Please help

[TheSharpRobin]

Hi everyone, my dh and I are separating after nearly 7 years of marriage. We are both late 50s and there are no children involved. My dh moved into my home and we have both paid the mortgage on this during our marriage. There is a small amount remaining to be paid off and dh has said that this will all be paid off and this will be my settlement.
The house is worth around £250k. He says he will take my ISA worth £110k and his ISA worth £120k plus his private pension of £300k (which was worth £60k when we married). I will keep 2 pensions I earned before marriage, plus a £50k private pension and my pension from the job I’ve worked at in basic salary roles since we married.
I have earned much less than him in our marriage and have had 3 years working part time only. There was £113k equity in my home when we married. I received £50k lump sum from pensions when I was 55 and have monthly payments from them too. We have used this money to do work on my home as it was only valued at £200k when we married.
He wants me to sign a financial agreement, is this a fair deal?

…just to add dh brought 60k in cash to the marriage, and after spending some money (and time!) on a property he had we sold it for 90k, plus he has received some dividends during our marriage of around 100k in total.

Too late for maths but I don’t think that adds up. Can you see a lawyer?

Do not sign anything without consulting a solicitor.

Let someone independent work through the values of each element, because there are too many variables to be able to tell from what you have written here.

You can no longer think of this man as your friend, or that he has your best interests at heart.

Do the math's so you get a home worth 250k plus pension worth 50K =300k

He gets 2 savings accounts total 23k plus 300k pension = 530k

No it's not fair

Too late for maths but I don’t think that adds up. Can you see a lawyer

Exactly.

Gather all your papers and get legal advice.

Best of luck.

My dd is a young adult and will live with me. She is not the daughter of dh

See a solicitor. Doesn't sound fair to me.

Thanks everyone. I was thinking this but at the same time I’m too scared that I will end up in a worse position than the offer. He is still living in the house and all our credit cards and bank accounts are still in joint names so I’m trying to think how I speak to a solicitor…being upfront but him kicking off in the house or getting a friend or relative to foot the bill and then pay them back …eventually

It’s hard to unpack the post. Are you receiving a regular pension now ?

Get a solicitor immediately. Your marriage might be considered a short one. Your home that he moved into might be considered more yours than joint for the years pre-marriage but only a divorce solicitor and a judge can determine that.

Right now he's robbing you blind.

Oh... and stop all credit cards in joint names. Get all those with you as primary card holder paid off and closed immediately as it puts you in an unsafe and precarious position.

Yes, I receive 2 of my former work based pensions and also work 30 hrs a week

I’ve just spoken to a solicitors about booking an appointment, will they be able to advise a way forward in a one hour appointment or will they just say as I probably already know…do it through a solicitor? And I’ll pay for the privilege of them telling me this…

You would be mad to try to negotiate a divorce without a (good) lawyer.

You probably need a pensions expert to do a joint evaluation on all pensions, including state. It will look at ages, provision and takes into account that women live longer. It will cost less than £1k.

Should have said, ours was done through the solicitor process. Have you gone through mediation? Was this not raised then?

No mediation or anything yet , only decided to split last week. My main 2 pensions were earned before marriage. I have a £50 private one put together during marriage and my current work one which is not the biggest ever . We will both qualify for full state pension at 67 for me and 68 for him as he is 4 years younger than me

It’s way too early to be making decisions about who gets what. I know that, that is what every one going through this wants to jump to, but you must go through mediation where a good mediator will guide you both through the process. We couldn’t even decide on who we should use for mediation, so we ended up with someone who we both thought was pretty useless, so choose carefully.

As mediation didn’t work for us we have now spent 2 years going through solicitors. My solicitor still won’t commit to what the split will be, and remember that the final decision has to be signed off by a judge.

Your marriage hasn’t been particularly long so that may have a considerable bearing on the split.

I cannot stress how important it is to get advice now.

Thank you. Overwhelming the advice seems to be to get legal advice which I will do, I really appreciate everyone’s input in my time of need

With such a short marriage there is usually no division of assets. You just leave with what you can in with. From my experience ( three short marriages)