Selling family home in divorce - timing

[legosnowqueen]

Husband & me will be divorcing after a 20 year marriage. We own the family home in full jointly. I have three private pensions & am the higher earner. We are approaching this amicably & wanting to keep costs down. Only DC is aged 20. I realise the starting point is a 50-50 split but anticipate the Courts may consider a slightly higher share to him is equitable based on future earning potential.

We would like to sell the house asap & buy separate properties. However, I gather there’s a risk that we might not be able to access the proceeds until the full financial settlement has been approved? Is there a way round this? We will both need the funds to pay for our new properties. I have not applied for the divorce yet in case it being in train has an impact.

Any experience/advice appreciated.

i think people do wait because the judge might not agree 50/50 so what would each party spend? I guess you might be able to sell and hold the money in apportioned accounts and divvy up after the financial agreement.

I thought (hoped) that the pension assets could be divided up in a different way if necessary to mitigate if the court directed a different split.

@legosnowqueenI thought you had to follow what the court says, not decide in advance? However you can go for a consent order if it’s amicable. But I’d talk this through with a solicitor.

@MeetMeOnTheCornerthis is all new to me to I appreciate the guidance. It will be amicable but we are both desperate to move out of the shared home. I’ll seek advice as you suggest- thank you.

If you amicably agree a settlement you can go ahead and sell, buy etc. I did was fine. File for the divorce online, approach a solicitor/online service to get a consent agreement written up and as soon as you get the conditional order through you can file the consent order. We only had one solicitor between us, saved a lot but there’s cheaper online sites. All items on the consent order will be percentages not absolute numbers so eg him getting 60% of sale price after all costs for example.

Judges very rarely query consent orders unless it’s incredibly unfavourable and even then will agree it if both parties explain why. You really do not need to spend money on solicitors except to write up the agreement you have decided upon

Too soon … it’s basically rubber stamped through, I doubt the judge even read ours as wasn’t in open court

Thanks @hahabahbag that’s very helpful

My Consent Order was queried by the Judge but was then agreed once the financial split was explained in extremely simple terms.

You'll need a CETV on all the pensions which can take some time to get.

We sold our house and split the proceeds and bought new houses before consent order. But we agreee 50:50 kept our own pensions, dud the divorce and financials ourselves as there was no real imbalance