Why get married?

[Needmynailsdone]

So have been with my partner 16 years. Childhood sweethearts, 2 kids under 2, early 30s. I see a lot of discourse online about why we should be married and why it’s stupid to have kids with someone you’re not married to, but aside from pension / life insurance stuff (which I’m the nominated beneficiary for), I don’t really understand the need. We both quite like the idea of it, it’s just generally not come up yet as we’ve been busy travelling, working on our careers and now the babies. What were your reasons for wanting to get married?

Because it isn't just pension and life insurance stuff.

If he ends up incapacitated you have no right to make decisions on his behalf as long as he has blood relatives.
If you don't own everything 50/50 and it be reflected as such on paper, you have no rights to it.
If he dies tomorrow and has individual finances you can't access them.
If one of you dies, the other has no right to inherit with a tax free allowance on top of standard IHT thresholds, which also has a knock on impact to your children.
And a tonne of other things. Marriage is a legal contract which makes your relationship recognised by the state.

Is this stuff not freely available information?

If you have a traditional setup in which one (usually the man) is the main earner and the second partner's (usually the woman's) career takes a back seat for childcare reasons (and in many cases never recovers), marriage is a legal contract that means family assets belong to both partners equally, thus providing financial security for the spouse who earns less or earns nothing but contributes in other ways. Arguably, raising children and taking responsibility for running a home is just as important to the family as income. Taking over these responsibilities has enabled my husband to develop his career in ways that would not have been possible otherwise (travel, etc).

That's not why we got married. We did it because we wanted to officially commit to each other for life and celebrate this big occasion with our loved ones. I only realised why it's important after we had children.

You aren't currently his next of kin and won't have the say if anything happens to him. and if he does ever sadly die don't assume you'll get everything automatically.
Once your children are over 18 they will
Inherit and could leave you out on the street.
If he leaves you you've no rights to anything.
It's a legal contract, I'm married for the second time. I like the title Mrs and wife but I also know I've a legal protection on the advice e

Many pp have mentioned the long list of financial and other advantages of getting married.
If you have a lot of time and money you could almost recreate some of these advantages with a mixture of of wills, putting partner as nominated beneficiary on pensions, creating legal documents with a solicitor etc etc.
But the far easier and cheaper way to benefit from all these advantages is to simply get married!

Do you have good reasons not to marry? It's just a legal formality.

That isn't true.

I've been consulted on medical decisions related to my father before I'd provided evidence of POA. Because somebody has to have those conversations and make those decisions. My father has a long term partner but they are unmarried and as such she has no rights whatsoever to be consulted on anything. Of course I wouldn't ever just leave her out, but I absolutely could.

I've been with my partner for 35 years.
We have adult children ( in my surname)
We have never married. ( I've never seen the need)
We own everything 50/50
Have matching wills
And for a couple of hundred quid, sorted out next of kin & power of attorney stuff if needed.
Get married if you want to.
If not just get everything legally sorted

From someone who's a bit further down the line age wise and is in the thick of the divorce era, in the unmarried couples splitting up the women are getting spectacularly financially shafted, even more so than the married ones, and that's saying something.

Again, you do not need to be married to have a say in healthcare decisions, nor do the wishes of blood relatives automatically override yours if you aren’t married.

You can only legally make decisions for someone who is medically incapacitated if you are their nominated power of attorney for heathcare. Otherwise the hospital will take family views into account but ultimately make a best interests decision on behalf of the patient.

You can nominate someone as your power of attorney without being married to them.

You need to look at your circumstances. DHs work has a spouses pension as part of death in service for example, plus other benefits like accommodation.Its very unusual to cohabit instead of marrying in his line of work.

But it can be disadvantageous in other circumstances for example if you have children from a prior relationship and want to protect assets for them.

And yes, your children will benefit when you both die. When my mum died, everything automatically went to my dad, including her nil rate band. And then when he died we were able to use both nil rate bands for money and for property, meaning no inheritance tax to pay on the first million.

I don’t agree that married people are necessarily motivated to work harder than cohabiting couples at their relationships as a PP said.

I think (not in all cases obviously) the hassle and cost of divorce isn’t worth it so marriage is a kind of artificial glue. I think there are more unhappily married couples than unhappily cohab couples tbh.

And that, unlike inheritance tax and legal protections for SAHPs, is not a “positive” of marriage. Quite the opposite!

We married for money reasons, specifically the IHT benefit. We also married so we would automatically be next of kin as we hadn't done our wills at that point so that if one of us dies, the other can get immediate access to money.

The idea of me dying out of the blue and my long term partner having to ask my parents for money to pay the bills because he can't legally access the money in my account and having to wait for probate was a complication we didn't want.

www.simpsonmillar.co.uk/family-law-solicitors/what-are-the-legal-benefits-of-being-married/

Consulted, yes. But you cannot legally make decisions on his behalf without power of attorney.

He could nominate his partner as his next of kin/contact and the hospital would discuss things with her instead. He could also refuse to let them discuss anything with you if he wanted to. It is his choice, not a legal right that you have.

Your relationship will end one of two ways: you split up or one of you dies.

If one of you dies, you will be spared inheritance tax and the process of post death admin will be much, much smoother for the surviving spouse. There is a reason hospitals organise bedside weddings: marriage really matters in the face of death.

If one of you is a lower earner in part because of childcare responsibilities, marriage protects your interests and nonfinancial contributions in the case of a split. If you are financially equal and both work FT, this is obviously less relevant, and indeed if your partner is a spendthrift it can be financially better not to be married. But 99 times out of 100 if there are compromises to be made in earning power between a heterosexual couple because of childcare/SEN/poor health the woman makes them.

From someone who's a bit further down the line age wise and is in the thick of the divorce era, in the unmarried couples splitting up the women are getting spectacularly financially shafted, even more so than the married ones, and that's saying something.

This is my friend, she’s been with her ex partner for almost 30 years, her name isn’t on the deeds of the 800k house they both lived in (there is no mor). Financially she has contributed a lot to their relationship as well as being the primary carer for their two DC. It really is a mess.

Your kids might question it / dislike it when they're older.

Setting up wills is not the same financual protection as marriage. They can be changed unilaterally if things go wrong.

It's not worth it for the person who has more income, assets and whatever else to be honest! Me and now DH had similar and similar future financial prospects, no way if I had more would I have got married though! I know that's not romantic but it's realistic.

@bakewellbride my adult children couldn't give a shiny shit that their parents never married.
But they are not from the 1950's so times have changed

but aside from pension / life insurance stuff (which I’m the nominated beneficiary for)

well, for now you are. But with a few forms and a signature he could change that faster than you think. But if you were married it’d be a different story.

I never understand the “too busy to get married” argument. We had a very simple civil marriage ceremony. All in all we were in and out in 11 minutes. My husband went back to work that afternoon. You don’t need a big “do” to be married. You’ve spent more time on this thread than we did at our marriage ceremony.

If you’re happy just being his current girlfriend, good for you. But your children deserve more stability.

People need to assess whether or not marriage will be beneficial to them after taking sound legal/financial advice. It is so dependent on your circumstances. When my non married relationship ended I walked away and that was that. Started again. My marriage cost me a lot of money to get out of, money that could have been spent on my kids. They have nothing that they wouldn't have had regardless.

The point PP makes above about your relationship ending in death or break up is spot on. Every relationship will end in one of those two and marriage protects in both.

Since the last budget we are considering getting married / civil partnership simply to protect each other in terms of inheritance Tax - more specifically our private pensions reverting to the other on death without the government taking too much. It feels entirely wrong that a government edict / policy change should indirectly affect how we live our life but that's the UK we now seem to live in... get married or lose money! Feels like it should be illegal somehow.

For me, being married seems to be recognized more than getting any of those legal rights in place i.e. pension, health etc . It shouldn’t necessarily be that way but it seems like that. Also, I just couldn’t understand the rationale of being together for years on end and not just filling in the form and popping to the registry office to cover yourselves in case of every eventuality.

@Needmynailsdone Strange that you reference travel as we also travel a fair amount. I take comfort that if anything happened abroad, it’s easier to be the wife than to be someone with a document that allows me to do x,y,x ( if it even applied in that country).

Weddings are another thing entirely though. No idea why anyone would want to waste money on that outdated ridiculousness.