Family home - wife is planning to leave/separate and a create a new family home

ManTheLight78

Hi all,

To cut to the point, my wife is shortly going to be approaching me to ask me to sign that a buy-to let property she is buying (she doesn't know that I know about this and she has not told me) to leave me will not be our family home in the future.

From meeting with a solicitor yesterday, he advised that I cooperate and sign yet at the same token she can put in a claim for approx. 50% against our family home if we get divorced.

I find this absurd as a logic given I have had all the risks and rewards of ownership since day 1 with significant positive equity built up. She can take half of my property in divorce and own a new one which I have effectively no entitlement to.

Please let me know your thoughts,

MTL78

Background

I am going to be sharing more about the martial struggles I have gone through and in particular coercive control I have experienced and caused by my wife and mother-in-law living with us full time while bringing up a stepdaughter and our own daughter.

However, coercive control may get brushed aside give that my wife is planning to take out a buy-to-let mortgage in her own name. Effectively giving her a clean slate!

The property is in my name and I have owned it for 6 years prior to the relationship starting with my wife. I pay the mortgage and all associated house costs (appliances, maintenance, utility bills etc.), she pays for kids private school, clothes some of the food etc.

Xterminator

hi op

if i understand this correctly, you and your wife share a home. she owns it as much as you, and vice versa, as thats what marriage is.

she is planning to buy a new house and pay for it herself, and you think she should surrender all interest in the family home? Are you barking mad or have i got the scenario wrong? or perhaps you owned the house before you got married? is she using your money for the deposit on the new house? what ae the circumstances that make you wife not an equal beneficiary of the family home?

You need to put yourself in her shoes and ask why should she surrender her interest in the family home? surely as a married coupe all risks and reward were shared. And its not your property, its the family property.

her past behavior however objectionable is irrelevant, as in Ireland we have a 'no fault' divorce to avoid extra acrimony in divorce proceedings, eg proving infidelity or unreasonable behavior etc is unnecessary. so to bring that up does not change the situation, however sad your situation is. Now i don't want to come unsympathetic, but put simply the law does not care about your feelings.

marriage and divorce is contract law.

ManTheLight78

Thanks for taking the time to reply, I'm not barking mad but you do seem to have missed where I said "I have owned it for 6 years prior to the relationship starting with my wife" ie. yes I owned the house before I got married.

She is not using my money as she has no access to it (she wouldn't use a joint account we setup for finances) and is using her savings and the wicked step mother's recent inheritance and the mother in law's own recent divorce settlement from a previous marriage (the irony). My wife was also previously married - a bit of a history and experience in this you might say! I agreed to her mother living with us following a further failed relationship she had as she couldn't find anywhere to live with no life savings at the time and I was told that she would not interfere in the relationship with my wife (which was true at the start...) but it's a case of the tortoise carrying the scorpion on his back across the water.

She is also going to be able to put a claim in on my pension property for which I had to ask her to sign a non-family home declaration. Oh and I lose half of the pension's value supposedly as well in divorce even though it relates to a period of employment long before I met her).

My wife can demonstrate and is doing so by her purchase of the property in her own name that she had and has no need for my property as I have paid the lions share of expenses in the family whilst she has squirrelled savings away over the years. But I'll be essentially adding to her savings by handing over half.

I am very tempted to seek an exclusion order for the coercive control yet it is going to be mired in lack of evidence, time (given the imminent clean slate she is going to have) and the legal system pushing for it to be demonstrably strong / bordering on domestic abuse. Imagine having a child (4 years and six months old) and only being able to take them to the local shops 3 times in their lifetime for absolutely no apparent reason other than control... that would be enough to drive anyone (yet alone a deeply loving father) barking mad as you say!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118544949#Comment_118544949

Is your solicitor a family law solicitor?

I know you said on your thread on Personal Issues that he is your solicitor for a long time and he is a straight talker, but in a complicated case like yours, you're going to need someone who is an expert in the field.

Might be no harm to seek a second opinion. I wouldn't be signing anything.

No blame divorce or not I was under the impression that on divorce the Judge looks at the effort and time invested so that a 20 year marriage ending is not treated the same as a 3 year marriage.

laoisgem

As with the other thread created by the OP, people are forgetting that there has been no inclination of a separation/divorce, just the OP's paranoia because his wife wants to buy another property 🤷‍♀️

Atlantic Dawn

She will take you for half your money too, joint account or not.

ManTheLight78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118554154#Comment_118554154

You always hit the nail on the head! My solicitor practises extensively in Family Law. He also practises in Personal Injury, Commercial and Succession Act Litigation. I questioned him on the coercive control side as he keeps trying to tell me the outcome without exploring fully the circumstances that I have found myself in. I did ask him in the first meeting whether he had experience in coercive control cases and he responded by telling me he practically lives in the family courts with 35 years of experience but yet in our recent meeting he said that 'coercive control is a relatively new area' when I asked about going to An Garda Síochána. Vicki Buckley, a solicitor from Cork, has some great You Tube videos on the topic of coercive control and I had a great conversation with her but didn't pursue it due to wanting to look at other areas of law which she does not cover as well e.g. complex will making and property law etc. It's also that niggling voice telling me that a solicitor may want to string this out for legal costs whereas at least my current solicitor has been frank about not wanting me to spend more money than I need to by accepting the legal system as it is.

Your solicitor does sound very experienced. It's a lot to think about.

I think myself I would be leaning towards following his advice - it's a case of deciding where your limit is, and where to cut your losses. I do fully understand your concerns though, considering the actions of your wife and her mother in relation to the coercive control, and the children. Without bringing that to the case, you are unlikely to achieve your goal of sole custody.

You mentioned your wife was divorced once before. Do you know who her solicitor was, and did they get her the outcome she wanted? In other words, is she likely to use them again?

It might be worth letting your solicitor know if you can, as he most likely will know what kind of solicitor they are, what strategies they use, if you know what I mean. It's all a game of chess!

Henry Ford III

It's all down to what might be agreed between the parties, or failing that what a judge might decide.

The children will need somewhere to live, and so will the Dad.

In my experience who paid for what, who "owns" the equity in a house(s), and who bought and funded any other assets are all secondary issues.

The OP has been beaten down by his overly assertive wife here I think, and needs to regain some strength and respect. Not easy.