How should separating couples divide things?

jimmmy

If a couple decide to split assets of the personal home 50 : 50 ( luckily it does not affect me ), how best is it done?

Lets assume both have items of joint monetary and sentimental value accululated over many years. Would it be best to make out a list of items eg television, dvd, painting, antique , stereo, ornament A, ornament B, ornament C, coffee table, telescope, book collection, household tools, picture album A, picture album B etc and then the 2 people involved take turns picking items ? ( "you pick something, I pick something, you pick something, I pick something" etc and so on ) . Or should a valuer pick out items over say 50 euro and list them ? It may be hard to value some items eg the painting and the antique ( which cost about 200 pounds ten years ago but is mostly of sentimental value and which they may both want ) ? The couple do not get on . If both people listed items they wanted from the house its likely the same items would be near the top on both lists. The contents of the house have to be split.

Sorry if this is not the correct forum but someone must have experience like this before + know the best thing to do ?

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Victor

There are many methods. Proper advice should be sought by both parties and each party should ensure hte other party has adequate advise to discourage a challenge to the agreement.

First of all it needs to be decided who owns what individually, e.g. clothes and what is owned jointly, eg. house. An accurate list needs to be created.

Dividing cash should be relatively easy as it hold no sentimental value. Similarly dividing pensions, shares etc. should be relatively straight forward, but not as straightforward as cash (the asset may be temporarily over- or under-valued). Then there are items that have real values, but also some sentimental value, houses, cars, electrical goods and so on. Then ag you go on you get to items that have exclusively sentimental value and no economic value, e.g. personal papers.

Potentially, you allocate a points quota to each person. Say 500,000 points each. Then each party allocates a certain amount of points against each item. I might really want the house and allocate 400,000 points towards it. I've no particular interest in the horrible artwork that my partner bought, so I allocate 1 point to each piece. On the flip side, my partner really wants the car (200,000) and the artwork (50,000 each). Each partner allocates their own points (possibly with the assistance of an adviser) to everything. Any left over points are added pro-rata. All point must be used.

Then the list is gone through an each item is allocated based on whoever has the most points assigned to each item.

I've never done anything like this and it might be important to balance things versus money, e.g. if one person wants all cash and none of the possessions or if one party ends up with all the valuable possession and the other gets all the sentimental possessions.