AIBU to want half of the pension after divorce?

Will you be giving him half your your small pension as well?

I dint think you have any right to his pension. You knew when you were unemployed that it woukd have a ripple effect on your own pension, and its not okay for you to think you can take his. He worked for it and it belongs to him. Take your share of the house and move on.

@Greenmouldycheese You are 100% wrong. I assume you know nothing whatever about divorce law. Maybe read up on marital assets and get better informed?

i disagree I think it's a lot easier to work if someone else is picking up the children from school and dropping them off and is always available if the children are sick. This was particularly the case in the 80s and 90s when there wasn't really flexible working and certainly no working from home. Plus child care cleaners and cook cost money. Even when the children have left home some high earners prefer it if they have a partner at home sorting everything out in the house and making tea for when they get back.

Totally agree! A high earner would absolutely have a SAHW during the 80s & 90s & beyond.

The kids are gone but he still wants dinner on the table every day, he doesn’t want to fend for himself two nights a week because she’s on lates. He wants to go on holiday when it suits him and his business, he doesn’t want to depend on his wife’s manager approving her annual leave. And he wants to socialise and relax at the weekend, he doesn’t want his wife running around sorting out vets appointments and the opticians and the big shop because that’s the only time she has all week.
Indeed, and who wants a husband like this! It makes it clear that she is less important and the woman feels worthless...but she wants the money, so she stays, continues the spending, feels miserable, moans about her OH, but can't get out.

It's so not worth it even if the first 10-20 years are great.

Why wouldn’t she. It will all be put together and split?

Wow! You have absolutely no grasp on marriage rights.

Well, it doesn’t matter what you think. The law says their assets are shared between them, and that includes any pensions. It is completely OK and morally and legally right that she has a share in it. That’s the law.

I bet you are one of those people who thinks marriage is just a piece of paper. it isn't!

Yep, OPs personal pension is as much an asset of the marriage as anything else.

It sounds like OP is more bothered about early pension access than DH, which may lead her to accept less of other assets in order to allow her to live off pension income now. But that's only a matter of preference. If they both had a radical change of heart tomorrow and DH wanted to retire early whilst OP wanted to try her hand at running the business, nothing to stop assets being split with that in mind.

OP is entitled to a fair share of marital assets. But OP really needs to sit down and do a budget and learn to live within new means.

London is very expensive. She already knows her half of the house will not cover buying somewhere for herself outright in same area. If she isnt earning she can't get or pay a mortgage. If she did manage to just afford somewhere she has nothing to live on - council tax, bills, food, maintenance costs.

State pension (if she has any) won't kick in for several years. Private pension share she could tap into earlier but thats going to be a big loss compared to taking it at retirement age. Taking a private pension at 60 vs 65 results in around 25% less payments. So if the pension is £2M, she gets £1M of it - shes looking at £30K a year if she retired at 65, but only £22.5K if she takes it now at 60. Not enough to live off comfortably in london even if there is multi- million in pension available.

You can’t just make up the law.

God so many bitter people on here. They can’t seem to accept the facts - if they are married she is entitled to half of all marital assets and the pension is half of the assets (hard to work it out and a solicitor will need to).

Your opinions on SAHMs are irrelevant.

I am slightly wondering how if he is a high earner, you had a Range Rover, kids in private school and bought a house in London many years ago that that house is only worth £800k?

Surely that would be a pretty small two bed house in London these days?

I don't see why you can't have worked when the children were grown.

Most people have to work. It's very grabby to try and take half of his pension while you sit and do nothing

Many high flying jobs require a home manager. And there were DC. She was hardly sitting doing nothing. @DivorcingDebbie25 's work enabled her DH to earn what he did.

FGS, whether she worked or not is irrelevant. And it’s not “his” pension. It’s “their” pension because that is the law. It would be very grabby of him to even try to keep the pension to himself.

What does your husband earn annually @DivorcingDebbie25? To have several million in a pension at age 60 he must have been paying in £££ for years and years.

My ex husband took £150k of my pension which was transferred to him under an order, which can be done. The start of the negotiations is adding everything up and then starting at 50/50. My ex brought nothing to our 3 year marriage, I owned my house, with a mortgage, yet because he had no where to live I had to give him enough to buy something. He arrived with one suitcase and left with enough to buy a small flat outright! I on the other hand now have a reduced pension. The only people who get rich from any divorce are lawyers, I paid £10k in fees and he paid next to nothing. Good luck.

Ok OP - so the house may not even be the main part of the marital assets. You need a solicitor as I’m guessing there’s a lot tied up in the pension.

I do question that pensions are the best place for funds. Obviously they are important but I’d make sure there aren’t shares or other investments you don’t know about.

Would he really be diverting millions in to a pension rather than spreading assets? We don’t do that…

How much did you know about family finances?

Well that is awful and morally horrible! OPs position is so different. Dedicated her life thinking this marriage was forever and over the years slowly realised it’s not and now she’s totally boxed in. OP deserves her fair share. Your ex didn’t!

Hi OP, as you can see from the sheer number of replies - your question has touched a very raw nerve! I don't think it's really about you personally, so please don't take it too much to heart. Here's what I think is actually going on:

1. comparison hurts more than unfairness does. A lot of the harshest posters are women who worked full time AND did the lion's share of childcare and home admin on top ("the second shift"). When they see you potentially ending up in a similar or better financial position for a different path, it doesn't feel fair - even if nobody's actually done anything wrong. Psychologists call this relative deprivation - we don't measure our situation in a vacuum, we measure it against the person standing next to us, and that comparison stings far more than an abstract unfairness would.
2. “She must not deserve it” protects their own world view. Loads of us want to believe that hard work = reward, full stop (just-world belief). If a SAHM comes out financially secure "for doing nothing" (in their eyes), it threatens that belief - because if it's not true for you, some posters have to face the thought that their years of grinding away at both a job and the household maybe didn't buy them any extra security either. It's much easier on the ego to decide you don't deserve it than to sit with that.
3. Sour grapes basically.. A few posters have said outright they weren't able to stay home even if they'd wanted to - money, a husband who wouldn't have gone for it, whatever. When you can't have something, it's a very human trick of the mind to decide it wasn't worth having anyway, or that the person who did have it is somehow morally lesser for it (cognitive dissonance reduction, if you want the technical term). It's not really about you - it's about a choice they didn't get to make.
4. Women being harder on other women than a stranger would be.. This gets called horizontal hostility in feminist psychology - when a group has to fight for scraps of social approval, they sometimes end up policing each other more fiercely than any outside critic would, rather than banding together. Working mums get told they're neglecting their kids, SAHMs get told they're parasites - nobody wins, and women end up turning on each other instead of on the actual system that never valued care work properly in the first place.
5. Unpaid work is invisible because we’ve never built it into how we measure “contribution”.. Yhere is no payslip, no job title, no annual appraisal for raising two children and running a household for 40 years - so when people ask "well what did she actually DO", it's because our entire economic language (GDP, CVs, pension statements) was never built to capture it. That's not a reflection of its real value, it's a design flaw in how we count things. It's exactly why UK divorce law treats homemaking as an equal contribution to a marriage regardless of what the comments section thinks - the law is one of the only places that explicitly corrects for this blind spot.
6. And there is a class angle too…Full-time SAHM right through into your 60s is genuinely more common in professional/higher-income households (which is your world - private school, one big income) than it is for most UK women, who've worked through motherhood out of necessity since the 70s/80s at least. Some of the "this wasn't normal" pushback is really a class gap talking past itself, not an attack on you specifically.

None of this means you were greedy for asking the question - the opposite, really. The posters most furious about your unpaid contribution being "worth" 50% are often, without meaning to, proving exactly why the law protects it. Please do go and get proper legal advice, and try to let the pile-on roll off you a bit. Good luck OP 💐

This has happened to friends of mine too and it is crap.
Marriage is not a good idea, unless your the poorer party.