Another warning in the press about pensions being overlooked in divorce scenarios, with a reported 35% decrease in pension sharing orders since the advent of DIY divorces. All family lawyers will be familiar with the gender inequalities here. Very often it is the husband who has a pension, and the wife who doesn't, or who has significantly less.   All too often it is also the wife who fails to see the value in the pension assets, focussing on other more immediate things such as the house. Lawyers will give advice about the dangers of that short-sighted approach but in the absence of advice, clearly more divorces are occurring where the pensions remain where they started. This is building up a significant problem for divorced wives in the future, who will realise far too late that they should have placed value on the pensions assets when they had the chance of sharing them. 

As this article says, even a one-off sense-checking meeting with a family lawyer would be a good investment to highlight these lurking financial dangers to unsuspecting (and often financially unsophisticated) spouses. However, another option is a meeting with a financial adviser who has specialist expertise as a 'pensions on divorce' expert.  Even if the choices around settlement remain the same post meeting, at least the individual is forewarned about the need to focus on pension saving for the future if they choose to retain other assets from the divorce.