Advice on leaving pensions out of divorce

[Feelingconfusedandunsure]

Hi everyone, I’m just looking for some advice on pensions.

My STBXH and I have (sort of) agreed to leave each other’s pensions alone in our forthcoming divorce/financial agreement. This is because they are in all probability roughly equal, mine is a better pension (final salary) but I have worked 4 days a week for the last 6 years and had two periods of maternity therefore my reckonable service will have been affected. He has had his pension (one private, one company) a similar amount of time but is probably not as good as mine anyway. Therefore all things considered there’s probably not a lot to gain by going after each other’s pensions. We’ve been married 9 years and still have 24 years before retirement, which I think my own pension will more than adequately cover.

From a legal standpoint is it ok to leave pensions out of the financial agreement?

Thanks xx

If you negotiate the finances yourself you can leave the pensions out but if it goes to court a judge will likely want them included.

Have you seen clear documentary evidence of how much each pension is worth ?

You can agree to what you want, but it's advisable to have them both valued anyway. If one is unexpectedly higher value than the other, then wouldn't you want to know?

What would be the advantage to agreeing they are "probably similar value" and so leave them out of the settlement?

Why not just get them each valued?

You can see agree to let them balance each other out, once you are sure that they are indeed of equal value.

I would be a bit wary of including them if yours is final salary and his Isn't.
Final salary pensions are worth an awful lot. You may find yours is worth a lot more despite having paid a lot less.

We left ours out as both only just started and they not anything to write home about other than the house the only other monetary amount was debt! X

We left our pensions out, but we had got them both valued and they were fairly similar. Not worth a huge amount as I only had about 7 years pension.

We got independent pension forecast
I got the equity in our home
He got his full pension

I’m happy, he’s happy.

I thought ours were similar, mine a tad less and ex was very keen to leave the pensions out. Turns out he'd been adding to his with avcs and I received a lot more equity to balance out the finances. So I would ask for it to be included.

You can come to any agreement you want.

But legally only the marital part of pension values are divided by 2.

It depends if a one worked for example 25 years and never contributed by choice to a pension whilst the other did paying into more than one due to the fear of the other person not contributing and worryI got about the future
I wonder how this would be looked upon .I don’t think that any judge would say that the pension should be divided equally ever case is looked at individually.