So confused about divorce options - please help!

[TedDansononmyown]

I'm going to take all emotion out of this and just give facts. I've been given conflicting advice and I don't know how to proceed.

I'm in Scotland.
Separated 3.5 years. DD who is 8.
When we split I was a mess. Ex and I sold our home and went 50/50 despite me having DD 6 night in 7. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but at the time, I just needed to get away. I've accepted I made a mistake and have put it to bed.

We're now finally at the point where ex wants to divorce (he wouldn't entertain this before now and I don't have the cash to cover it all myself)

We have no shared assets.
I don't want his pension and he doesn't want mine
While I think I'm entitled to money considering my career has suffered as a result of me having DD all the time, I don't want to start a war. So no financial arrangement needed.

What I do want is a formal agreement in which we sit down and agree monthly maintenance for DD and yearly reviews of this (full disclosure). I also want this to include a fairer devision of childcare arrangements. He now takes her 9 nights a month but no extra over holidays and I want this addressed.

Do I first need to go to the solicitors and get a minute of agreement, then get a divorce or can these conditions be folded into the divorce itself? I'm very confused and I'm unwilling to go into this blindly trusting ex.

I'm absolutely skint so can't afford this to become a fight. What I want is to extricate myself and DD as quickly as possible, making sure that her maintenance and extras are covered and reviewed each year (based on his salary) and that there is a fairer split of parenting

Any advice would be really appreciated.

Child arrangements are nothing to do with divorce, well they are but your actual divorce doesn't include that element do ask your ex to divorce you online, no solicitor required so much much cheaper. You then need to work out a child arrangement order with annual reviews, this is part of the the financial/consent order, confusingly separate from the legal divorce. This a solicitor may be needed but we have one between us to save money

What mootymoo says applies in England and not in Scotland. As you have children under 16 you need a solicitor to act for you in an Ordinary Court action. The court needs to see that there are suitable arrangements for financial division and children. Financial division is not split from divorce in Scotland. Unfortunately, neither you nor the court can force your husband to see or look after the children. You may well be entitled to at least some help from Legal Aid. The majority of the population are entitled! Once again, the Scottish Legal Aid system is not the same as the English one. Go into the Scottish Legal Aid Board site and use its Civil Legal Aid Estimator. There's a separate type of Legal Aid called Advice & Assistance which deals with basic pre-court advice and would cover a few hundred pounds at most. It is harder to get as its means test sets a very low amount. So don't get them mixed up. The Law Society of Scotland can give you details of a local solicitor who specialises in divorce. You need to speak to a solicitor. Maintenance for children is normally dealt with by the Child Maintenance Service and you can use the calculator on its site to see how much you would be entitled to. It's based on a percentage of your husband's income and how many nights in a year they actually stay with him.

I’m just going through this. I’ve had a minute of agreement drawn up by my solicitor, which covers all financial stuff (what is happening with the house, cars, other possessions, pensions, and what he’s agreed in terms of child maintenance, school costs such as uniform, shoes and music lessons, and that he’s agreed to pay for half of any costs for counselling etc for our autistic dd), and also deals with contact with the children (that he’ll have them Saturday evening to Monday morning each week, but that they’ll live with me other than that - his choice, not mine). It does state that the child maintenance will increase annually in April, in line with the child maintenance calculator, and does say something about flexibility in our arrangements for holidays, but I’m not really expecting him to do much more in the way of having them in the holidays - he’s not bothered in the two and a half years since we split. Obviously you could have something more concrete about that put in.

Next step is an ordinary divorce.

I didn’t know about the legal aid @ItsDinah, I’ll have a look in to that.

Thanks. This is really helpful.@neverenoughcats
Did you come to the minute of agreement together or did you write what you wanted, pass to your solicitor and he just agreed?

Because we've this far 'managed' to sort ourselves out, ex wants to do the online solicitors only and I'm loathe to do this as sorting contact and money each year is an awful experience for me. I am treated like shit and I want a legal document that states what is happening and when so there he can stop considering himself the victim in all this.

We talked about it, and I put something together (I googled for a kind of template), sent it to him and he added/altered bits in a different colour font so I could see what he’d done, and I then sent it to my solicitor so that she could write the actual minute of agreement.

We included things like our pets, furnishings, antiques that he’d inherited and so on.

@neverenoughcats
Thanks that's super helpful. I'll have a look for a template online and have it ready.