Advised to get married whilst doing wills

[mustytrusty]

Went to a solicitor with DP today to arrange our wills. We have mortgage, two dc's and been together 23 years. Have been advised that for tax reasons we should think about getting married.

I have no desire to be married. Not to him or anyone else, and I never have wanted to be.

Does anyone know if there's a campaign to make the tax situation for long-term couples
mirror that of married couples?

Boggles my mind that in this day and age unmarried couples can be treated differently than married.

If you are so committed is it a big deal to evidence that commitment with a piece of paper officially recording your relationship?

When you bought your house did you want a piece of paper evidencing your legal rights and responsibilities?

What about your job? Got a piece of paper evidencing the commitment between employee and employer or are you happy to trust that your employer will always do the right thing? What happens when that trust breaks down or when things go wrong? If you don't have that piece of paper how do you go about claiming your contractual benefits?

Marriage/CP is a contract. If you want the tax breaks you have to enter the contract. It comes with rights and responsibilities, it is for each couple to consider whether it is right for them or not, they shouldn't be able to accidentally drift into marriage/cp without making a choice, so it has to be "opt in" and there has to be official proof that they have opted in.

If you want the protection that marriage gives, get married - if not don't bother. A bit like saying you want the protection of insurance but won't pay the insurance premium.

I’m still interested to know why having a piece of paper trumps having a joint mortgage and shared children though.

If you changed the rules to suit the circumstances you describe, it would discriminate against those who couldn’t afford to buy a house and those who couldn’t have children, or didn’t want them!

Just fill out the flipping paperwork, nobody’s making you have a big white wedding!

Unfortunately they can’t. I did ask but they said they were not permitted to assist. They said they only need witnesses for a few mins so I’ll grab someone random walking past. Someone will help.

I don’t want to use anyone I know as I don’t want any fuss and don’t really want to tell anyone we’ve done it.

We were advised to get married by the solicitor doing our will. We had been together for 20 years-there was no issue about how committed we were. Marriage just hadn’t been something that we felt we needed to do. But when we looked into the legal situation plus heard stories about how people can be treated differently depending on marital status-for example in a hospital setting - we decided to go ahead.

As an aside, something that we thought wouldn’t mean much to us turned out to be a really special day even though it was very practically motivated.

My best friend bought a house with a friend to get on the property ladder. They are not a couple. Should they be treated as such? What about a couple who have children together, but then spilt up? Or someone who got pregnant on a one night stand? What if one of them thinks they are a couple but the other doesn't? Civil partnership or marriage is a simple way for two peopl to legally agree they are a unit for tax, inheritance, property and other purposes. Others its a nightmare for the state deciding who is and isn't. I went to a registry office with two witnesses. Simple and cheap.

Op, as others have said, because people might not want to grant such protections to long term partners, mostly in second marriages. Civil marriage and/or civil partnerships and the protections it affords is a legal contract, and can’t be entered into by default. It has to be chosen.

Could a civil partnership work for your situation? I hope it all works out for you and your family.

What is it about marriage that you don't want? Are the things you object to still problematic if you had a civil partnership?

I am married - got married before civil partnership was an option for straight couples. I already had a joint mortgage (for many years) and 1 DC. The marriage made us legally a family, each other's next of kin. Decades on, the inheritance tax benefit is more relevant too. Even a marriage doesn't have to be a big ceremony and can be a couple of hundred spent on an afternoon in a registry office.

But at what point would it be appropriate for the law to force a legal commitment onto two people that have expressly chosen not to voluntarily enter into that legal commitment? 4 years? 10 years? 25 years?

Just get a civil partnership if you like the idea of what comes with being legally married but for some reason get the heeby jeebies about calling it marriage.

Divorce court is already bogged down with huge backlogs - it’s also very expensive. Can you imagine the rigmarole of sharing everything as though it were a divorce when every single relationship ends? Shudder.

I’d have been made destitute by now!

You mention having children but that doesn’t show any kind of commitment to their other parent - otherwise there’d be no single mothers!

One thing to note OP is that whilst you are missing out on the tax breaks by not being married you are guaranteed to leave assets to your children. Personally I would not leave everything to my partner because if you die first and they remarry then all your assets are then theirs and your children could receive nothing if they don’t make another will (getting married negates a will).

So I would just do some careful planning (as far as you can as none of us know when we’re going to die) and gradually pass assets to DC or spend it!

I think this government is going to change the rules and IHT only increase. There’s a race to the bottom in this country and then seem to want to tax anyone whose worked hard and saved hard. It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point they start taxing primary residence profit anyway.

It sounds like civil partnership would be the answer for you OP. It will enable you to opt in and secure the rights you want.

It may seem like "just a piece of paper" but forget about the paper and focus on the rights it confers. Like your passport is "just a piece of paper" but without it you can't legally go abroad. The deeds of your house are just pieces of paper (albeit held electronically by the land registry these days) but without them you don't legally own your home. Etc.

Having children and buying a property doesnt confer the same rights because anyone can do those things with multiple people. You could have children with multiple different people and/or people you've never been in a relationship with. You could buy a house with a friend or family member or a company. How would the government be able to work out which person or entity you were most committed to? Marriage or CP gets round all that by making a public record of it.

One of my best friends has just got married in her 50s. She'd spent her life saying she didn't believe in marriage, it was old fashioned, just a piece of paper, but in recent years she and her partner have been concerned about IHT and wanting to leave their large house to their 4 kids without a tax burden. One of the things she said was "if you love each other it should be considered the same as marriage". But I pointed out what if A loves B but B loves C? Or A loves B but B falls out of love with A? That stuff can't be monitored legally in order to get legal rights. They decided to get a civil partnership "for tax" and were very cool and nonchalant about it. But a few weeks before they decided to marry instead and surprised themselves how much they enjoyed the day. But you could get a CP and not tell anyone, no rings, no music, no name change, just the essential legalities if you prefer.

Good luck. You sound sensible and I hope you come to a decision you are happy with.

The reason is there are up sides and down sides to marriage and for domestic people what is an upside will be a down side to to another.

For example, without a will a married woman inherits everything from her deserved husband by default. Now let’s say he had kids from a previous relationship they would be disinherited ( in England). So the government want to make it a conscious choice to have that happen. They don’t want people accidentally stumbling into these kind of things.

The family also decide about the medical treatment. Visits aren’t always allowed for friends - which you’ll be classed as. If the next of kin family don’t want you to visit they can ban you from the hospital and also take your possessions and house and take control of their next of kin’s assets/money. You can’t register their death because you are just a friend. If one of your children is over 18 they are the next of kin but if the kids are younger then it’s the partners parents, siblings, the next living adult member of their family. They decide on the funeral and burial place. Legally you are nothing to your partner no matter the kids and house you live in. If the op prefers this to them being the next of kin it’s their choice. It’s the same situation for the op partner.

The mortgage is a commitment to the bank. The kids are a commitment to the kids. You haven’t chosen an official commitment to each other. All contracts are a bit of paper. It’s so weird to consider a marriage certificate less important than an other contract.

I was working in the NHS then, it was heart breaking.

Is there any way of getting around this without getting married?

If you travel abroad it is worth considering how other countries view unmarried couples.

I read a post a while back where a woman talked about her DH having died suddenly while on holiday. She said it was bad enough as it was but would have been a whole lot worse if they hadn't been married. Being married gave her automatic rights such as for arranging repatriation which she wouldn't have had otherwise.

Pensions are a game changer from 2027. If you are not married or CP then essentially when you die there will be an IHT charge on your pension.

If you are married/CP then the IHT charge doesn’t arrive until the 2nd one of you dies.

If you are leaving it all to your DC this gives you longer to withdraw the funds in a tax efficient manner meaning your DC benefit more.

You only need a pension of 250k to have an additional 100K IHT bill from April 2027. Many will have much more than that.

Pretty much anyone who has had a reasonable career will have to get married or CP from April 2027 if they want to avoid a huge 6 figure additional bill.

Except she doesn’t necessarily get it all without a will - if there are children she inherits the first £322,000 then half the rest. The children get the other half.

If the main asset is a family house in the South of England (bought for peanuts, now worth a fortune) and for some reason her name isn’t on the house (far more common in years past) or there is a large amount of assets that she and the deceased husband thought would support her into old age, she could end up having to sell her home and / or have far less to live on because of having to give the children their share.

If she’s not their mother (or even if she is), the children may not be prepared to wait to receive their money,

Close friends of mine became civil partners for similar security reasons. He'd been married and his wife went off with his best friend. This happened years before they met, but it put him off marriage. They became civil partners after being together for 15 years.

Lasting Powers of Attorney. There are two, one for Health & Welfare, the other for financial.

You can set up one or both. I think the cost is around £400 for a couple to register both LPAs.

There are already two sensible and low cost options available to couples that want to provide one another with legal and financial protections. Marriage or civil partnership.

Having children together doesn't symbolise a committed relationship.....lots of people have children with partners that they never see again.

If you want co-habiting couples to have the same legal protection as married couples or those in a civil partnership.....how would you propose that worked? What length of time would people have to have lived together before the rights kicked in? Had a joint mortgage for 5 years? Had a joint bank account for 10 years? It would be a logistical nightmare for HMRC to try and work that out.

What about people that purposefully don't want to get married as they want their assets to be kept independent from one another? How do they opt out of your system for co-habiting couples bring treated the same in law as married ones? My FIL and his partner were in this situation. Both previously married and divorced so didn't want to get married again but were with each other for 30 years and owned a house together. They wanted their money to each go to their own children and to keep things financially separate so they didn't get married. In your scenario they could have drifted into a situation where the state viewed them as married in the eyes of the law.

This is why it has to be an opt in system. If you want the legal and financial ties recognised in law you can get married or have a civil partnership. If you don't want those protections and you want to opt out of that and keep things separate, not be next of kin etc then you don't get married.

It actually seems like a pretty sensible system to me that gives couples the choice to bind themselves legally or not. You're currently choosing not to, which is fine because lots of couples don't want that. But if you do want the legal protections then there is a very simple solution available to you that doesn't need to cost a lot of money and doesn't mean you have to change your name or whatever else it is you or your partner objects to.

"Slated" because there already IS a solution for long-term partners in the form of a civil partnership, so whingeing about a problem that doesn't exist.
It's like saying "wa wa waaaaa I don't want to send my children to a state school wa wa waaaaa". There are already other options available (home ed or private).