Now is not the right time for me to petition for a divorce but that time will come in the next year or so.
H will not go to relate or even talk about divorce or the state of our marriage except to throw some accusation at me about how it's my fault because I should do X or be more Y and that I'm a rubbish, short cutting, lazy mother. I'm not going to go into details to more than prove otherwise to you guys but I have confidence in myself and my ability to raise the children in much the same fashion as I am doing now but with H living somewhere else and having pretty much unlimited access. The strain of not having to keep up a friendly show with him every day, for the children's sake will be a blessed relief.
As soon as H realises how serious I am that this is going to happen I am 99.9% sure that he will make life very difficult for me in achieving that goal. He has in the past given me the impression that he will pay the minimum he can get away with as he knows that I earn a good salary even taking childcare costs into account (which he considers to be my costs alone ). I know he will make me go through the CSA and delay things as much as possible, he has talked about this having been a good tactic of one of his work colleagues. He will nitpick and wriggle every step of the way, knowing that the children are not suffering financially as I can pretty well support them myself. The thing that will suffer will be my long term financial position as I will be using all my earnings to support us whilst he is able to save and make pension payments etc etc.
At the moment I deal with all of our financial stuff which is all in joint names except one ISA in his sole name, H barely looks at our monthly bank statement, our mortgage will be paid off in about 2 years. He leaves all of the household stuff to me, DIY, tradesmen, finance, getting the cars serviced etc. just expects it to get done and moans when it isn't sorted out. I wouldn't mind but I work outside the home too.
It would therefore be easy for me to start planning financially for his siege mentality kicking in when I start divorce proceedings in a year or so.
I feel that morally repugnant as it is to be even thinking of doing this, it is something that will enable me to let his warlike attitude to a divorce and ensuing financial siege mentality tactics wash over me when "the smelly brown stuff hits the poor mans air conditioning". I will be calmer and less mentally consumed over the whole battle which must be better for the children, no ?
Unless he would reconsider serious relate sessions, our marriage is dead so the trusting each other issue is somewhat irrelevant.
I have so far only thought about substantially raising my personal pension contributions which come from our joint acount and opening a secret savings account into which I pay as much cash as I think won't be missed from the joint account, over the next year or so.
So, what else can I do ? I realise that this all sounds money grabbing and horrible but if only I could show people his daily verbal treatment of me and undermining comments and behaviour which would have sent a mousy sort of lady over the edge by now, plus the aggressive language and domineering/argumentative/nitpicking attitude over everything, you would understand where I am coming from although possibly not my decision to stick it out for possibly 18 months to 2 years. I believe that sooner or later it will be more and more noticeable to the children so I have a limit on how long I can keep up the facade as I don't want them to be affected by this any more than necessary although I realise that there are never any guarantees over that.
If you've read all of this, thanks
Any suggestions for more planning tactics, finacial or otherwise ?