Pegs

I have been married for 25 years and we have lived in Perth, Australia for the last 7 years.  We both have citizenship and intend to remain here.  Unfortunately, we have grown apart and in April 2018, separated amicably.  We have agreed terms of a Financial settlement which includes allocating my soon to be ex-wife a significant portion of my Group Personal Pension plan with Standard Life in the UK.  On contacting them to determine the necessary wording of an Australian Court's consent order, Standard Life wrote to state that they would not recognise the Australian order and I would need a Court Order issued by a UK Court.

Does anyone have any experience of splitting of UK based pension as part of an Australian, obtaining a UK Court Order and, importantly, recommending a UK Solicitor who has relevant experience. 

The one I contacted online from a Google advert was quoting GBP3,000 - GBP5,000 (!!) 

Any help would be appreciated

We moved to Perth 3 years ago and were lucky enough to have a mortgage free property in the UK that has been let out. We rent here in Australia. Now our eldest son has gone and got in to Cambridge and we will have to fund the rather large (international) fees. To help with this, I thought it would be easy to put a mortgage on the property (at max 10% of the value) but no. It seems that the banks do not have policy to offer buy to let mortgages to non UK residents and that to offer them to Australian residents the bank has to have registrations in Australia; this plus the currency mis-match of my income being in Australian dollars is scaring them off.

HSBC came close but because we do not have a mortgage here; this was apparently a problem for them. I also tried Expat Mortgages....with no success.

So we are now thinking that we will have to sell up but before we start this I thought I would check in here to see if others have found a way ?