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The practical steps that need to be considered following a relationship breakdown or separation can depend on where you are married or unmarried, and whether you have children together or not.
Children matters
If you and your ex-partner have children together, you will need to think about what the child arrangements are going to be once you and your partner begin to live separately from one another. Usually it’s best to have a fixed routine in place. You can consider entering into a voluntary parenting plan, which can be beneficial to set out your agreements in a written document. You can download a blank parenting plan from Cafcass’s website and complete it with your partner together.
If you are not in a position to discuss maters directly with your ex-partner, you can consider attending mediation so that a mediator can help facilitate your discussions. Alternative you can instruct solicitors to send proposals to your ex-partner on your behalf.
There is no need for a court order to be in place if you can agree the child arrangements between yourselves, but if the arrangements are controversial and require the court to make a determination then you can apply to the court for a child arrangements order.
There should also be consideration given to child maintenance payments. You can assess the level of maintenance required by visiting the child maintenance website.
Financial matters
There will be financial implications of separating from a partner, whether you are married or unmarried. Some immediate things to think about are access to joint bank accounts and making sure neither of you can make the accounts become overdrawn, as this would impact both of you.
If you are married you will need to think about your financial claims against one another income, capital and pensions. However if you are unmarried, you do not have these same claims and your entitlements will stem more to do with property ownership and who owns any properties according to the Land Registry title documents.
Married couples have more financial claims to explore and the outcome of these financial claims can be depend on a variety of factoring including overarching fairness. The court can depart from whose legal name assets are held in, in order to achieve a fair result overall. Some spouses may find themselves receiving more or less than 50% of the overall assets depending on the circumstances and we have written a separate blog post about that topic.
Other practical arrangements
Following a relationship breakdown a practical arrangement to think about is updating your Will if it makes provision for your ex-partner. You should also consider updating the death in service nominations that you have on any pensions or life insurance policies, if your ex-parter was named as the beneficiary and if you no longer wish that to be the case.
Conclusion
There is a lot to think about following a relationship breakdown and we would encourage you to meet with one of our expert family law solicitors to help you to navigate through the process. If you wish to discuss your situation or any issues raised in this blog our family solicitors are based in Wolverhampton, Cradley Heath and Sutton Coldfield and serve clients across the West Midlands. For all new enquiries, please call 01902 328 355 or complete our online enquiry form and a member of our team will respond.