The Affidavit of Means was born into a world of houses, salaries and pension books; today’s balance sheets add crypto wallets, share options, RSUs vesting on schedules and interests in funds. The principles haven’t changed — disclose everything, value honestly, structure deliberately — but the new assets test each one.
Crypto: Disclosure’s New Frontier
Cryptocurrency belongs in the Affidavit of Means like any other asset — and its mythology of invisibility is overstated: exchanges keep records discovery can reach, transfers leave bank-statement footprints on the way in and out, blockchain analysis exists, and the lifestyle-versus-declared-means arithmetic that catches ordinary concealment catches digital concealment too. Volatility is the honest complication: valuation dates matter more than usual, and settlements involving crypto should say deliberately who carries the swing between agreement and execution.
Options, RSUs and the Not-Yet-Vested
Share options and restricted stock ask the field’s trickiest timing question: value granted during the marriage but vesting after it — is it marital effort or post-separation earning? The analysis looks at when and why the awards were made, vesting schedules, and what they compensate; the structural answers range from valuing and offsetting now to formulas that share vested outcomes when they land. Carried interest and fund economics raise the same shape of question at higher altitude. What every version needs: complete disclosure of the paperwork — grant letters, vesting schedules, plan rules — because these assets are documents all the way down.
Constant across all of it: the section 20 analysis counts resources actual and reasonably foreseeable, opacity invites inference, and the tax treatment of every disposal or transfer routes to your accountant. Modern assets, classical rules — the full disclosure machinery is on the Hidden Assets page.
A modern balance sheet meeting an old institution? 01 5827148, confidentially.