Aibu to think if you want the legal protection of marriage then get married

[Sofabitch]

I was listening to the radio this morning and they were talking about how widows allowance isn't paid to couples that weren't married, even if children are involved.

Aibu to think marriage is essentially the legal joining of people and if you want to be recognised legally and finacially then you should get married.

I guess the supreme court will ultimately decide if I am being unreasonable. But i can't help but think people dont realise the legal security marriage offers and they should.

It's just occurred to me...Marriage in some form, of some kind, exists in almost every society/culture in the world. Why?

"I think it may switch to £350, or similar, a month for 18 months to be paid to the adult with the care of the children. This means not being married wouldn't matter. It may also address the complaints about the fact that people who suddenly lose child maintenance have no assistance at a time where their child has also lost a parent."

I agree. Getting back to the original thing about widow/widower allowance, I think there is a good case for saying that this should be a payment to dependent children rather than to any adults concerned. Regardless of marital status. I would be fine with this.

psi I am a financial adviser specialising in mortgages and the relevant protection. It is not our remit to advise you to get married, but it is our remit to tell you of the tax implications of buying property together or a policy paying out if you are not married. So I do have a duty of care to discuss IHT implications and ways around that if you are unmarried. However I cannot outright tell you to get married.

Yes, it would be rare if someone did not advise you of that. Lawyers would be likely to do so as well eg are you married (because they must see your passport or other ID anyway - I had someone the other week with a different name from what they had said and what was on the passport so I asked if they were married or just partners and they were married but I think the passport had not been changed) and whether married or not do they want to hold property as tenants in common or joint tenants and what shares each and have they made a will and that kind of thing.

Anyway I think these threads on MN are very helpful. I had a client once whose wife did not know they were not married (they had had a religious ceremony only) or so he thought anyway and I think it is a big problem for lower earners (plenty of whom are male of course these days) that they are unaware. However some find a man won't marry them as he thinks they want his money but the best offer they can get is just to live together as at least that buys them the lifestyle for the time they live together and they knowingly accept that as a compromise even though a £200 wedding (or even £50k wedding) would have been their preferred choice. If people do want marriage there is an argument that you should not therefore move in until you have that wedding ring - part of the reason in the old days why you didn't give up your virginity until you had the marriage.

Look the point I'm trying to make is that I'm frustrated that we can clearly show our long term commitment together but it's worth less than a couple who got married after, what? A couple of weeks together?

This 'worth less' is a value judgement you're adding though psi. Cohabitation isn't intrinsically better or worse than marriage, it's just legally quite different. Its people who've signed a particular legal contract and people who haven't, not committed v non-committed.

I'd say exactly the same to you if you were eg a married person complaining that the reduced testamentary freedom meant you were being treated as less worthy of free choice than someone who hadn't married their partner (if you disinherit a spouse in your will they can challenge it, whereas it's much more difficult for a cohabitant to do that).

I do see why you're unhappy you're only learning about this now. I'd still recommend taking legal advice before deciding what to do, this time specifically focused on whether marriage would improve your position as you don't seem to have had that already.

And you can get a lot of the marriage benefits if it is those you are after if you are not married eg if you are worried about inheritance tax your partner could give you assets and then survive 7 years or give them to children; you could have high life insurance policies and health cover with each other as beneficiary; you could ensure money is all held in joint names so if one dies it goes to the other etc etc

if you are worried about inheritance tax your partner could give you assets and then survive 7 years

If you could with confidence predict being alive in seven years' time, a lot of the reasons for marriage would disappear.

Conversely, gifting your unmarried partner a house in London and then dropping down dead the following month is likely to result in a great deal of trickiness, as the IHT on the equity in the house would be due, as well as any outstanding mortgage. If the survivor were able to get a mortgage

You can get life insurance policies to cover potential IHT on a house, and if you are not married and of typical MN age such a policy is not wildly expensive (a few tens of pounds per month, perhaps, but I'm guessing).

However, within a few years that would have paid for a registry office wedding and dinner afterwards. IHT increases with house values and inflation, so cheap level term policies, which are probably about six quid per hundred thousand per month, wouldn't be suitable. And a reducing mortgage life insurance policy wouldn't be suitable either, as the potential IHT increases as the outstanding balance falls.

Saying to everyone oh we're signing this contract cos one of us might die tomorrow so we won't invite you - but we'll renew vows or something in the future and you can all come to that sounds just rather mercenary, hardly romantic (and I'm not a romantic person!) and not exactly what we thought of. We can't afford a get together right now like we would have liked but clearly we're going to have to look at this and go bloody get married asap.

psicat You don’t have to tell anyone you’ve done it. It’s up to you whether you do that or not. But honestly, if my friend or daughter or sister said to me that they couldn’t afford to have a wedding right now but they’d been advised that not being married made their legal and financial situation quite precarious and they wanted to just get the legal part out of the way as soon as possible, I would have no problem with that.

If someone did have a problem with that, I would think that they were either an interfering busybody or that they themselves did not understand the legal implications of being married vs not being married.

If you did decide to tell close friends and family about what you’ve learned and why you wanted to get legally married now even if you can’t afford to have a “wedding” until later, you might find that some of the people you tell realise they’re in the same situation as you and decide to do the same thing.

It would be a great way to get people talking about what is a very important and clearly much misunderstood issue.

we'd planned to do so someday, once we'd done other things first.

I'm in my 50s. As I said somewhere hundreds of posts ago this is a very new approach to marriage. When I was a child almost nobody would have contemplated buying a house and having a child with someone they weren't married to. I doubt many of them were fully aware of the legal differences between married and unmarried couples. It was a lot more to do with respectability and avoiding stigma then. But it did the job of protecting women and children if a man (almost always the higher or sole earner then) died or walked out.

But honestly, if my friend or daughter or sister said to me that they couldn’t afford to have a wedding right now but they’d been advised that not being married made their legal and financial situation quite precarious and they wanted to just get the legal part out of the way as soon as possible, I would have no problem with that.

I would be a bit sad if my kid or sister did this. Not because they weren’t having a wedding, I wouldn’t care if it was straight in and out wearing jeans and a Big Mac on the way home. It’s an important thing and I would just like to be there to express my support. I like all my family’s partners so it would be important for me to be there just to say ‘this is an important decision and we support you and we’re happy’.

No offence but the best way you could support them would be to be supportive, rather than making it about you.

You could still plod along and be a witness mucks. Somebody doing the right thing should not make you sad.

It's quite awkward sometimes having these conversations with clients.Have had couples turn to me ask "do YOU think we should get married " eek I'm here to advise you but that's a decision for you! But from a tax point of view yes..

Good points by Cuboid on IHT. I am single so no man either living or at the moment even sleeping over which is rather nice but it does mean if I die soon the children areh omeless because of IHT. However it's fairly likely I have another 20 years + yet. I just meant if a couple earn about the same and own say one property which is currently in the name of one but no mortgage they could choose to put it into joint names as joint tenants - there are lots of issues to consider however. We have a married neighbour who gave a lot of assets to their adult son -the son is now dying or at least very ill and has been for I thnk about 4 years so assets were moved back to the parents I believe.

The tax liabilities and iht are not simple. As a protection adviser I can mitigate iht by writing a level term with indexation but it will never keep up with house price increases.

On a separate issue if a direct descendent is willed the main residence property (husband/wife/children/grand children) then the iht threshold is increased. The amount by I would have to check because I can't remember the new figures off the top of my head. If you are NOT MARRIED the increase will not apply if you leave the property to your partner.

Yes from memory it goes up form £325k to £500k threshold if it's your home as an asset you leave not another asset but that is de minimis for some of lucky us with houses worth a fair bit more. Anyway I hope to live to 80 so it's a lontg time off and we might have confiscatory capital taxes on our homes by then and £20k a year council tax, who knows....

My current aim would be to die penniless having ensured the children have every last penny before whatever is the then IHT liimit.

This thread smacks of people needing proper financial, legal and tax advice.

I appreciate that lots of people see getting married as a wedding. It is NOT, it is a legal contract that allows certain benefits in life and death.

In reality it is just a protection mechanism for either party/both parties. The dress, and everything else doesn't even need to exist.

Sounds good to me Xenia. Having recently had a big health scare I'm not banking on that but am going to give it a good go 😂

Yes if Jeremy Corbyn gets in who knows

Arguably is rather unfair that a single person with no children has a tax allowance of £325k whilst from 2020 a married person owning a house they leave to their children or grandchildren gets an IHT allowance of £1million..

K, I agree, very unfair. the tax system is full of unfair stuff but even so for me it is just so much better without my ex husband any price is worth paying even inheritance tax.

the tax system is full of unfair stuff

The problem is that the "solution" to unfairness is one that no-one apart from Rand-ite nutters and the hyper-rich would regard as acceptable, which is various sorts of flat tax. The moment you start using tax to redistribute wealth, which most of us regard as a good thing, and using it to reward "good" behaviour, you will create anomalies which can be gamed by the astute and which sometimes punish the "wrong" sort of "good" people.

Simple case: should people die of starvation in old age? No. Should we encourage saving towards old age? Yes. Can you achieve the former without implicitly punishing the latter? 10 marks, write on only one side of the paper at once.

Simple case: should families largely plan to fund their own children's upbringing? Yes. Should children be punished for the poverty, however caused, of their parents? No. Can you achieve the latter without implicitly undermining the former? 10 marks, etc.

Taxation is unfair. For most people, over the whole of their life, it roughly evens out. Sometimes it doesn't. Fixing it almost always means breaking something else.

Well it's certainly been an eye opener of a thread. Re financial advice - we've had two properties/mortgages over the years as well as one review, made a will and had financial advice to set up life insurance. And more informal chats but the above were proper, sit down, look at money and future with someone we were paying. Not once was subject even broached (different people btw over the years).

So maybe it is something that it needs to be more out there, more up front. Ive asked some of my unmarried friends (all sensible, mature couples) and they were as surprised as me. Ive only had chance to ask a couple of married friends but they equally were not aware and it wasn't their reasoning for getting married.

And we're all educated professionals in various fields, we all take pensions and mortgages etc seriously. Its got a conversation going that's for sure...

Mumsnet public service announcements?

I suppose that leaves us with the $64,000 question, which is how? This topic comes up on just about a weekly basis on MN, but evidently people don't always read those threads. One answer is to cover it in schools, which I guess is what would have to happen if it's to imprint in the collective mind, but they already have rather a lot to do!

Also psi I have a lot of respect for the fact that the first thing you've done on acquiring this knowledge is to make plans to change your own behaviour and situation. Not suggested other people should lose their rights (to cohabitation without the legal implications of marriage) as a consequence of you not knowing, but taken the initiative yourself. Good for you and I'm so glad this thread has been useful to you.

I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d chip in as I had an relevant experience. I discovered I was pregnant with a pretty unsuitable person but I come from a family where it had always been pressed on me not to have kids outside marriage. I wanted the baby so did a registry office jobby as 6 months pregnant.

It benefited the children of the marriage in 3 ways. First, he got my marriage tax allowance which helped financially when I took the first couple of years out of work to care for my babies.

When I discovered he’d cheated in the local pub car park, I was able to claim spousal maintenance as well as child maintenance so my children and I were able to maintain the lifestyle we were used to until I found work so none of us had to suffer, lose our home and I could pay the bills and when I finally divorced, a clause remained that should he come into money in the future he was obligated to set aside some of that money for his children’s future.
He received a good inheritance and now his children both have a fund for either university fees or house deposit in the future as a result.

I have since remarried for love. The first marriage, although it didn’t work out at least gave the children of that marriage protection.

• it's very sad if people don't know how materially vulnerable they could be if they are cohabiting without being married

• but if people do know it can still be reasonable to refuse to marry. Some principles are worth paying for: different principles at different prices for different people. It is perfectly rational to refuse to marry even if you would be better off if your husband dies, than if your partner dies

• I agree with the OP - "if you want the protections of getting married, get married". I think that there should be a precisely defined legal moment at which people knowingly enter that state, where their affairs are entwined in such a way. At the moment it is a choice. If your boyfriend was down on his luck and you "temporarily" put him up, and then kicked him out because he turned out to be a lazy user, that's just part of life and every day is a school day. If you married him the moment he crossed the threshold he would now own half of your house. The decision to marry should be consciously taken and not dished out according to potentially irrelevant living circumstances.