What Is an Actuary Report in Divorce?

I want to demystify what an Actuary Report is in divorce, to give you the low down so that you understand why they might come up during your divorce.?

An actuary report, sometimes just referred to as a pensions report, is a report that is often required when pensions are of a certain value or where we have pensions that are a little bit more complex. ? the aim of the actuary report is to give a clear line of sight on what distribution of pensions is needed to create an equal income in retirement? For both parties.

That's the aim, is to actually get to a place where we can see how to split pensions so that there is an equal amount for both parties to live on in retirement.

How would an actuary report come about?

Typically it would normally be ordered by your solicitor and you would normally agree between both solicitors, what actuaries you want to use.?

Often what happens is one side suggests three actuaries, and the other side then picks from that list. And then they are instructed.?

The instruction comes from the solicitor and it will outline some key facts because they want to make sure that they get it specific to your situation.?

They will mention in there what retirement age they want the actuaries to use. And they might also want to get a picture if certain parts of the pension are not included. And this sometimes happens for pensions that accumulated before or after marriage or separation.

What the actuary report will then go on to do is give us a picture of how much each party would need so that they have an equal income in retirement.

If they've been asked to also consider ring fencing or leaving some of the pensions to one side, they will also give that picture.

They then will go on and also say how much of a lump sum would be needed if one party decided that they didn't want a share of the pension, but instead, they wanted to have a bigger share of the other assets, that's called offsetting. they will talk about how much of the pension would be represented by an offset amount so that you can accurately decide how much you want.? this often happens if somebody's choosing to stay in a property, they might offset a pension share against the property.

Obviously, there's a huge, long-term implication to that and that's something you should always talk about with a financial planner.

The report is typically ordered by your legal team and they will give an instruction for how that is to look. they typically cost between ￡1500-￡2000, but they can be a bit more if it's a slightly complex situation.

It Generally takes 8 to 12 weeks to produce a report, and t because of the research that the actuaries need to do and the details that they need to obtain.

When the report comes back there are a variety of report styles, some more straight forward than others, so it might be that it's worthwhile you sitting down with a financial planner and just having some input into understanding what it is that the report is suggesting.

If you have a very straightforward situation, a situation where your pension values are under ￡100,000 and there are no final salary or defined benefit pensions and there's no guarantees to any of your pensions, it might be that you don't need an actuary report, but for the vast majority of people, things are more complex than that and the values are higher.

And certainly, when you're divorcing a CEO, it is very typical that we are going to need this to be able to accurately determine what a fair split will be.

That's actuary reports and do follow along for more details about how divorcing a CEO can be complex and the things that you're going to need to know on the journey.