DH thinks I’m ripping him off

[EmmaG78x]

Hi, big disagreement with DH about the proportion in ownership of our house.

When we met I’d just bought a house but We moved in together and joined finances shortly afterwards. Everything was split equally including the mortgage but this was much cheaper than if he was renting. 8 years later we used the profit from the house as a 20% deposit for a house. Noting else was used as a deposit so we split ownership 75:25 in my favour.

Now, 5 years later and we are about to change mortgage providers. DH has mentioned we should now move to 70:30in my favour and continue until it’s 50:50 in another 20 years.

I want it to remain 75:25 forever as the deposit was from selling my house and he earns a lot more than me so me and the kids will need more if he leaves me.

He argues we’ve had joint finances the whole time and he earns a lot more than me. (about 50% more until I went part time once DS1 was born so now about double)

AIBU to keep things the way they are?

Agree with PPs: you get whatever deposit you paid on the first house plus any mortgage you paid before he moved in. Everything beyond that is 50/50. If you didn’t want to do that then you should have paid the mortgage yourself.

My partner moved into the house I owned. I carried on paying the mortgage myself on the understanding that the house would be entirely mine if we split. He paid the bills and put what he was saving on rent into an account so he had money for a deposit on a new place of his own if we split. We did that for the first couple of years, then we merged our finances and now everything is 50-50 and we are getting married.

Stop drip feeding, either be upfront with the facts or quit stringing it along. What deposit did you pay into the first house, not the subsequent house?

You are ripping him off, being VU and being tight AF.
The law thankfully protects people (women mostly) where financial contributions aren't equal, which is why women who have quit work to raise kids get a share of partner's pension, and share of house.
It's no different in this case.

DH and I started off where we both owned separate properties. I had a house and he had a flat. I had more equity in my house than he had in his flat. He sold his flat and moved in with me and when we got married used his equity to pay off more of my mortgage. We moved house using some money an aunt left me to help us and we protected my portion of the deposit (excluding his equity) so that if we did split up we both got our deposit back and the rest was 50/50.
We have moved again since and have given up on all of that. After 10 years it is pointless in our case- he has since inherited quite a lot money from his grandma which he has put into joint savings and I had some from my mum which I did the same with. No point in having 'that bit was mine, I put more into that bit.' I was the biggest earner for 6 years, am now SAHM and he is on a large salary now. Just no point. We still have separate savings from the past but now everything is joint and we consider it all 'our' money.
I think I am stuck with him anyway He loves the children, the cats and the house too much to ever leave.

My father left me a substantial pot of money when he died which allowed me to purchase our house. We have a contract written that stipulates should we separate then upon sale I will receive that money back in full and we shall split the rest down the middle.

Could you do similar?

If it helps any, over my 20+ year marriage I paid the lion’s share of the price on our 1st house, then on our next house I paid off the mortgage from an inheritances. He paid the mortgage on the 1st for about 1-2 years and on the 2nd for 1 month. In total I’d paid for about 90%, plus more than he did on family expenses, this in spite of his income being a lot higher.

Of course this is one of the reasons I divorced him. The point of this post - it mattered not a jot on who owned or paid for what. It was Matrimonial property and as such all in one pot to be divided as to our respective needs.

@EmmaG78x he did save towards the deposit though as he contributed towards your mortgage for 8 years. He also contributes towards this one and allows you to spend his much higher earnings. I imagine that if you have an 800,000 mortgage like you say then you are also living a comfortable life based on his much higher earnings.

It should be 50/50 now regardless of the amount. Protect your deposit if you want, and then 50/50 any profit.

But he hasn't "done well", he's being ripped off.

Presumably with your much lower income you would never have got a mortgage that big without his salary? So you've "done well". Better in fact

I have a declaration of trust on our house. If my husband and I were to split and the house sold I get 30% (the deposit that came solely from me). The remaining 60% is split.
So I would get in total 60% and Husband 30%.
We have had discussions where DH wants to balance things by now paying half of what the deposit was. I have said ok but it would not be in cash terms but % as the value of our house has increased the value of the deposit has increased.
We have never been able to agree so it remains as it is.
We now both pay 50% of our earning into a house account where all bills and mortgage are payed from. Any excess stays there and accumulates or pays for holidays, treats, stuff for the house.
Who pays more has fluctuated over the years by who earns more but the % remains the same.
In the beginning I had more disposable income ( and tended to spend it on the house).
These days he has more disposable income (and tends to spunk it on stuff for himself🤔)
But as long as we both feed the house account with our % what we do with our own money is up to us!

And when I say protect your deposit I mean the deposit you paid towards your first house. Not the current one. He paid half towards that property so the increase in value resulting in the 200k deposit was not a result of you "saving"

I don't think you can really justify it by saying he would have paid less in rent over time, you are his wife not landlord and if he hadn't met you then he would probably have gotten himself a partner and a mortgage which would have been 50:50. You seem to have the pretty cushy end of the deal having half of your mortgage paid and a joint account with a higher earner but if the relationship goes tits up he hasn't much to show for it, it's not as if he isn't contributing so I think YABU.

The more I think about it, the more I see this as genuinely disgusting behaviour.

There's not even a pretence of trying to do things logically or fairly. There's no logical maths that arrive at the split the op had decided is correct. Just selfish grabby financial abuse

What you need to do is ring fence the deposit you paid so you get that back then everything else is 50:50. Easy done

The deposit from your jointly paid for home you mean.

You don't just get the deposit back, you get the proportion of the price. Value can go down or up.

YABVU and massively ripping him off. Why get married?!

I have a similar situation but not married.
We have a legal document drawn saying that if house is sold, once mortgage company is paid off, I get first X amount of remainder (my deposit amount back) and anything remaining is split 50/50.

Uh, yeah. That’s a no from me.

Protect your initial deposit + value inflation.

Any additional equity to be split 50/50

So you're in a 1 million pound house? And you think you are owed 75% of that value?

The profits from the first house are only yours in law, not in morality, seeing as your husband paid half the mortgage on it for almost all the time you owned it.

I would be willing to bet that your deposit into that first house was probably only 10-20% or it's value so that's the only bit you should have any claim to protect.

But your husband has probably over contributed by far more than that over the years anyway. You sound incredibly greedy and selfish.

I want it to remain 75:25 forever as the deposit was from selling my house and he earns a lot more than me so me and the kids will need more if he leaves me.

Don't know if anyone else has said this but what if the boot was on the other foot. If you had moved in with him and the deposit was from selling his house would you be happy to a 75:25 split in his favour?

YABU. It should be 50/50.
Another vote also for the suggestion that your relationship would be more stable/happier if you do this.

I’m imagining the comments if the roles were reversed and the husband was refusing to let his female partner own 50% of their home. I think we would all be outraged and call him evil.

You are meant to be a partnership. I assume you couldn’t afford the mortgage payments without him given how much more he earns.

The logical and fair minded part of me thinks that his share should be higher. However, seeing so many times how women get shafted on the Relationshhip board over the years, I can't quite summon the energy to get outraged. That said, I would change it to your DH's suggestion because that still gives you a very generous deal and it might improve your relationship.

But how much more than you has he contributed to the mortgage since then?

Broadly, there are 3 main approaches for the split:

(a) a fixed split, either 50/50 or some other proportion

(b) take your deposit back (or if there is not enough equity, as much of it as you can) then split what's left according to a fixed ratio

(c) work out your total contributions and split the equity in proportion

(a) is simple and makes sense for couples who are paying pretty much equal shares, or have mingled finances like an SAHP and breadwinner,

(b) is what a lot of people are advocating but can result in a very unfair outcome if the house is not held for very long but has gone up or down significantly in that time.

(c) is the most complicated but the "fairest" in purely investment terms

My DSis went down route (b). She put in 60K deposit then they split costs and mortgage 50/50.

They lived together 3 years and the house went up 70K. They probably paid about 22K mortgage in that time. So she put in 71K and got back 95K, 34% return. Not bad!

But he put in 11K and got back 35K which is a 318% return!!! They both bought the same house somehow it worked out a much better investment for him than her, because he invested 11K but recieved return as if he'd invested 41K.

It wasn't deliberate; they both thought the fair thing to do was to get back her original deposit. The problem is that (1) that ignores the fact that she is forgoing returns she coudl get on that 60K if it wasn't being used as a deposit, and (2) the deposit meant they could buy a more expensive house and therefore got a bigger return.

If they'd taken approach (c), the split would have been 112K to her and 17K to him, which once we take out the initial investment is a profit of 41.5K to her and 6.4K to him, which works out as a 58.5% return for each person.

Because of this, When my husband (then BF) and I first bought we informally agreed if we did split up we'd do the proportional share model. Luckily he's very mathsy so although his first feeling was that the protected deposit model was most fair, once we ran a few scenarios he realised it wasn't.

By the time we got married 7 years later, our finanaces were so intermingled that we had no concerns we'd be moving into the 50/50 model.

I'm not advocating which is right for you her, but given how often model (b) is suggested I wanted to show how that can really work out badly for the person putting up the deposit.

I moved in with my now DH at the point he had almost paid off the mortgage on a £200000 house (he got lucky with the housing market). I had £10 grand in an isa as the sum total of my assets. He sold the house once we were married and had our first child, and added a substantial inheritance he'd received from his family to buy our current family home, almost outright. We own the new house jointly, 50/50, despite me essentially never having paid a penny towards it.

We have two children now so I imagine in the case of a split, as the likely resident parent I could get a fair amount of cash from the house that I haven't paid towards. I have no intention of doing that, and he loves & trusts me so I don't think it has ever occurred to him the 'protect himself'. Also, he's a decent man who would want to provide for his children in the case of a split. I'm not sure how I would deal with the situation if he was as protective of his money as you are. It certainly wouldn't feel like teamwork!