Divorce & separation

Why us?

Divorce and separation represents a significant lifestyle and financial change, one that leaves many people asking ”what do I do?” and “will I be okay?”.

We regularly help clients answer these questions by advising on financial matters both during and after their divorce. So much so, that we have designed two specific services to help people get in the strongest financial position possible, combining financial planning and investment advice with our unique experience of helping with divorce cases.

Our two services are:

  1. Know before you ask, and

  2. Understand before you accept.

“What’s so unique about you?”, we hear you ask. Great question. For the best part of a decade, Peter has helped with hundreds of divorce cases, either by:

  • Preparing Expert Witness reports

  • Acting as a Shadow Expert

  • Attending and supporting Mediation

  • Acting as a Financial Neutral in ‘one lawyer’ cases

  • Answering one-off questions from lawyers and their clients

  • Providing pensions and financial training to many law firms, including an online seminar attended by over 100 legal advisers.

Very few Financial Advisers, let alone Independent Financial Advisers, can match our experience in this space.

1. Know before you ask

  • Before starting any pension negotiations, it’s crucial to know exactly what you have and disclose that information accurately. We’ll help by reviewing your pensions, ensuring you and your solicitor understand all the key details, including any hidden guarantees or valuable benefits that might be tucked away in your pension contracts.

  • We will discuss the pension sharing process with you and prepare some indicative calculations to help you understand the likely outcome of different scenarios (e.g., what might happen if we choose to split the pensions based on equality of capital value, or equality of income at age X). This will help you start to understand your future pension position.

  • This is one of the main benefits of our ‘know before you ask service’.

    Your solicitor will send a letter of instruction to the pensions Expert Witness to request a pension sharing report. In that letter, they will ask for different types of calculations and different scenarios.

    Building on the work we have done in steps 1 and 2, we will help prepare the letter of instruction by suggesting specific questions to include that we believe will help you towards a favourable outcome.

  • Pension Sharing Report are often 40+ pages long and full of relatively complicated issues.

    We have reviewed hundreds of these reports so can quickly and simply distill the main issues for you, sharing our thoughts in a meeting with your solicitor, a summary note, or even a recorded video.

    If we spot any mistakes in the report, or think there are follow-up questions you should ask, we will suggest those, too.

  • By law, pension providers can take up to four months to implement a pension sharing order.

    Usually, by understanding the various schemes’ requirements (and having a plan in place before the pension sharing orders are made) we can help speed up this process so you receive funds sooner.

Pensions can be very complicated to deal with on divorce. Luckily, as a Pensions on Divorce Expert (PODE), there are lots of ways we can help you and your solicitor achieve a good pensions outcome.

Our ‘know before you ask’ service will help you avoid the common mistakes most people make when dealing with pensions on divorce, and help you to get a really good pensions outcome.

The service includes:

Please note that we are not authorised to provide legal advice and nothing we say can be interpreted as such.

The help we will provide during your divorce is for guidance purposes only and must be discussed with your solicitor.

Pension sharing is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

2. Understand before you accept

It is important that you understand how much you need from the financial settlement in order to maintain your lifestyle. Our cashflow modelling service (which we call ‘understand before you accept’) is the perfect way to project your future financial requirements and test whether any offers made are capable of meeting your long-term needs.

This service will help you to identify what you need from your divorce to be financially secure throughout your lifetime.

It will allow you to properly assess any offers received (or that you intend to make) so you can make fully informed decisions and feel confident about your financial future.

There is a lot of overlap between our ‘understand before you accept’ service and our normal Financial Planning process. To start with, we will spend time discussing:

  1. Your spending and how that may change throughout your lifetime.

  2. Any existing income sources (and how they may change),

  3. Your existing assets, such as property, cash, investments, pensions etc., and

  4. The proposed settlement.

Next, using our own cashflow modelling tools, we will show you what your financial future may look like and importantly, what your probability of success is.

Predicting the future is impossible, so our software runs 1,000 random simulations which we can then use to gauge the probability of an offer meeting your needs. In turn, we can then confidently tell you, either:

  1. The proposed settlement should meet your needs, or

  2. We think you may need £X more to be financially secure.

You can then return to the negotiations armed with the information you need to make good choices.

A glimpse into your future….

This is the sort of analysis we can provide for you and your solicitor.

…and don’t worry, we will take time to explain these charts to you and make sure you understand what our analysis is showing.

Please note that we cannot negotiate directly on your behalf.

Our role is to support you and your solicitor by providing financial context to proposed offers. We cannot be held responsible for any decisions you choose to make following our input.

Cashflow modelling is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

3. Moving on

…A third service? But you said there were only two!

Where possible we prefer to be involved in the divorce process from an early stage, as this gives us the best opportunity to add real value to you and your solicitor. However, we accept there will be times when this is not possible or necessary, but you may still need help with things like:

  • Implementing pension sharing orders,

  • Investing cash sums,

  • Setting up an income plan, and

  • Organising appropriate life cover.

We are very happy to help with matters like this towards the end of your divorce, so please feel free to contact us directly.

We are a proud member of Resolution, which is a community of family justice professionals who work with families and individuals to resolve issues in a constructive way.

Peter is a Resolution Accredited Specialist and his page on their website is available here:

(This link will open in a new browser window. Enbrook Wealth Ltd has no control over the content of third-party websites)

https://resolution.org.uk/members/peter-turnbull/