Why a 70/30 Split Isn’t About “Fairness”: Looking Beyond Percentages in Separation
** This article contains legal information and personal perspectives based upon lived experience. It is not legal or professional advice. Legal and professional advice should be obtained if you wish to understand your personal legal and financial position and what approach may be best suited to your situation**
“I can’t believe they’re taking me for 70%. That’s not fair!”
This is a familiar phrase I hear often in post-separation conversations, usually in varying versions about a former partner seeking more than 50% of the property pool.
Sometimes it’s said with shock.
Sometimes with anger.
And often it’s followed by harsh judgments about the other person being lazy, greedy, entitled, or “not deserving it.”
Recently, I wrote about why focusing on percentages alone is rarely helpful in financial separation dicussions, and how a seemingly small 10% adjustment can have enormous practical consequences for the person receiving less.
In this piece, I want to take that conversation deeper.
Because when it comes to separating families, impact often matters more than percentages - especially if bringing a collaborative and conscious approach to separation.
And sometimes, outcomes like a 70/30 or 65/35 split are not only reasonable, they are what creates the most stable, fair, and sustainable future for everyone involved.
Why Percentages Alone Don’t Tell the Full Story
In my experience, it would be rare for someone receiving 30% to feel that outcome is “fair” if they are only looking at the numbers on paper.
And that reaction makes sense.
Our brains are wired to interpret fairness through equal division. 50/50 feels “right,” and anything else can feel like loss, injustice, or failure.
But separation is not just about what happens on paper today.
It is about how two people, often with children, will live, parent, work, and age over the next 10, 20, or 30 years, after having significantly invested in building their lives together.
When people focus only on the immediate split, they often miss the long-term reality. This is where future needs become critical.
Why Future Needs Are Central in a Conscious and Collaborative Approach
When families choose a conscious and collaborative approach to separation, one of the most important shifts is moving away from:
“What did we each contribute?” toward: “What will we each need to live well into the future?”
In other words, it is a shift from entitlement to compassion, care and dignity.
Collaborative processes are designed to support real-life sustainability, not just legal compliance, for all members of the family, especially children. This requires honest consideration of future needs, including:
ongoing housing and financial stability
supporting and meeting the children’s specific challenges and needs
maintaining a strong co-operative relationship between parents
securing the physical and mental wellbeing of the parties as much as the financial
creating structures and outcomes that support parents to provide ongoing stability for children
providing a relativity equal standard of living between homes
creating relatively equal opportunity to build for retirement
access to financial resources to ensure financial resilience
processes and outcomes that mitigates the negative impacts of separation and give each person and any children, the best chance of rebuilding and as quickly as possible.
When these factors are understood and explored properly, it becomes clear that equal division does not always create equal outcomes or opportunity.
These conversations are not about “justifying” why one person should receive more.
They are about ensuring two people who invested in building the life they have had together, can now re-establish with dignity, security, and realistic prospects, so resentment and hardship are not built into the future and any children are buffered from the impacts of separation in both homes.
Future Needs Aren’t Just Values-Based… They’re Legal
Importantly, this focus on future needs is not just a feature of collaborative practice. It is embedded in Australian family law.
Section 75(2) of the Family Law Act 1975 requires courts to consider a wide range of future-oriented factors which may include (but are not limited to):
children’s specific challenges and needs
ongoing primary caregiving
reduced earning capacity due to health or caregiving
age and stage of life
capacity to obtain and engage retraining opportunities
superannuation disparities and capacity to fund other retirement plans
capacity to obtain and retain stable housing
financial resources that translate to long-term financial resilience
In other words, the law itself recognises that fairness is not determined by past contributions alone. It requires consideration of how each person will actually live after separation.
None of this is to say contributions do not matter. They do both legally and in collaborative separation which still includes consideration of the law. The difference, however, is often how they are processed and weighted.
What often happens in traditional processes, is that people become fixated on contributions and percentages first and often weigh these more heavily. In doing so, their minds often fail to fully consider future realities. Further, future forecasting or modelling as to the many possible outcomes and the lived impact of such, is often not a feature at all.
Collaborative processes however:
Start with direct acknowledgement of each other of their value and contributions.
Ground with joint intention and validation of genuine needs of each other.
Prioritise future needs of children and outcomes that serve the ongoing wellbeing of all; and
Allow the numbers to emerge from that understanding.
In doing so, the numbers still tend to land within what the legal advisors would assess as the just and equitable range, but now with fully shared understanding and confidence in the outcome as being a better one for all.
A Simple Example: When “Equal” Creates Inequality
Let’s take a modest property pool. On paper, a 50/50 split looks fair. But in real life, it can mean:
one person can rehouse and re-establish, the other cannot
one can afford school activities and trips, the other cannot
one has financial buffer, the other lives in constant stress
one absorbs unexpected costs, the other relies on debt
one can plan for retirement, the other cannot
Over time, that gap does not close. It widens.
And when children are involved, that instability does not affect only one parent. It affects the entire family system.
Financial stress becomes emotional stress.
Emotional stress affects health.
Both emotional stress and health affect parenting and co-parenting capacity.
And children deeply suffer from avoidable consequences.
Responsibility Still Matters
None of this suggests that the person with greater future needs has no responsibility.
They absolutely do and, in my experience, most are working hard to rebuild. But even with effort, gaps remain due to realities such as:
lost career progression and smaller superannuation balances
re-entering the workforce later in life with less workforce experience/skills
real differences in employment capacity and limited access to high-income pathways even with upskilling
reduced compounding over time in both career opportunities and superannuation
For most families, the differences are structural and not derived from poor character or skewed entitlement. And ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear.
And where a member of a separating couple may be showing up with some lack of responsibility, often this is not deliberate, and a collaborative approach can be supportive of addressing and resolving any underlying drivers to bring back any balance.
Perspective Shifting Changes Everything
When conversations stay stuck on percentages, misunderstandings grow, conflict escalates and positions harden.
But when the focus shifts to:
“What does each person need to re-establish well?” instead of: “What am I entitled to?”
I tend to find that everything changes.
Tone shifts.
Options expand.
Outcomes improve.
This is where collaborative, well-informed support can excel.
Because it keeps families focused on sustainability and encourages exploration of future forecasting to test if foreseeable outcomes align with true desires and intentions for the wellbeing of the separating family to preserved - not just short-term wins.
Because separation is not a competition. It is a restructuring of a family through an evolution.
If you would like support in reframing your approach, understanding practical impacts, and gaining clarity on outcomes that genuinely support your next chapter, you’re welcome to book a complimentary Next Steps Call to explore your options.
