' Use her best endeavours ' to my mind suggests that your former
marital home was in joint names, and she had the right to live there, possibly while the children were still dependent, perhaps longer. You say she ' got the house ' - does this mean an outright transfer ? This means that your husband's name is probably still on the mortgage, which would, I guess, prevent him getting another one. Unfortunately for you, the decision as to whether to release your husband is entirely that of the lender, and the Court can't order the lender to release him. For that to happen the lender would have to be satisfied that the wife could meet her obligations without support from your husband. Unfortunately so much of her income consists of maintenance , and not all lenders take maintenance into account. So all the Court can do is to ask the wife to try. It doesn't, I'm afraid, mean she has to sell the house, and a sale could possibly trigger off a division of the proceeds, depending on how the
Consent Order is worded.
What do you mean when you say, the
Consent Order is about to expire ? Child support of course has a built in termination date ; what about spousal maintenance ? Has the Court fixed a date when the payments are to cease ?
The difficulty is, madam, as I'm sure you have realised, that when former spouses have gone their separate ways, over time they tend to lose touch and it becomes difficult to work out whether an application for variation has a realistic chance of success, and it may be a factor which will lead you to bear the evils that you have than fly to others that you know not of, to quote Hamlet. The difficulty is that an application for variation can rebound on the party who makes it,and £15K is a hell of a gamble.
I can only stress that no solicitor could advise you on the chances of success of a variation application without seeing the
Consent Order. My feeling is that if you are paying £1000 per month child support, that means your husband's income will be in the region of £5000 a month and you are paying £3000 of that - 60% of his net salary. That seems a very severe order if your husband's ex got the house outright, as opposed to a deferred sale. I would have expected a countervailing reduction in the spousal maintenance ; the disparity in your incomes seems quite large even if she does have two extra mouths to feed. But unfortunately, without knowing the full facts I can give no more than general
guidance, and a variation application is not without its risks.
Mike 100468