Advice

[Pompom8]

Hello,
Ive been married to dh for 7 years and we have two children 5 & 6 years old. We have just bought our first home together also.

I would like to seperate/divorce but i have no idea about how to do this and how i will manage financially on my own with two children on basically a minimum wage job.
Does anybody have any advice or info they can give me?
Would we definitely have to sell the house? I dont want to leave the house but i wont be able to afford the mortgage/bills on my own.
Grateful for any advice or information. Im so lost x

I'm in a that situation, though no young kids thankfully. First thing I did was make a spreadsheet of my costs, everything that's fixed (so not food, petrol or leisure), I then went onto the benefits calculator - I didn't qualify for extra help but Dd is a student so by their reckoning she should take the home student loan and hand over most of it to me, whereas you should be able to get a top up.

Once you know what you will get assuming no help from h, you can enter discussions with him about what he would offer for child support and possibly spousal support then put that into the benefits calculator and see what works out best. It looks like I can keep my home but only because the mortgage only has 9 years to run, by the time we sort only 7 and I put in 1/3 of the equity and he has a massive pension that I can trade the remaining equity (that's the theory) though he's offered to pay half and maintenance to keep the equity so I'm deliberating.

It depends a bit on his finances of course, mine earns good money, though he's in for a shock when we economise next month to try to save £20k to buy another house.

Forget spousal support unless he is an extremely high earned and there is limited capital

You may be eligible for universal credit, and then child support from your ex. There are online calculators available.