Really sorry this is so long, thanks for reading! Really trying to give as much essential info as possible.
Ex-husband-to-be and I are at the early stages of separating our finances.
I'm moving out in three weeks to stay with our two children (10, nearly 6) at my mother's, hundreds of miles across the country (from Scotland to the south of England), until I can find my feet and move out. Ex has a new job an hour away from my mother's town, so he will see the children probably EOW and maybe midweek sometimes.
The relationship not been great for the last few years (normal, ish, imo, with young kids taking a toll), but it is his choice to split, if that has any bearing).
To clarify:
He is Scottish. I am English. I'm not sure if the law differs between England and Scotland in such cases.
We have lived in Scotland for the last eight years. We married up here in 2009, though we're living in London at that time.
He has composed what he thinks is the way we should split our finances, and what he will pay in maintenance.
I think he's doing me (and consequently our children) a huge disservice, but is a solicitor likely to agree with him or me? Bottom line, any money he and I spend on solicitors is only going to eat into our finances, which ultimately both of us will use to support our children, so I'd rather not fork out on wasting money on a solicitor when it could go on our children.
I will put his calculations in the next post, after explaining our circumstances here.
When we met, I had a much more valuable property in London than he did in Scotland, which I'd worked hard to overpay the mortgage on from the very start. So when he came along, I was in a decent, independent financial position, and it put him in a favourable position because he moved in to my house when we married.
He sold his house some time later and put his equity into helping pay off my mortgage. He said this was £50k, I can't recall if it was this amount. I continued paying off my mortgage until a year after our first child was born (I was still getting paid a full year of maternity pay, at full pay). They were then making redundancies before I was set to return, so I took the redundancy payoff (about £25k) which completed my mortgage. So, we were mortgage free in a property in my name, based on my initial investment and overpayments, by late 2011/early 2012.
I have been a sahm since. He wanted the freedom to move jobs so I became a trailing spouse, giving up my earning capacity security because I trusted him not to do this to me, and we both preferred to have our child/ren at home rather than pay others to look after them. We were also in the reasonable position to live on one salary because of MY property enabling us to live mortgage-free.
We then jointly decided to home educate the children. This means I have been out of the job scene for over ten years.
He now wants me to put the children in school (not, imo, in their best interests, but because he wants me to earn money), and he thinks I can just sail into a job. Even if I wanted to put them in school, that means I am the one doing the limiting school week hours, plus I've taken a hit on my earning power, whereas he has not.
So his offering of £900 a month (a smidge over what he says the child maintenance calculator suggests), is not really factoring in that I may be unemployed for months or possibly much longer, and that I can't work full time because I'd be the one working around the school run/after school activities.
My choice would be to find something I can do part time from home (I'm already speaking with wahm friends who earn ok doing online sales type stuff) whilst I continue to home educate the children.
Neither child wants to go to school, btw.
His £900 a month also means if I don't manage to find a job as he wants me to, I'm stuck at my mother's for longer, in a less than ideal situation (I'll have to share a room with my daughter). So it's definitely not a long-term solution, nor, in the interim, should he feel he can pay minimally whilst I sponge off my mother.
I sold my property in SW London in 2014 for £310k.
He sold his property in a run down Scottish town, c2009, taking 50k profit. House prices as they are in his home town he wouldn't be looking at much more profit had he kept his Scottish property. As such, I feel he's making himself MUCH better off than he would be had he not latched on to my London property. 'We' were only able to pay the mortgage off in 2011 because I was the one who had invested in it, and overpaid my mortgage for all those years, and then helped at the end by my redundancy payoff.
He calculates:
2021
Separation on 1st March 2021.
Current assets are roughly £336,000 (may vary based on housesales and fees, caravan etc). This is an increase of £21,000 from the sale of Ex-W's house. Splitting this increase 50/50 and adding to the 2014 split gives:
Ex-W: £227,062.50 - (increase of £95,062.50 from 2009)
Him: £108,937.50 - (increase of £48,937.50 from 2009)
I want £275k.
Plus at least £1100 a month maintenance.
If he thinks I, having bought in 2004 for £173k, overpaying for years on my mortgage thousands of pounds am only coming out in 2021 with £227k, he's got a fight on his hands.
He put in £50k (if that) yet comes out with £109k???!!!
I'd rather he see the error of his ways without us both paying solicitors thousands of this money.
Is a solicitor likely to get me more than the exH thinks I should get? If we can agree without a solicitor, great. £275k isn't going to go far in my home town, and my getting a mortgage on my own, having been out of paid work for over ten years, limited to school hours, at my age (47) is going to be very very hard.
He, on the other hand, is in steady work, on a decent salary, and will be in a much better position to buy a property on his own, even if he 'only' has a £60k deposit.
To add. He pushed for me to sell my London property because he said he could do better with the proceeds investing it. He hasn't.