Separated but living in the same house

[notasausage]

If you’ve separated but remain living in the same house for practical or parenting responsibilities what does that actually mean in reality? Neither of us can afford to take on the house alone and we have 2 teen DC and a few outside animals that our current property allows us to keep. Things are currently amicable and we have separate bedrooms. Is it just a case of separating our finances? Will it affect a divorce further down the line?

If you’ve separated but stayed in the same house any tips/advice would be much appreciated.

I did with exH but we didn’t have children (and it was for only just over a year rather than long term).

We separated our finances and put a legal financial separation agreement in place - this agreement was then used in the divorce proceedings to show how long we’d been separated as well as to settle the finances on the divorce. We still ran a joint credit card for communal things, still shopped, booked and ate together.

The financial separation in our case involved me buying him out of the house though - I assume yours will mean owning an agreed portion of the house each?

I had a very helpful chat with a bank manager who explained that as soon as she heard that we were separated she was supposed to freeze things on the joint account, but I reassured her it was all amicable so she agreed just to cancel the overdraft and set up separate sole-name accounts for both of us and gave us time to transfer direct debits and money into those.

I’d suggest that (if you can) you lay out some ground rules between you to stick to if things get tough and try to think through difficult scenarios before you get to them. What happens if either of you start dating for example? Will you both be spending weekends together? (We generally did different things to each other at weekends but made sure one or other was around for the cat).

Happy to answer any questions although I appreciate that without kids involved, my situation was a lot more straightforward.