Pension sharing: two bites of the cherry

A pension sharing order (PSO) cannot be varied at a future date. In addition, if you are awarded a PSO from your partner’s pension you cannot apply for a second PSO for the same marriage on the same pension. It’s therefore important to ensure you take good legal and financial advice during your divorce negotiations. If an error is made the PSO cannot be adjusted, and you do not get an opportunity to ask for additional payment in the future.

However,you can apply for a PSO at any time in the future to vary maintenance. One point to be aware of is that if your partner has a number of pensions which have had a previous PSO against them, but are at a later date are consolidated, the new arrangement can be challenged. You can apply for a PSO against this new arrangement, to capitalise maintenance.

As an example, assume your partner had a pension with both Prudential and Friends Life, and you received a PSO against both arrangements. Whilst the funds are with Prudential and Friends Life neither pension is available for any future share in respect of your divorce.

However, if at a later date the 2 pensions are consolidated into a new arrangement, you can then ask to capitalise maintenance by obtaining a PSO on the new arrangement.

If you are the spouse with the pension funds and your partner is seeking a PSO, my advice is to consolidate your pensions pre the PSO, and apply the PSO against the new arrangement. That will ensure you safeguard this pension against any further sharing.

If you are going through divorce and would like advice on your finances please call me for a no obligation discussion on 01932 698150.

photocredit:flickr/tanakawho

Mary Waring

Mary Waring is a Chartered Accountant, Chartered Financial Planner and Money Mindset Coach, helping women transform their relationship with money so that they can become free and powerful. She is also the bestselling author of "The Wealthy Woman: A Man is Not a Financial Plan."

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This was taken about halfway up the block on the east side of Broadway, between 79th and 80th Street. It's at the north end of the "Filene's Basement" store on the corner, and it's a place where I've often seen homeless people holding up a sign that asks for assistance...

With very rare exceptions, I haven't photographed these homeless people; it seems to me that they're in a very defensive situation, and I don't want to take advantage of their situation. But something unusual was happening here: the two women (who were actually cooperating, and acting in tandem, despite the rather negative demeanor of the woman on the left) were giving several parcels of food to the young homeless man on the right.

I don't know if the women were bringing food from their own kitchen, or whether they had brought it from a nearby restaurant. But it was obviously a conscious, deliberate activity, and one they had thousght about for some time...

What was particularly interesting was that they didn't dwell, didn't try to have a conversation with the young man;they gave him they food they had brought, and promptly walked away. As they left, I noticed the young man peering into his bag (the one you see on the ground beside him in this picture) to get a better sense of the delicious meal these two kind women had brought him...

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This is part of an evolving photo-project, which will probably continue throughout the summer of 2008, and perhaps beyond: a random collection of "interesting" people in a broad stretch of the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- between 72nd Street and 104th Street, especially along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

I don't like to intrude on people's privacy, so I normally use a telephoto lens in order to photograph them while they're still 50-100 feet away from me; but that means I have to continue focusing my attention on the people and activities half a block away, rather than on what's right in front of me.

I've also learned that, in many cases, the opportunities for an interesting picture are very fleeting -- literally a matter of a couple of seconds, before the person(s) in question move on, turn away, or stop doing whatever was interesting. So I've learned to keep the camera switched on (which contradicts my traditional urge to conserve battery power), and not worry so much about zooming in for a perfectly-framed picture ... after all, once the digital image is uploaded to my computer, it's pretty trivial to crop out the parts unrelated to the main subject.

For the most part, I've deliberately avoided photographing bums, drunks, drunks, and crazy people. There are a few of them around, and they would certainly create some dramatic pictures; but they generally don't want to be photographed, and I don't want to feel like I'm taking advantage of them. I'm still looking for opportunities to take some "sympathetic" pictures of such people, which might inspire others to reach out and help them. We'll see how it goes ...

The only other thing I've noticed, thus far, is that while there are lots of interesting people to photograph, there are far, far, *far* more people who are *not* so interesting. They're probably fine people, and they might even be more interesting than the ones I've photographed ... but there was just nothing memorable about them.

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