Making Your Divorce Pension Settlement Fairer

Going through a divorce can be a difficult and stressful time. Your priority may have been staying in the family home, keeping a roof over your children’s heads or just wanting to see it through quickly to move on with your life. Whatever your priorities were at the time, what is often overlooked in divorce settlements is often the most valuable asset in a marriage; the pension.

If you were a stay-at-home mum bringing up the children whilst your ex-husband worked in the civil sector, getting to keep the house and giving up your right to his pension may have been an attractive option at the time but you may be selling yourself short when it comes to your future. Is it right that you have gaps in your entitlement to the state pension by staying at home looking after the children whilst your ex retires on a pension of say £10,000 per year?

Your divorce solicitor should investigate your ex-husband’s pension and advise about what exactly you are giving up. Courts have the power to order a Pension Sharing Order which is where your ex’s pension is split so that a proportion of the pension (and the benefits of that pension,) is transferred into your name as if you were a fully-fledged member of the same pension scheme. Even if your solicitor did investigate your ex’s pension, calculating how much that asset is worth is not an easy task and unfortunately, many divorce solicitors get it wrong. Many advise their clients simply to split the pension pots rather than the income on retirement. What you could be getting could be in the hundreds of thousands… maybe more than what the family home which you got to keep is worth.

If you were divorced after 2003 and are unsure if the pension provisions in your divorce was dealt with properly, give me a call on 0800 612 5069 and I can look into your file and let you know whether you could be entitled to more. There is no contact with your ex-husband at all. I will simply look to see whether your divorce solicitor has properly valued what the pension is worth and if not, then we look to recover from them what you should have gotten. Unlike your divorce proceedings, we offer this service on an entirely ‘no win, no fee’ basis.

May Lee
Associate, Irvings Law