NC for this post, in case anyone recognises me from description ...
Split with long term partner (15+ years, unmarried) 18 months or so ago, and am having very un-fun shenanigans over the financial shakedown. For various reasons we didn’t actually manage to sell our very large, old, flat till this summer. At that point, he bought a new flat, and I did the same. His came furnished as the previous owner was BTL investor and the vendor wanted it that way. We have our three children for exactly equal portions of the week.
When it came to time to sell old place, he said he wanted/ could take very few of the possessions & furniture. Lots of our stuff was at the end of its life – think 13 year old sofa and 9-year-old bed although some of the appliances were newer. I did want the bed and have offered to allow £1,000 against that even though it is fairly old and has seen 3 co-sleeping kids through (!) because I said I wanted it, and that seemed fair to me.
So, I had to take the majority of stuff with me, to clear the old place out to enable the rather rushed sale. We had exactly one week’s notice of simultaneous exchange and completion date, and so selling unwanted stuff online wasn’t really an option. I have the lion’s share of the guff in my new (smaller) flat now, and he is having to buy new things for his place.
His sol has apparently advised him to cost all our joint possessions on a new-for-old basis, and ask me to, essentially, settle up with him on that basis. Initially he suggested that this meant that I should pay him slightly over £5,000.
I think this is mad, and have offered for him to come and take half the things he says he will have to re-purchase (like sofa etc….) to even things up, but I’ve not heard anything on that so far.
It rankles because I didn’t want most of the possessions either. I said at the outset that I would like to split the possession equally when it came to moving time, if we couldn’t sell them, to avoid exactly this situation of one having to pay the other lots for second-hand goods. That didn’t fly.
He won’t communicate verbally with me on this at all (or in fact on anything much) and I suspect is running everything past his solicitor, the wally – it’s going to cost him a fortune.
I don’t have a sol, I don’t want one apart from to witness the settlement agreement I never wanted in the first place (!): there’s nothing in it for me, at all. I have no legal entitlement to anything apart from half the equity in the house (which thankfully I got in the end, after a bit of a tussle). Surely one of the few benefits of separating when not married is that you don’t need lawyers to get divorced and seek financial orders etc?! I’d much rather spend the money on a nice holiday to recover from all this arsing about or a new sofa!
He’s also expecting me to suck up the majority of the removal costs out of the old place because ‘he did his himself to save money’. I’ve pointed out that the only reason he could do that is because he elected to take very little with him, leaving mostly me alone to arrange for the emptying of the flat and moving all the stuff into temporary storage.
I’d like to throw this open to the MN jury to say whether I’m right to say, actually, no, buster: I’m not giving you the new value of the stuff you didn’t want, so you can have new stuff, and I get the old stuff you rejected! And… how the actual hell do I get this resolved? I just want to move on, and not have the threat of ‘owing’ him gazillions hanging over me.
I left him, btw, and I think this is part of the issue - in his mind, he isn't letting me 'get away' with anything thank you very much ;).....