Divorce and pension sharing without solicitors

[narrowpath]

Hi, I'm looking for advice from anyone who has filed and arranged everything to do with divorce without legal involvement. I applied for divorce online several months ago, so am coming towards the end of the 26 week wait and want to have things ready to go by then.

Been separated 2+ years. We have already sold and split house, so that is done.
There are no meaningful savings to split.
The only thing that remains is to split pensions, which realistically means I need to receive some of his pension (we already have CETVs to confirm that his is more due to my years of working part time after having our children.

Husband has always been reluctant to spend money on anything so will want to avoid costs if possible. I've seen that we need to fill in a D81 and also a P1 for the pensions.

Is it possible to just fill this in ourselves and submit it without any solicitors being involved? The D81 looks straightforward but the pensions form looks more difficult to understand.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has done this. Thanks

We are doing as much as we can without solicitors however it’s not possible to do the whole thing without.

At a bare minimum you need a solicitor to draw up the Financial Consent Order and submit it to the court for approval. The court is unlikely to approve it if neither of you have had any legal advice.

Did you split the house equity 50/50?

Are the children out of full time education? If not, have you agreed custody and maintenance?

House was split 50:50.

Children are in Y13 and Y12 so the decisions about where they live are up to them not us, and are flexible and informal.

We pay into a joint account to cover child expenses. It is not a perfect set-up by any means, but as they will likely both be at uni within 18 months its not worth looking for anything better.

So really its just the pension that needs sorting.

@wheresmymojo when you used the solicitors for the financial order, did they actually on behalf of both of you or did you have to instruct individual solicitors?

We didn’t use solicitors for financial order - we drafted and submitted ourselves using online resources and templates plus submitting d81. We did not split pensions however or require pension sharing order and agreed to retain our own based on the fact we were similar earners, similar workplace pensions ( eg defined contribution tech industry), neither party had missed out due to periods away from workplace etc

Agree with @wheresmymojo- judge is unlikely to accept a financial order without legal advice from both parties having been taken.

And yes, you each need a solicitor as can have one acting for both parties. I think I paid £800 in total to solicitor (more because she was somebody I knew and trusted, quite senior partner so more expensive but very effective). They handled financial order and pension sharing order which was, as in your case, all straightforward but needed translating into legalese to be acceptable.

We didn’t have legal
advice and order was accepted ( possibly because we worked it to look 50:50)

You will need to submit a consent order in addition to forms D81 and P1. You can get express 7 day drafting with submission to court for around £600 where the jointly appointed solicitors will use agreement in principle to complete all required documents in the form required.

You don’t need separate legal advice. Had FDR today and this was not a problem. We progressed to FDR because equalisation determined by PODE report didn’t meet need due to S25 factors and there was no housing asset to offset a 50:50 share of pension. My pension share is closer to 60:40. If you had combined housing asset and pension asset at the outset you may have achieved a better overall settlement given long marriage and reduced pension accrual due to working part time for child care reasons.

Have you agreed percentage share of pensions overall? How will this be organised across the schemes?

We did not use a solicitor.

we used amicable.io as we agreed on what we wanted and they drafted it up for us.

it is not necessary to have separate solicitors if you agree.