Over 19 years of family law practice, I’ve heard this conviction expressed with something close to biblical certainty: fifty percent of everything is my entitlement. People say it as though it were carved into stone.
If the law were really that simple, no one would spend two or three years locked in a court battle over property division. And yet, that’s exactly what happens — often. If it’s really just “50% of everything,” why does this keep taking so long to resolve?
The hidden question: 50% of what?
The real battle is almost never about the percentage. It’s about what counts as family property in the first place — and family property does not automatically mean everything either spouse owns.
Under BC’s Family Law Act, certain property is generally excluded from division, including:
- Property either spouse owned before the relationship began
- Inheritances received during the relationship
- Gifts from a third party to one spouse specifically
- Court awards or settlements for personal injury (in most cases)
- Certain insurance proceeds
- Property held in trust for one spouse
- Property excluded by a marriage or cohabitation agreement (a prenup or “cohab” agreement)
One common misconception worth naming directly: lottery winnings are not automatically excluded. If a ticket is purchased during the relationship, the winnings are generally treated as family property, subject to division — even though it feels intuitively like something that belongs to whoever bought the ticket.
The twist: even excluded property isn’t always fully protected
Here’s where it gets genuinely complicated. Even when property is excluded — say, a home one spouse owned before the marriage — any increase in value during the relationship is not automatically excluded. If that home was worth $400,000 at the start of the relationship and is worth $700,000 at separation, the $300,000 increase is typically shared, even though the underlying asset itself is excluded.
Whether something counts as excluded, and how much of its growth is shared, depends heavily on the specific story of the family: how the asset was acquired, whether it was commingled with family finances, whether there’s a cohabitation agreement, and how the asset changed over the course of the relationship. There is no single formula that applies identically to every family — which is precisely why two spouses so often walk out of a courtroom with meaningfully different amounts, despite both believing “50/50” was the rule going in.
And even this isn’t the end of it. Once an asset’s increase in value is on the table, a spouse may claim they personally contributed to that increase — renovating the excluded home, managing the excluded investment portfolio, or growing the excluded business — and that contribution can itself become a contested question, layered on top of the exclusion question, layered on top of the valuation question. Each layer can, in principle, spawn its own dispute. There is, practically speaking, no natural end to how many layers a determined argument can add.
This is not a flaw in the law so much as a reflection of how genuinely complicated real families’ finances become over years or decades together. But it’s exactly why “50/50 of everything” collapses so quickly under any real scrutiny.
When “unequal” is actually the fair outcome
Beyond exclusions, BC law also allows for an unequal division of family property when a strict 50/50 split would be “significantly unfair” under section 95 of the Family Law Act. This isn’t a common outcome, but it isn’t rare either. Courts have found significant unfairness in circumstances such as:
- One spouse dissipating family assets — for example, through gambling, reckless cryptocurrency speculation, or a pattern of business failures stemming from provable, reckless conduct
- A short relationship where dividing long-held, pre-relationship assets equally would produce a clearly disproportionate result
- One spouse hiding assets or failing to disclose them honestly
- Significant debt incurred by one spouse without the other’s knowledge or benefit
None of these guarantee an unequal split — they simply open the door for a court, or a negotiation, to consider one. The threshold (“significantly unfair,” not just “somewhat unfair”) is intentionally high, so that unequal division remains the exception, not a routine outcome.
Why understanding this actually reduces the pain
None of this complexity is designed to make property division harder than it needs to be — if anything, understanding it early tends to shorten the process, not lengthen it. Most of the pain, and most of the extended legal battles I’ve seen over 19 years, come from a mismatch between what a client believes they’re entitled to and what actually applies to their specific situation. That gap — not the law itself — is usually what fuels years of conflict and drains resources that could have gone toward rebuilding a life instead.
Yes, “50/50” is a reasonable starting point, a preliminary idea worth having in mind. But it has deep corners most people never see coming, corners that make an absolute, unconditional claim to exactly half genuinely risky to rely on. Sometimes, fairness looks exactly like an equal split. Sometimes, precisely because the circumstances are unequal, fairness requires an unequal result.
This article is intended for general information purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Every property division case depends on its specific facts — we’re here to help you understand where yours actually stands.