Reflections and lessons from the financial negotiations in my divorce

It took seven months from starting financial negotiations with my ex to agreeing on a final figure. Here’s what happened and what I learned from going through the process.

7 min readJun 2, 2024

Having a goal put me at peace with losing my house

When I ended my marriage three years ago, my plan was to buy my ex out of our shared house. I liked my house. It had an amazing kitchen and was the first place in Edinburgh I lived that had good insulation.

However, when my ex accepted we were breaking up, he said he wanted the house. I said okay and didn’t even try to fight for it.

Above everything else, my main goal in the divorce was to legally exit the relationship as quickly and non-acrimoniously as I could. Fighting for it would get ugly and take time.

So as much as I wanted that house, I knew selling was the quickest way to get us no longer living together and I could move on with life. That realization put me at peace with the reality of losing my house.

There are rules for how to divide your money, but it was ultimately up to my ex and me to decide

Before telling my ex I wanted a divorce, I spoke to a lawyer about how the whole process works. At the time, I thought I would be buying my ex out of the house, and I wanted to know how that would work in practice and how to arrive at a number to pay him.

What I learned from my lawyer was legally, all the money we earned since being married was technically both of ours, and when you split, you divide the money ‘fairly’.

Fairly can mean different things, but if my ex and I went to court over this, fairly would almost certainly equate to 50/50.

If we worked out a financial settlement ourselves, though, it was ultimately up to us to work out how we wanted to split things.

While married, my ex and I had our own separate accounts and a joint account we paid the same amount into to cover expenses. Outside of that joint account, it was an unspoken agreement that we did what we wanted with our own money.

I went into financial negotiations with the mindset that we wouldn’t touch each other’s personal accounts. The house transfer process should be a case of paying the other person what they paid into the house, plus half of how much it had increased in value.

My ex had other ideas.

Holding my ground and dealing in facts got me closer to my desired outcome

My financial negotiations process was one of having to constantly hold my ground, get my ex to deal in facts, and wait for him to present realistic offers.

When my ex realized how much it was going to cost him to keep the house, he didn’t start the negotiations by offering an amount I was legally entitled to. He started by offering what he could pay me in cash, which was significantly less than what I was owed. He also started before speaking to a mortgage advisor to see if he could actually afford to keep the house.

I told him this wasn’t the place to start negotiation from, and he had to speak to a mortgage advisor before we negotiated further.

Once he did that and confirmed he could afford the house, he started to offer me higher amounts. They were still far off from what I was owed, but holding my ground and saying no led to him continually increasing the amount.

Another fact we had to deal with was how much value our house had generated since we bought it. After five months of dealing with assumptions of what this number could be, I finally made my ex arrange an evaluation.

Even after the valuation, my ex would not accept the market rate we were told.

He was stuck on this statement the valuator told him: the legally binding value of a property is what a mortgage provider’s surveyor would value it at, which can be 10–15% less than what the market value is.

He was not willing to consider the market value as the one we should consider because in his mind this wasn’t the ‘real’ figure. That said, the valuation did get him to accept an increase in value far higher than what he was previously assuming.

It eventually led to us shaking hands on what I felt was an acceptable deal. But sadly, it didn’t last (more on that later).

I had to strategize, but it didn’t always work

Holding my ground in negotiations was part of being strategic about the process.

Being strategic didn’t always work, though. Two months into negotiations, I told my ex he could pay me all that I paid in to the house and no more. No extra for the value the house had generated since we moved in. We were getting so close to a resolution at that point, it just seemed best if I could get what I paid in and get out as soon as possible.

He said he would think about it, and I intentionally did not chase him up for an answer. I was going to stay silent on the matter until he said something.

My reasoning for this was because I felt if I went to him, it would make me look desperate and he’d try to get me to agree to less than what I was owed.

If I said nothing and he came to me, he’d look like the desperate one and he’d be more likely to agree to my number, or I’d have a case to ask for more.

This strategy backfired, though. For three months, my ex did not respond to me about my offer. For three months, we did not discuss the matter at all. We just carried on living separate lives sharing a house together.

That said, the period of silence allowed me to restrategize for my own benefit. When my ex finally broke the silence and asked to resume negotiations, I told him we would be doing that on a timescale that suited me. By that point, it made sense for me to delay moving out due to an upcoming trip where I’d be in the US for six weeks.

That new strategy ended up working, and I was able to get my ex to agree to me moving out when I came back from my trip.

Differing financial habits cost me in the end

Remember that acceptable deal I mentioned? It didn’t last because there were some facts we hadn’t yet dealt with: how much we each had in savings.

I had an estimate going into negotiations of how much my ex had in savings, and I factored that in when negotiating. It was only a week after the acceptable deal my ex told me what that amount actually was. Seven months after starting negotiations, he had finally spoken to a lawyer of his own and was advised to not agree to the deal we shook hands on.

I knew I had a lot more in savings than my ex. I’m very much a saver, and he was very much a spender. Turns out, he had even less money than I was expecting.

I started negotiations thinking we’d each respect each other’s personal savings as their own. As negotiations dragged on, though, it became clear he wasn’t going to do that and he had the law on his side.

So in the end, he paid me less than what I paid into the house. It wasn’t exactly half my savings he factored in to his total (I managed to get him to reduce what he claimed somewhat). But it was most of it.

You need to be financially aligned with a partner

The biggest lesson from my negotiations experience is you need to be aligned with your partner in your views on how you deal with money in your relationship and what you would want to happen financially if you break up. And you protect yourself by putting those stipulations in a legal document.

We never drafted and signed a prenup when we got married, which is the greatest regret of my life.

There were a few reasons I never got one. One, the UK’s inhumane immigration system led to me getting married at 22. While the idea of a prenup did briefly cross my mind, I thought that having one might negatively affect a spousal visa application because it might not make our relationship look genuine.

I don’t know if the Home Office would have had a way of knowing if we had a prenup or if it would come across negatively. This might have been an unfounded fear. But it just goes to show you how much fear that process instilled in me.

Another reason I didn’t pursue a prenup was because at 22, I didn’t think of the savings I would one day have, and I didn’t realize my ex and I handled money so differently.

I also didn’t know I was marrying someone who would act the way he did during this process.

I don’t care how much you love your partner or how reasonable a person you think they are.

You don’t know what your break-up is going to be like if it happens. You don’t know what your partner will be like in that process.

Always prepare for the fact that one day you and your partner might not like each other. If you don’t, you might find out the hard way like me why you should have.

The divorce series

This is post three in my series of divorce blogs, following my previous two:

In my next post, I will share how lawyers made the legal process of transferring my house to my ex take six months.