Hi,
This is a question on behalf of a friend whose Decree Absolute has recently come through. She has a child with her ex who is in primary school.
She made a financial settlement with her husband and was intent all the way through to be as fair as possible and to come out with integrity.
I think this is fine in principle, but only if both parties want to be scrupulously honest and fair. If only one of them does and the other wants to play dirty then to my mind there is only one outcome - the 'fair' one gets shafted. Which is what I think certainly happened in this case.
My friend even dropped the first solicitor she hired because the lawyer was too aggressive. This is a measure of how 'reasonable' she wanted to be.
However, her ex was not interested in 'fair'. He was mainly interested in keeping as much money out of the settlement as possible. I am sure he lied outright on his 'E' form, and moved large sums of money around many accounts in order to hide it from my friend's solicitor. While my friend was being as open as she could, the ex was burying money like a squirrel and in the process severely limit his child's life chances by defrauding his ex-wife.
He kept the house, most of their possessions, the swanky car etc. Instead of having to re-mortgage the house to pay her off, which is what he claimed he would have to do, he somehow found another £100k in cash to avoid it.
There is also a legacy implication - his remaining parent is extremely ill and likely to die very soon. When that happens he will likely inherit over a million pounds. He seemed anxious to expedite the divorce as soon as he could, probably it seems to me, to make sure it went through before he inherited.
Does anyone know if the settlement has to be final? Can a big inheritance shortly after the divorce move the goalposts after the fact? Can you factor in important questions such as paying for the child's education which, alarmingly, seems to have been left out of negotiations up to this point?
Many thanks.