Hidden documents and fair split of money

[Slightlybitter27]

I'll apologise now for the long and complicated post but I am stumped at where to turn, i have already spent thousands on solicitors fees and i just don't have the cash to do it again!

Aprox 5 years a go I bought a property with my now ex partner, at the time we had no children and no other assets or debts. Just before we bought the house i was awarded £11,000 victims compensation for suffering through a very violent sexual assault by a stranger and then a court case to have the guy locked away due to that event i have had some quite sevre MH issues including PTSD, Anxiety and deppression which i am thankfully on top of now.
I had been with my then ex for a few years and asked if he would like to buy a house with me, he said yes and I was under the assumption he had some savings to contribute.He didn't have any savings but did have some debt I wasn't aware of until this point.
We bought a house with a 5% deposit mortgage, I paid the entire deposit and all fees for the sale, I also gave him £1000 to pay off a debt before we moved in.
Whilst we were together we made equal payments to the house (mortgage/bills ect) I paid for everything for our daughter whilst pregnant as well as the entire furniture for the house we lived in plus all the decorating/upkeep ect not out of choice he just refused to help!
I fell pregnant in 2016 and gave birth to our daughter in 2017, from finding out i was pregnant he began to drink every day which progressively got worse. I made my feelings clear about his drinking and gave him 6 weeks after our daughter was born to make an effort to stop drinking. He made no changes and left me alone with our daughter every weekend then worked voluntary overtime every night so i was alone 7am-8/9pm most week nights, I had expressed my unhappiness on lots of occasions and decided to leave in March last year, i went to stay with my parents as i knew he wouldn't leave if asked.

I knew we were over and stated i wanted to sell the house, he refused and said for months he would buy me out. i continued to pay my half of the mortgage for 7 months whilst he paid nothing for our daughter. I eventually told him that it was going up for sale and he either agreed or i would force a sale through court, He did agree but caused issue after issue for a year so we have only just sold the house! He lived in the house paying just half of the mortgage for months with all of my furniture which id left so he was comfortable.
Now the house is sold, all costs have been paid and the proceeds have been frozen in an account at my request as we cannot agree a fair split, He is demanding half of everything where as I feel I should have my deposit then everything else should be split.
I haven't any contact with him for months on police advice but he has now sent me a letter demanding half or he will take me to court, along with this he has sent me a document addressed to me from our solicitors when we bought the house which i have never seen but he has kept all this time, The document discusses tenants in common which is obviously important here as it was the document which clearly explained my money wouldn't be protected if i didn't agree to tenants in common. I briefly remember our mortgage provider discussing this with us, they advised me to speak to our solicitor which i did. they said they would send me some information on it in the post, I never received the information, This document is what my ex has now sent me. It is solely addressed to me but has strangely been sent to my Ex's parents address, the solicitors at the time knew we lived separate and had two different addresses so i have no idea why he has the letter. the only thing i can think of is that he requested everything sent to him without my agreement so that he could be in control of what I saw.
i have followed this up with the solicitors who dealt with the purchase and they are looking in to all this at the moment.

Basically what i want to know are what are my options? Im aware i can agree a 50/50 split like he wants to keep it out of court but should i decide i want to fight him for what is mine will this become an free for all, will it take years? and am i at risk of loosing everything i put in? i really don't know what is for the best!

we have just spent 18 months through the family courts for our daughter because he was getting bladdered before/during seeing her, It was horrible and i'm not sure i have the strength to have my character questioned again. Since i left he has been emotionally and financially abusive, he has taken so much from me during the time we were together and since i left both emotionally and financially that i finally feel better and i'm not sure its worth the risk of braking down again!

Any advice would be greatly appropriated! x

If you signed to say 50/50 when you brought the house, I doubt you would stand a chance of getting the £11k back :( I think best is to do the 50/50 but then to take it further with child support and make him pay for something that way.

I hope someone can give you better advice but I didn't want to read and run

Thank you for replying , I don't want the full £11,000 back and I don't want all of the profit either. I just want my deposit which was about £5000 plus half of the profit which I feel is fair! He does pay maintenance now, I offered him to pay £15 a week but he refused because it was to much do I went to the CSA and he now pays £70 a week, all of it goes towards our daughter and if she doesn't need it all I put it in to an account for her x

It sounds like you did not do anything at the time of purchase to say that you owned more of the house than he did. Indeed, it sounds like your intention was that the house should be shared between you. When you bought the house you effectively gave him half your deposit. I'm afraid it is too late to change that now. Based on the information posted here he is correct - the house should be split 50/50.

Agree, I'm afraid. You didn't sign a deed of trust to protect your deposit so it's 50/50. I would say however, that your solicitors at the time could be held negligent in sending the information to be wrong address and not following it up. Not worth chasing them up now though. You'd be throwing good money after bad.

You need to download the deeds from the land registry. Under the proprietorship register there either will or will not be a paragraph that says the survivor cannot give a valid receipt. If it’s not there, you each own half. If it is there, you might own more than half , but would need to take legal advice. Contributing £11,000 doesn’t make it a big money case that you’d want to spend thousands in legal fees, though.

So am I right in thinking that the dispute is about you potentially losing £2,500? (Half of the £5,000 deposit.) Isn't going to court likely to cost you a fair amount of money? Possibly more than £2,500? I have no legal experience, but I might be tempted to think £2.5k is a price worth paying to have no more stress and to get everything sorted ASAP. Going to court and ending up with similar or less money than you would get by agreeing a 50 /50 split now would presumably be pretty galling.

I already paid 3k not even at court yet , date in 4 weeks don’t waste the money if you’re happy with 50/50 do it! It’s not worth the stress