Home comfort is not always best when dealing with divorce

Women often have an emotional attachment to the family home when dealing with divorce but this can have disastrous financial consequences.

In my experience, women often ignore the question of their partner’s pension and, understandably, focus on the family home which provides security at a very difficult time even though it may not be the right thing to do for their long term financial health.

At True Financial Design we recently helped a 50-year-old stay-at-home Mum with two children, 15 and 18, who was getting divorced from her 55-year-old husband. She had no experience of investment and was understandably worried about making poor decisions about her finances. The family lived in a £1.5m house with a £400,000 mortgage and her heart was telling her to remain in the property until the children had completed university in around 8 years time.

We examined the issues she faced and using our Visualise your Financial Future system came up with some possible solutions. The first option was to stay in the family home and ignore any share of her husband’s pension. Choosing this path meant she would take on the whole mortgage plus the running costs and could struggle to maintain her standard of living in retirement.

The second option was to split everything 50-50 with half the pension income in retirement and half of the equity in property. This option would mean short term disruption, however, it would give her the ability to live within her means, keep outgoings to a minimum without a mortgage and give the children peace of mind that their mother would be financially safe.

In her own words, our Visualize programme meant she could see that remaining in the family home would mean her being “ screwed” financially. “By sharing everything 50-50 we were able to show that she would receive £550,000 to buy a house in addition to the future pension income.”

As a result of this advice, our client said that rather than feeling “ in the dark” about how to deal with her situation, the process we followed had given her a clear vision of her financial future and the comfort of being armed with the full facts to make this very important choice.

At True Financial Design we offer a free discovery call which you can book via our website or on 01423 297077.