How costly/difficult would a divorce be in these circumstances?

[EarlofShrewsbury]

I've been split from my husband coming up to 5 years.

We were together for 7 years and had been married for 2.5 years when it all went to shit.

We lived in a council house, I still live there with the 2 DC and he is still living at his mums.

We have no joint savings and no joint assets.

I don't think he has a pension, if he does I don't think it's worth anything. I don't have a pension. When we split we had 8k of joint debt but over the 5 years I've paid it all so no debt.

It's only now there is no debt I can think about spending money on a divorce.

Are all divorces complicated?

No
not if you don’t make them so

generally they are complicated where there are assets to split and people cannot agree and one party feels they are being penalised / not getting fair share

ib your situation it could be pretty straightforward

I think you could DIY - there is a form that needs to be completed and a fee of around £500 but its not complicated

This looks useful www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/how-to-separate1/getting-a-divorce-or-dissolution/

Hi you can download the forms from HMRC website

www.gov.uk/divorce/file-for-divorce

it is really straight forward and quite easy to do, as long as you have your marriage certificate and an address for him to be sent the paperwork to, pay the fee of £593 and off you go.

The fee includes the decree absolute

Hope this helps

I did my own divorce. the forms are very easy to complete and the system is fairly easy. i'm in NI so the forms are different but I highly recommend it.

I thought you couldn't do DIY if children under 16?

@name985 mine where 13 and 16 at the time i divorced. we had a shared parenting plan which was working well and we did it no problem. Both parties need to be in agreement though. We had been separated for 6 yrs so we used that as our grounds for divorce.

He has the DC every fri- sun (I work weekends) and extra in the holidays to make it more 50/50 over the course of a year. No maintenance.

Flexible on changes if I want to take them away for a weekend and its worked fine for the past 4 years.

They are 6 and 9

The divorce itself is easy and you could do that yourself. You should make sure that you have a financial order (consent order) too to give you a clean break. This should stop your ex coming after your assets in future so is important even though you don’t have significant assets now. You could probably draft that yourself or else do it very cheaply seeing as you don’t have assets to split.

There is the £500 fee but I think this is reduced in certain circumstances.