The aim of the Site.
To help divorcing couples reach financial agreement more easily by learning from past cases. By seeing how others settled their differences we hope it will shorten the time taken to reach agreement, reduce the acrimony and keep legal bills under control. Solicitors are used to write up your agreement rather than negotiate it for you. For those who’ve already spent a considerable sum of money on legal advice it’s an opportunity to let others benefit from your knowledge of the process whilst steadily recovering your costs.
How can your experience help others?
The most expensive divorces, in terms of legal costs, are the ones that go all the way to a Final Hearing. When agreement can’t be reached it’s because one or both parties are being unrealistic. Your experience could demonstrate to an awkward party that they need to adjust their expectations or risk an award for costs against them. “It is possible to obtain a costs order against a party but only when they have been unreasonable such as when they fail to accept an open offer which is then deemed to be reasonable at a later date.” – a legally qualified person.
Some realities.
There are around 80,000 “first divorces” per year in the U.K. First divorces are often the most acrimonious with emotions running high. 54% of couples in the age range of 45 – 54 have a household wealth over £300,000 and 17% of them in excess of £1 million. The most common age bracket for divorce is 45 to 49. (Office for National Statistics.)
Are there really any similarities between one divorce and another?
At any given time there are probably in excess of 200,000 divorces “on the go” in the U.K, how many are truly unique? Some will have the children’s interests to consider and others won’t but in the vast majority of cases people fill in all the same boxes on their Form E’s. On average 80% of a family’s wealth lies in the marital home and pensions, 10% in savings and investments and the remaining 10% in physical assets such as cars, home contents, golf clubs and jewellery. (Office for National Statistics.)
The solution,
The aim of the Site is to create a reference library of anonymised past divorces. One or both parties in a divorce can purchase documents relevant to their situation and get a clear idea of an acceptable, sensible agreement.
The benefit to you for helping others.
Contributing to the database takes less than 30 minutes of your time, costs nothing and could give you a very useful extra income stream. Every time your entry is downloaded by any of the 4000 people per week who commence divorce proceedings you’ll get paid from £71.50 up to £444 depending on the value of your documents. Please email us at admin@divorceactually.co.uk if you’re interested in finding out what your database entry could be worth to others.
No two divorces are the same.
Compare a divorce with buying a house; they can both be eye-wateringly expensive and no two are identical. When you purchased your current home how long did it take you to agree the price? You probably checked on Rightmove, Zoopla etc, to find similar properties in that area, checked historical sales values against the asking price, made some allowances for the fact that one had a slightly bigger garden but the other had a double garage etc, then if the price seemed sensible, you went ahead, right? That research probably took you no more than an evening or at most a day. If none of the background and comparative information was available to you, would you have proceeded so quickly and easily? Even a couple trying to keep legal bills to a minimum and go through mediation need to satisfy themselves the settlement is fair and reasonable.
Has anything like this been done before?
The concept isn’t new, there are already websites that have searchable databases with every type of court hearing and judgement such as Bailii.org. They tend to have the more newsworthy cases such as Sir Paul McCartney’s and Heather Mills’ divorce, so if your circumstances are similar to theirs you don’t need this website, just follow the link and see what the Judge ordered in their case.
Thanks for taking the time to visit the website. I hope you’re interested in creating yourself another income opportunity. If there’s anything you’d like to know please get in touch and we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible. We’d also like to hear any thoughts or suggestions for improvement you may have. Please email us at admin@divorceactually.co.uk or use our “Contact” page.