What is a ‘Form E’ in divorce proceedings?
Whichever way you choose to resolve property and financial issues during a divorce, it is likely that you will have to complete a Form E at some point.
Our head of Family Law, Joanna Toloczko, explains all.
What is a Form E?
A Form E requires you to set out the financial needs of yourself and your children during the divorce process.
You and your spouse must give full disclosure of all of your finances, including your income, your savings, expenses, properties you may own, and any pensions.
Filling in a Form E can be a daunting process but we are here to help. It runs to 30 pages and requires detailed information regarding your financial circumstances and also requires you to provide documents which confirm what you have said.
Form E provides the information for your financial order. It is a financial order in a divorce that makes your agreement as to how you will split your finances legally binding.
The process of filling in a Form E.
We make the process of filling in a Form E as painless as possible.
As a starting point, we usually ask our clients to complete a Form E in draft as we feel that it is the best way for us to get the information and documents that we require.
If we ask you to do this there is no need to worry about making a mess of the Form E or putting the information in the wrong section because it is only a draft document for us to work from.
Instead of asking you to prepare a list of your income needs on a blank page, we will provide you with a comprehensive budget form which is designed to capture all of your monthly outgoings. When preparing your monthly budget form, start with your direct debits and standing orders first. You will then need to think about your regular supermarket shopping and things that you pay for in cash.
So where do you start with the rest of the Form E?
A good place to start is at the back of the form where there is a checklist of documents that need to be attached. We suggest that you have one session where you set aside 30 minutes to an hour to gather those documents together. That is part one of the task completed.
We then suggest that you set aside another hour, or so, to complete part two of the task which is to go through your documents and extract the information needed for the form.
This process makes the task more manageable to break it into two separate chunks of time. Schedule time in your diary to deal with these tasks.
What happens once I have prepared all the information for the Form E?
Make sure that you get your completed form and documents to your solicitor at least a week before any deadline for exchange. Your solicitor will need time to prepare what is called the ‘fair copy’ and get it approved and signed by you.
Once we have the draft Form E, we will then set aside some time to start preparing the fair copy. It is when we start doing this that we can tell if there is anything still missing and if any of our client’s financial circumstances are still unclear. If this is the case, we will arrange a telephone conversation with the client to seek clarification and go through outstanding matters with them.
When the fair copy is completed we can then submit it.
If you have any queries relating to divorce or any other aspects of Family Law please contact Joanna Toloczko on 0207 703 5034 or email her at jtoloczko@meaby.co.uk.