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Parties. This page is for any person considering family law proceedings or already involved, with or without the assistance of legal professionals. Also see: Family Lawyers | White Label | Trustees
Divorce Property Settlement and Superannuation
Your divorce property settlement needs to take into account the value of everyone’s superannuation.
After many years of struggling to calculate superannuation values in a consistent way, complicated laws were made for uniform methods. That is where we come in, we work out which laws apply then and perform the superannuation calculation using our highly-accurate superannuation calculators. This is the ‘family law’ value of superannuation that you need.
The family law superannuation value is not usually the same as the ‘payout’ value you might expect upon normal retirement.
Sometimes the value of a party’s superannuation asset will be taken as a whole when dividing the assets.
Other times there is superannuation splitting or ‘super splitting’ which means the fund is legally divided between the parties.
Until you and your lawyer (if you have one) have a superannuation valuation there is a missing piece of the property settlement puzzle.
A valuation is usually obtained for the date of separation, and other dates may be relevant as well, for example the date of marriage or cohabitation. These are technical issues for your family lawyer to advise you on.
Superannuation Information Form
Some superannuation funds will calculate and provide you with the ‘family law valuation’ for your property settlement but many do not. The CSS (Commonwealth Superanuation Scheme), PSS (Public Sector Superannuation Scheme), DFRDBS (Defence Force Retirement & Death Benefits Super) and MSBS (Military Super fund) do not.
In all cases you have to apply the Form 6 procedure to get the Superannuation Information Form that contains the information we need to calculate the valuation correctly. It is highly unwise, particularly for a legally-unrepresented party, to assume that any figure in a member statement is accurate enough for family law purposes. |