Should I buy partner out before divorce is final?

[sofanotcouch]

My partner agreed I could pay half of the equity of the house to him and therefore stay in the house and he would move out and buy somewhere else using the money I paid him.

However the divorce process has only just started. Is this ok to do it before the divorce is final? We'll write down our agreement how much I agreed to pay and whose furniture belongs to whom. Also how much of the joint bank account belongs to whom. We'll also say our pensions are our own. We don't have a car or any major savings.

I need my own space to move on and if I get the house to myself and child now, then myself and my 7 year old child can have some stability. Also I am worried mortgage rates will go up so I'm hoping to obtain a good deal now and have it all dealt with quickly. However I'm worried house prices will rise between then and now and then he will claim that he is owed more at the divorce point.

Is this a silly thing to do before the divorce is final?

Your settlement might be more or less that 50% of house equity,
do t let anything until the financial settling has been worked out and sealed

The safe advice is not to.
However, I did this - we are in no rush to divorce as it will upset the kids more in our situation - I trust him actually and if he suddenly changed character and went after any increase in the property since we split etc I actually wouldn't really care that much.

My mind was / is much more settled now we are fully separated financially and it's still worth anything he could still claim from me - I think that is your balance really - I believe technically he could come after anything in the future so if you won the lottery etc but actually I wouldn't mind sharing that if it did happen - we were together a long time so I see that we jointly built our lives anyway.

You can sit down and do the documentation now ready for your consent order. You need a D81 and form E form the government site. Fill those in together putting down everything ( it includes pension valuations although if you’re agreeing not to claim you can put down an estimate and then an explanation as to why you don’t want to go the route of asking the pension companies for full valuations if DB for instance. If they’re DC pension just ask your companies for latest value) . You’ll need to value the house . And then an sect or savings. You can sign the forms at this stage.
you can then sit down and write out in layman’s terms how you want to split stuff. Make sure you read the 10 or so criteria the courts use to detainee if it’s a fair settlement . These come first before any assumption of 50:50 Which people wrongly assume is starting place. Some of these 10 or so criteria won’t apply to you , but the ones that do you need to agree your split in a way that satisfy these criteria .
if you trust each other explicitly you can then transfer funds. Imho I’d take to a solicitor first, and get them to do the proper legal draft and maybe even sign something, but you really need your court case number first for them to do it- which means you needed to have already gone onto the government site and raised your petition (you do NOT need a solicitor for your divorce petition - especially since aprils law change). The government web site is fantastic- easy to use and find the documents and then use to raise your petition. You do not have to spend aperture on a solicitor- just ask them to ”draft” your consent agreement (change your and stbex words into legal speak) and for them to submit it into the court online system with your D81 once you get decree nisi or whatever they are calling it now. You can’t submit these documents yourself online so worth paying solicitor to do, otherwise it’s by post and I’m hearing lots of people on this site saying docs getting lost in post etc.

in my case we had everything drafted and ready. My ex moved out and took his assets with him. I stayed in family home until it was sold and then paid him balance of his assets - by then it was after the decree final by a couple of weeks. But effectively he moved out and we released his assets before the decree nisi and before courts looked at consent order, let alone sealed it. We didn’t see it as a risk- despite everything we trusted each other financially and had worked out for ourselves what we thought was fair and we’re going to stick to that.