Where will each of you live? On Portsea Island that question is harder than in most cities, because the terraces of Southsea, Fratton and Copnor are small, the prices are high for the wages, and two homes rarely come out of one. Divorce solicitors in Portsmouth spend more time on housing need than on almost anything else: whether the house can be kept until the youngest child leaves school under a deferred sale, whether a transfer to one spouse with a charge for the other works, and what a lender will accept.
Pensions come next, and in Portsmouth they are often naval. An armed forces pension is valuable, inflation-proofed and payable long before state pension age, and a settlement that divides it on the basis of the lump sum alone can be badly wrong. A spouse serving away, or a ship deployed for months, also affects timing: the application and the financial disclosure can go on, but mediation and hearings need a date when both people are in the country.
Divorce is no-fault, applied for online by one spouse or both, and the conditional order cannot be made for twenty weeks. An agreement on money is written up as a consent order and approved by the family court at Portsmouth Combined Court Centre on Winston Churchill Avenue; contested finances and children arrangements are heard in the same building after a mediation information and assessment meeting. A spouse living in service families accommodation will lose it when the marriage ends, and sooner than many expect.
Portsmouth firms generally charge a fixed fee for the divorce application, hourly or staged fees for the finances, and many offer a free first meeting. Legal aid is confined to cases involving domestic abuse.
Portsmouth's divorce firms appear below, verified first, then by distance. Read the divorce process, how much a divorce costs and the general divorce solicitors guide, or see family law solicitors in Portsmouth for children, cohabitation and injunctions.
