Hi, thank you for reading my post.
My husband and I have been separated for over 6 months now but still live together in the family home. He works onsite, so can't move away to family and work from their home, plus we don't want him to be too far from the children (who do not know about the separation yet).
We are waiting to apply for the new 'no fault divorce' in April 2022 and are struggling to work out how to get our finances in order before then. I wondered if anyone would be able to provide advice on what a settlement might look like and how they practically go about starting to put that settlement into place. It isn't easy living together but we are being as amicable as possible and would like this to continue so that we minimise the impact on our children, but would also like to be able to move on as quickly as is practically possible.
Husband (38) works full time and currently earns £56k +5%, but he might be increasing to £75k +10% bonus. Of course this isn't guaranteed, but he's pretty confident and I wasn't sure what impact this would have.
I (38) work part time, 2 days at week, at £12,000.
When we re-mortgaged last year, our property was valued at £528,000. Our mortgage is roughly £260,000
We borrowed more on the mortgage for home improvements, which obviously won't happen now. This, with our other savings, brings the total to £100,000 in savings.
I'm afraid I don't know what the pensions are worth - sorry, i know that this can have an impact. My husband has only being paying into a pension in the last two years. Can we assume that the pensions are roughly equal at the moment? Of course, his will be worth a significant amount more than mine when it comes to retirement, but I presume that the settlement is based on the current values? I paid into mine from a younger age, but my contributions are now minimal as I have a much lower paid job since the birth of our second child. I wasn't sure how to work out their current value.
We have two boys, aged 6 and 3.
As far as I'm aware, we have no debt aside from the mortgage.
We're thinking that the boys and I would stay in the family home and part of the savings would be used as a deposit for a 2 bed place for my husband. We envisage the boys would stay over every other weekend, so either 1-2 nights every fortnight depending on what time he gets home from work on a Friday night.
I will not be able to afford the mortgage and running costs alone. My husband is happy to contribute - we weren't sure if this would be through a higher
child maintenance rate to enable a
Clean Break or through some kind of spousal maintenance. I will also try to increase my hours - if i go full time i could earn £30,000 but this isn't guaranteed. I have looked into the price of three beds in our local area (EN1), but they are not much cheaper than what we currently have (4 bed as there is a loft conversion). Our house could do with some improvements, which might limit it's value. While I would quite like to move for the fresh start, once you take into account fees and stamp duty, I don't think we're any better off moving. We could use any savings left over after my husbands deposit to reduce the mortgage of the family home, but this impacts the % split.
Sorry for the very long post, but I guess we wanted to work out what would be considered a
fair settlement in terms of equity split and maintenance, and if we agreed amicably that I could have more so that the boys and I stay in the family home, would a judge reject this?
Should we wait for the divorce before looking at flats for husband and working out what to do about the mortgage on the family home?
I'm sorry for being so longwinded! As you can probably tell, I'm panicking a bit about the future and wanted to give you as much info as possible. Thanks again!
