Divorce Form E and the appendix to Form E:

What Form E does is paint a broad picture of your assets. These are normally your cash (including savings and shares), your house and your pension.

Filling out your Form E is quite straightforward and obviously where possible you will be putting down that you own as little as possible. It is a waste of money to pester your solicitors with questions about what you should enter and how much etc. Your house value is what an estate agent thinks it is (you can shop around for low estimates) minus remaining mortgage and 2-3% selling costs.

Your pension provider will give you a free print-out of what you have put by (keep it safe, because most providers will charge for a second print-out). Certainly the sections on Form E about how much you need to live on in the future are almost laughable. If you have said you want to see your kids then the Court must grant you sufficient income to enable you to care for them in that time you have them. Obviously if you say do you never want to see your kids again then there is a good chance that you will end in a rented bed-sit for the rest of your life while your ex milks your salary at source. So now is a very good time to buy a new house:

The chances are that you are being chucked out of “the marital home” (i.e. your house that you have looked after, repaired and tended for years) so you need to quickly find a reasonable abode with one bedroom for you and a bedroom each for the children, the mortgage for this will be a large part of your “reasonable expenditure” in the future. Without this a large part of your income is in danger!

After your house, your pension is probably your most significant asset – or it was! But as from now it is no longer yours! You will have to give it to her (just as you did with your house). There are 3 possibilities:

• Your and your ex’s pensions are either equal or negligible. In this case money will be offset: Offsetting is where you have for example £50,000 Cash Equivalent Transfer Value (CETV) in your pension fund and your ex has £10.000 CETV, then your pension will remain untouched and half the difference, £20.000, will be treated as if it were cash (i.e. you will lose that amount on your other assets, house, car savings etc). This is tough because what you lose is “soft” money (because you never know that you’ll get it) but becomes 1:1 her hard cash to use right now.
• The second is a pension sharing order. In this case the pension provider is instructed by the court to take half (or whatever percent) of your pension savings out of your account and put it in her account. Clearly this is a reasonable and humane thing to do if both of you are 55 and you have a million pounds whilst she has nothing. This gives both of you a chance to have some financial support in your old age. Where it falls down is if your much younger wife has run off, so she is taking half of your life’s pension savings whilst still retaining the ability to save up on her own account. Most people would find it unfair that the wife runs off leaving the man an impoverished pensioner whilst the younger wife has prospects of retiring on a much higher pension than him.
• The third possibility is “earmarking”; Earmarking should solve the problem of the mans impoverishment in old age and the woman’s bounty, but it is hardly used, because the courts don’t like it (they prefer “clean break”, even where the man is shafted (presumably cleanly shafted) and the pension providers don’t like it because some expensive actuaries have to be mobilized to work out the figures. In principle earmarking is fair, and entails the man getting pension payments from the ex-wife’s fund when she retires. The disadvantage is that this motivates many ex-wives to continue working -getting part of your ex’s pension may seem lucrative but it is not if you have to wait until you are 85 to do it. Paradoxically that should boost its popularity because not many ex-wives will have to pay, and then not for very long.