in the post' as it were, but without actually having been received?  Probably immaterial in the grand scheme of things....

Farside71

eskbanker said:

Farside71 said:

eskbanker said:

Calculating from number of units and prices will probably be needed for investments inside or outside pensions though, but ought not to be onerous unless held by frequent traders?

Yes, by writing the OP, I think I have convinced myself that will be necessary, and no it won't be really too onerous.  Only issue is taking account of movements as statements are only quarterly for instance.  Again, not a massive deal but requires a bit of working out and evidencing.

I don't know what the divorce valuation rules are but there could potentially be detail issues around dividends, i.e. if the date you're using happens to be in between an investment's ex-div date and the resultant payment date, should the dividend value be included or not, given that it's 'in the post' as it were, but without actually having been received?  Probably immaterial in the grand scheme of things....

I think it's immaterial for me to be honest as there's nothing large enough dividend wise to be significant but it's a fair point and I can imagine under certain circumstances it could be a very large sum.

Having worked through this for a couple of hours, I think I've managed to get most of the information I need.

However what is frustrating is that for former workplace avc and a current workplace pension, the annual statements are absolutely awful in terms of detail.  They only show a monetary value for funds and not the number of units held at that point.  For the current workplace pension I can download all the transactions into a CSV and roll them up to get the number of units held at a point in time, but for the older one the information is only available on about 40 separate web pages in a non computerised format.  But I think I can work back from a current position to go back the required amount of time and manually deduce the change in units (which is only really deductions for charges) to the present day.