Helping with your divorce

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, I hear you ask. Good question. In the past 8+ years, 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

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 includes:

  • Before you enter into any negotiations on pensions, it is very important that you fully understand and accurately disclose what you have. We will conduct a full review of your pensions, making sure you and your solicitor understand all the important aspects of your pensions, including any hidden guarantees or other valuable benefits that may be buried within 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 is the letter that your solicitor will send to the Expert Witness to request a pension sharing report. We will help with the drafting of the letter of instruction by suggest questions to include. This is the main benefit of our ‘know before you ask service’: if we know the likely outcome of different pension sharing scenarios, we know the best questions to include in the Letter of Instruction to get a good outcome for you and move the needle in your favour.

  • 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, either 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.

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.

There is a lot of overlap between our ‘understand before you accept’ service and our normal Financial Planning process. We will need to spend time reviewing and 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.

Using our own cashflow modelling tools, we can then show you what your financial future may look like and give you a percentage figure that represents the likelihood of success, i.e., based on the proposed settlement, we can show you how likely is it that your will be able to meet your spending needs without running out of money.

This means we can review offers for you and advise whether a) they are capable of meeting your needs or b) how much more you may need.

In turn, this allows you to make fully informed choices and feel confident about your financial future.

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:

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

(This link will open in a new browser window).