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Doing your own divorce can potentially save you money but it also has several drawbacks.

Being a legal procedure, there are certain steps which must be followed to the letter and, whilst there is a considerable amount of information and advice available, both online and offline, for people pursuing their own divorce, it’s often loaded with jargon and difficult to decipher making the task far from simple.

Because of this lack of easy-to-use materials, doing your own divorce without any support has many drawbacks. Here are, in our experience, the greatest disadvantages to doing your own divorce:

It can get very expensive

As most people who file their own divorce applications do so in order to save money, it may seem surprising that one of the main pitfalls of trying to end your marriage without any assistance is cost but, believe us, it can get very expensive, very quickly.

Firstly, there’s the court fee. You may not be required to pay the maximum £550; you may not even need to pay a court fee at all under certain circumstances. Even if this is the case, however, mistakes can be very costly.

If, for any reason, you need to amend and re-submit your documents to the court, you’ll need to pay a fee in excess of £100 to do so. Couple this with the fact that it’s very common for people to make mistakes on their Divorce Petitions when they prepare them themselves and it soon becomes clear that costs can start to add up very quickly.

Considering that Quickie Divorce will prepare all of the documents you’ll need to file for divorce for just £67 and guarantee that they’ll be free of errors (or we’ll cover any resubmission costs), completing your own documents will only result in a saving if they’re completely free from errors.

You can’t finalise any agreements

You and your spouse may have agreed on how to divide your assets but you’re not going to be able to finalise these and make them binding.

This may not be a problem if neither spouse make a claim on any of the other’s assets but, without a Consent Order (you’ll probably have heard these referred to as Clean Break agreements), this remains a possibility.

Whilst claims can be prevented by having a Consent Order approved by a court, these cannot be prepared by laypeople so, if you do your own divorce, you’ll be leaving yourself open to possible claims in the future.

It’s emotionally draining

Even people who’ve been separated for several years and who receive our support throughout proceedings still inform us that they’ve found divorce to be a difficult and upsetting experience.

When people do their own divorces, these negative feelings are exacerbated meaning that the process will be even more emotionally draining – particularly if costs begin to spiral.

It’ll take longer

Finally, if you choose to do your divorce it’s going to take longer than it would with professional assistance. This may not be of concern to you, of course, but as we’ve stated previously, divorce tends to be upsetting under all circumstances and we find that most people want the process finished as quickly as possible as a result.

In comparison, we are able to process divorces from start to finish in just 12 weeks.