‘Mary’ separated from her husband after 26 years. ‘John’ moved out of the family home and in with his mother and as things progressed with the separation it became clear that John had been financially abusive over several years, accessing accounts without Mary’s knowledge, misappropriating funds, and then cutting her off financially, making it difficult to access legal help. I had several coaching sessions with Mary to discuss child arrangements and her progress through financial separation.
Fast forward 6 months and this was the email I received from Mary:
Hi Caron
Thought you might like to know that I had my FDR yesterday and I did much better than I might have hoped for! He is now unemployed, and has increasing debts and is being threatened with breach of confidentiality for his last contract, which was cut short after 4 weeks due to his unprofessional behaviour! I thought he would milk me for every penny therefore – both of the house and in terms of assets/savings.
The day before, he replied to my questions about his bank statements, he revealed he’s helped himself to over £15k of our children’s savings, so he was clearly desperate for money.
I thought my ex would be really aggressive and unwilling to negotiate, but in fact he was incredibly easy to negotiate with. I thought he’d force me to sell the house and argue for a majority share, but he offered 50:50 on the house, and the judge said she expected it to be 50:50. He also claimed he had good earning potential so he would envisage getting a mortgage.
In his offer to me, he had asked for pension sharing, but the judge said he was unrealistic expecting to retire at 60, so it needed to be at 67 years (this was my favourite option).
I’d done loads of work on the value of his watches, so on Tuesday this week, I’d submitted my evidence saying they were worth almost £200k! He then managed to respond with various pieces of evidence the very next day (having refused to do this for the last 6 months) and offered to agree the value at £110k- we settled on £130k.
My barrister said it would cost him circa £20k to go to final hearing about the disputed ’stealing of his money’ that I was apparently guilty of (I took 50% of the joint savings), so that was pushed aside as an argument.
Then because he wanted to keep all his watches (which I couldn’t care less about), I got to keep all my savings, he was happy to accept slightly less from my pension, and he’s paying full cost for the pension sharing order.
All in all, I’m rather surprised and find it hard to believe that it was so easy in the end. I can now apply for the final divorce, which will be a relief! I can begin to look forward to the next chapter in my life now.
So, you see it is not always as difficult as you might imagine, sometimes even a controlling ex can end up being reasonable – especially if it is going to save them money.
If you need support around financial separation please get in touch.
