Hi all
My wife and I are in the early stages of divorce. I have a police pension.
At present we both still live in the same house, as neither of us can afford to leave until the mortgage is dealt with and also because we both want to be with our child. The house has been valued at £450k, with the outstanding mortgage and fees, to settle our mortgage debt we would need to pay just over £319k and we would also like to settle approx £20k of other debts and some other smaller payments will need to be made too. If we then split whats left in half we both walk away with just over £50k to set up a new home each. We have one child together who is 7 and my wife has an 18 year old from a previous relationship but who I have been a father figure to for the last 16 years who is at uni until 2022 but I have never adopted her as she still had contact with her father until a few years ago. We have only been married 9.5 years. We have no savings or any other capital at all.
She earns a lot less than me and would not be realistically able to afford a mortgage of any description and could not take on our current one alone. It is my opinion that she will have to rent at least for a year using what she takes from the house sale and during that time improve her wage and then use what she has left to put a deposit on a new home. I will obviously be paying what I need to towards the upkeep of my son as well as having him as much as I can.
She now is talking pensions and things are steadily going south in terms of how amicable we are. Ultimately even if she were to take the entirety of our equity in place of my pension in an
offsetting agreement she still couldn't afford to keep the
marital home and would still struggle to find a suitably sized mortgage to buy. Such an agreement would also leave me unable to put a deposit on a new home and make it difficult for me to even rent.
Its all very well keeping my pension but at the age of 35 that is not going to help me or my son now as I won't see any benefit for another 20-30 years. By which time of course I may not even be around to collect, nothing is guaranteed.
Whilst I think the rules on pensions in England are grossly unfair, the rules are the rules. If she wants half my pension she will get it one way or another and there is little point me fighting that fact but I want to do it in a way that is best for the children now and of course both of us. It just seems far more sensible to me to split what we have now equally and both use it to set up a new home that we can both be a parent in for the sake of the children.
It seems offsetting is far more suited to those with larger equities and other capital where one party can afford to lose their equity as they have other means of moving on from the marital home. I/we do not. I am worried I am going to be forced to take nothing from the home I have been paying for and continue to pay for and be left at the mercy of friends and family to house me. I hope that a court and solicitors would also see that this would be highly inappropriate given that I need to raise my son in a home as much as any father does.
There is limited advice I can find online but nothing that really fits my scenario in anyway and was hooping someone here could give me some guidance.
I have yet to receive my
CETV quote for my pension but with 13.5 years service I know its going to be well into the hundreds of thousands.
