After 50, the settlement is about the rest of your life.

Three main mechanisms in England and Wales. Pension sharing gives each of you your own separate pension pot by court order, and is the cleanest break. Offsetting trades pension value against other assets, typically the house. Attachment orders redirect part of a pension when it is paid, and are now rare. Which is right depends on the pensions involved and your ages, and what you should then do with any pension rights is a question for a regulated financial adviser, not for us and not for your solicitor.

Generally, the longer the marriage, the more the court leans towards equal division of everything built up during it, regardless of whose name things are in or who earned what. Arguments about pre-marital assets carry little weight after three decades. The bigger question in long marriages is usually not the split but the structure: how to turn one retirement plan into two liveable ones.

Sometimes, but do the arithmetic before the emotion. Compare like with like: what income the pension would produce against what the house is worth to you in real terms, remembering that transfer values can understate final salary pensions badly. This single decision is where later-life divorces most often go wrong, and where a pension expert's report or regulated financial advice is money well spent.

Yes, and this catches people out. If you remarry before financial claims from your first marriage are resolved, you can permanently lose the right to make most of them, the so-called remarriage trap. Pension sharing survives differently from other claims, but the safe course is simple: get the financial order sealed before anyone remarries. If remarriage is on the horizon, tell your solicitor immediately.