StbxDH and I have decided to separate. We have 4 kids still living at home. We are mid forties. He is full time and major breadwinner, I’m part time, much lower earner.
Our only assets are the family home (equity is about 25% of the house value for our 5 bed home) and quite a lot of pensions. No savings at all.
He wants kids 50:50, which I’m upset about but can’t really argue with - he’s a really good Dad and has a very flexible job, he spends loads of time with them now. He’s not doing it for the money - we’ve gone on the child maintenance calculator and he is offering to pay me 20% more than the amount he would pay if he was only having them one day per week. He’s offered to get it put into writing.
However, because we have no savings he is insisting we sell the family home to release equity, split the equity equally and buy a smaller home in a worse area each with the deposit plus mortgage. He says without doing this he will either have to rent (which he HATES - he bought a house as soon as he got his first proper job because he hates the idea of renting so much!), or buy a bedsit or small flat, which would be too small to have the kids stay. He says to get a rental big enough to house all the kids comfortably would be unaffordable (I’ve checked, and he’s right), or at the least would prevent him ever being able to get back on the property ladder. He also has a dog, which he loves, and most rentals don’t allow pets.
He knows that a court would likely give me more than 50% of the assets, and says that he is happy to give me whatever proportion of the pensions a mediator considers necessary to make it a fair settlement.
I really don’t want to move. On my relatively low salary I’ll be limited in how much of a house I can buy with half the equity (although he says I should be able to get a mortgage which takes maintenance into account). It’s likely the children will have to share bedrooms for the first time in their lives, and their ages/genders make this a bit difficult.
We did talk to the mortgage adviser and she said that that buying him out would be very difficult due to my earnings and the high price of the house, and would incur mortgage penalties which would wipe out 20% of the equity to switch to a mortgage company which might allow it (ours won’t take into account maintenance payments). He might be able to buy me out based on his income, but not if he is paying me maintenance - because I’d need the maintenance agreed in writing for my mortgage company to take into account but that would then impact on his borrowing ability!!
I suppose I just don’t want the children to suffer as a result of our decision to split up, and all I can see is them having to switch back and forth between two homes which are much to small for our big family.