Impoverished Pensioner – Or Pension Share?

What are you expecting your lifestyle to be like on retirement? Frequent holidays in the sun? Spending hours of pleasure in the garden or improving the house? Treating children and grandchildren at those special times of the year?

The Government thinks we should all be putting more of our income aside to meet our needs when we retire, but there are still an alarming number of married women who assume that they can simply rely on their husband’s pension to provide them with a decent lifestyle as they get older.

But what happens if the marriage goes wrong? Divorce is always hard, but it can be particularly frightening for a woman in her late forties or older. It’s often the case that a woman will have given up work for a period of time to be at home with the children or has been working part-time to fit around the family’s needs ; on a lower income, she probably won’t have been able to put as much money away for her old age as her husband. If her national insurance contributions record has been interrupted, her state pension will also be affected.

What can divorce lawyers do to make things better? Since December 2000 the courts have been able to make “pension sharing orders”. These orders give the wife a “chunk” of her husband’s pension; the chunk can remain in her husband’s scheme, but under her name, or transferred either into her existing pension fund or into a new investment vehicle set up for the purpose (for example, a stakeholder pension scheme).

What’s so good about pension sharing orders?

• Independence - a pension share can avoid the need for lengthy maintenance orders because a wife will have her own pension income, rather than be paid a monthly sum by her husband ; better for husbands and wives.
• Fairness – the courts no longer discriminate against women who might not have earned a great deal during the marriage, but whose contributions to family life were nevertheless very important
• Equality – whilst not all wives will get 50% of assets on divorce, pension sharing certainly makes this much easier to achieve. It also means, from the husband’s perspective, that he has a much better chance of getting a clean break, because he can take care of his wife’s retirement needs by giving her a slice of pension now.


You can also beef up your state pension if divorce is looming; a wife can elect to have her pension based on her husband’s national insurance record rather than her own!

Getting the right deal on divorce is vital; pension sharing orders may very well mean the difference between an impoverished retirement and the retirement you always hoped for.

Published 09/11/2007. The author of this article is Yvette Rooke