Marriage law is outdated given the increase in second/third marriages

[Itsmyaccount]

I'm really interested to get people's thoughts on this as a friend has recently been through a very difficult situation with her dad and his decision over his will and it's got me thinking.

Her dad remarried when he was in his early sixties after having been married to her mum for 3 decades. Work wise he's a very successful man and as with any high flyer quite a lot of sacrifice had to be made by her mum and by extension my friend to facilitate him being able to build that career. Things like moving abroad when work dictated, limits on the amount of time he was around when she was growing up when the hard graft had to go in, all for the long term intention that the hard sacrifice would pay off in the end for the family. Sadly the pressures from it contributed to the eventual divorce.

That then leads me onto the current situation. As said above he went onto re-marry shortly after the divorce. Her step-mum has kids of her own but all kids on either side were young adults when they married. They were in very different situations financially and at the time he had made sure my friend knew that his will would be such that his wife would be looked after if he pre-deceased her but that the lions share would be protected for her (his daughter).

Her dad has continued on with his financial success, a few years ago even came into a large sum of money when he sold a company he started when my friend was younger. That triggered him to re-visit his will and he has since decided that his current wife is entitled to 50% of everything due to the length of marriage (of which the law agrees), he briefly had it that his wife would inherit everything trusting that she would divide it equally between her kids and my friend when she then passed (assuming he predeceases her as he's older). This has caused a great deal of upset. My friend isn't close with her step-family and is finding the idea very hard that they are effectively profiting off of something they've not themselves made a sacrifice for as by the time they married kids were already grown up and the hard foundational work requiring the big sacrifice had long since passed.

This brings me onto the thread title. I've tried to put myself in her shoes and honestly I think I'd feel exactly the same way even though the sums in my case would be much smaller.
It feels to me that the laws on marriage and inheritance were written at a time when second, third (fourth even!) marriages were so uncommon it didn't need to account for how you can legally protect assets for your children (or whoever) without having to do a serious amount of mental gymnastics to achieve it. I do actually know of another friend whose dad thinks it's so important to protect his finances for his kids he refuses to even live with his long term partner, let alone marry her. That to me seems sad that actually should he want to marry her (which who knows maybe he doesn't want to), he is choosing to not as the complication it would cause for him and his kids inheritance is so great.

YABU - yes the law is fine as it is
YANBU - things have changed a lot and law needs modernising to better protect everyone given blended families are on the rise, not just your spouse

People need to be smart and not remarry. Marriage is ultimately about getting your economic contract recognized by the government. You can’t happily be in a later life relationship without being married or muddying finances. Women don’t need protection in the same way they do when marriage involves pregnancy and child rearing so forming an economic contract isn’t critical.

Other countries (including in the UK - Scotland) do have it so you can't disinherit children completely.

My siblings and I been 'disinherited' by my father (he's not dead yet, but has shared his will) - weirdly we get on really well with him, but his position is that it will all go to his wife/stepmother and then her children.

It's his money and his decision and he's making it with his eyes wide open. No one is entitled to their dead parent's money - their parent can make the decision about who this goes to.

I've also got the same arrangement with my not-first husband. Everything will go to him and he can pass onto my children and his children IF HE WISHES but there isn't much anyway, and he needs a roof over his head. I've made this clear to my DC.

Are you thinking of something like the Scottish law where you cant disinherit children? Not sure this is needed. When you have a complicated relationship situation you need to think about how you want to recognise your relationships, make a will and keep it up to date as circumstances change.

I'd feel the same but marriage isn't the problem, the problem is that he has actively made that decision. Its not like he died and has created an accidental fallout.

Her mum got what she was legally entitled to at that time.

Dad is giving new wife what he thinks she should be legally entitled to after supporting him from what was essentially the reset point of the divorce.

He isn't married to daughter or owes her a legal claim. So marriage isn't the problem. Dad thinking his wife is equal to his daughter is the problem

I do actually know of another friend whose dad thinks it's so important to protect his finances for his kids he refuses to even live with his long term partner, let alone marry her.

Smart man. Your friend has been massively fucked over by her Dad. All for a bunch of step kids he's not even related to. I'd be livid.

He probably could write his wife out of his Will though? Or at least leave everything to her on trust so most of his wealth is protected for his kids. There are mechanisms to allow this.

Divorce law and inheritance law are very different.

What do you propose would be a better legal solution than the one we already have?

I’d also observe there’s no requirement to marry again after divorce. If you’re unhappy with marriage laws then don’t get married - that’s the beauty of our legal system, you can choose whether you want to opt in to marriage laws or not.

I’m not sure exactly what you’d want the law to do? “Protect everyone” in what way? You can already leave you money to your children, or your spouse - are you saying you want a law that you can’t disinherit children? It feels like maybe that’s not what you mean because you’re talking about a friend’s father who doesn’t want to get married in order to protect his children, so you’re not just talking about people cutting their children off.

Personally I don’t think it needs to change, but I think people need to make sure they understand the legal and financial implications of the contract they’re signing when they get married. And the implications of not marrying as well - I know someone who thinks that because she’s been with her partner 20 years, if they break up she’s entitled to half his house and pension because she thinks they’re “common law married”.

She’s been no more fucked over than someone whose dad died with no money. It’s his money, he can choose what he wants to do with it.

It’s tricky.

dh walked away from his first marriage with nothing (her affair). The kids were young and there was no way to keep the house without just signing it over to her.

so his kids have already had their “inheritance”- he worked hard for that house, paid a huge deposit and nearly 20 years of the mortgage by himself.

it’s a house in the SE so probably worth about £800k now. 400k per child.

if he died everything he owns would go to me. It’s not as much as he left his ex with, our house in the north is worth much less, and I paid the deposit, and 10 years of the mortgage before I met him.

if he was forced to leave a share to his kids it could leave me having to sell up to pay them and in the financial shit.

Of course there’s always the chance his ex leaves it all to her AP.

Oh and my own dad died when I was 7. He left a large estate to my mum. There will be nothing left when she dies.

Have I been fucked over? should she have been forced to put some of that money aside for us children?

It happens a lot but tbh it always has. Wasn’t unusual for Victorian husbands to go through a few wives because of deaths in childbirth. Widows likewise were considered a destabilising influence or expensive hangers-on. Read some Dickens or Austen: Fanny Dashwood ahoy. Or just read threads on here.

I was really worried about this in my case as I knew if I died that Dh would soon have got together with someone else and ds could have been excluded. I was planning to meet with a lawyer to suggest redoing our wills to protect his inheritance in that situation. But then Dh died.

DP and I do live together but no plans to marry. However, English law allows me to leave my things to anyone I want, and I do quite like that flexibility. I’ve done a will in contemplation of marriage in case we ever do the deed, to make sure that ds is protected, and that won’t change. That of course is why it’s so hurtful when children get deprioritised in a will or when someone won’t make a will at all. I don’t think it’s the law’s fault.

I take the point - especially when it means the child(ren) from the first marriage end of up with nothing - but am I missing something here?

So he's a very wealthy man... his DD will end up with half of that very large amount of money and then his wife, and eventually her children, will end up with the other half?

I can understand that she would prefer all of that fortune to herself, but why is it actually a bad thing really if he is effectively providing handsomely for his DD, his DW and then for his step-children?

Or have I missed/misunderstood something significant here?

they are effectively profiting off of something they've not themselves made a sacrifice for

I don’t get it. What did your friend, the daughter, do to facilitate her father’s financial success? If anything she has already benefited from it and still will. The ex-wife, sure, but she already received divorce settlement surely.

I agree that marriage protections in later life cause this sort of issue time and time again, but that’s often due to somewhat grabby adult children. Protections in newer marriages quite rightly protection housing and security for children, and for the primary-caregiver parent, who has lost out on earning potential, income and pension, but why on earth should an adult child need any of this protection?

It’s financially tougher to single (and sometimes even tougher to be single and elderly) no matter what your age, so I’m not sure why the widowed wife does not deserve the ongoing protection of having been married to her deceased spouse.

It seems that if you are a divorced father you must make sure all your money goes to your children prior to any second or third marriage and not a new wife or subsequent children. If you don’t you are a bad father.

however you are allowed to leave everything to your wife if she is your first, with no consideration as to what she may do with the money. After all she may spend it all on a top of the range BMW, spend 6 months of the year on holiday, or remarry and leave it to a new husband. Easily done if she forgets to rewrite a will after marriage.

i don’t think anyone should be forced to leave anything to anyone. Even dependent children the money will usually go to the other parent for their care, not them. Adult children have no financial need. It can leave other dependent adults such as spouses in the shit. A second wife who has cared for him in old age should take precedence over adult children.

some children can go NC without good reason. Parental alienation is a thing, not every kid is a lovely human being.

i am more in favour of ensuring parents have adequate life/critical illness insurance should they die before the children reach adulthood. It should be a condition of divorce so one parent isn’t left with children and no adequate support.

I don’t think it’s the marriage laws that need looking at, but rather the inheritance laws. You could adopt the Scottish approach to not being able to disinherit children, for example.

However, I think I agree with the PPs who say that the divorce already accounted for the first wife’s ‘sacrifices’, or should have, so in this case the daughter is being unreasonable to not be happy with half, given the length of the relationship with the second wife.

The ones that I have more sympathy for are where first wife dies and all her assets go to the husband, who then remarries and passes everything to his second wife (and subsequently his heirs) on his death, thus depriving the children of the first marriage of what their mother would presumably have wanted to go to them. If it were possible to build in a law to prevent that I’d be all for it, but I think it would be difficult. My own will allows for some of my assets (ones that have come from my side of the family) to be passed immediately to my children on my death. However, my half of our house would go to my husband, for obvious reasons, and I would have to trust that he wouldn’t cut our kids out either intentionally or accidentally if he subsequently remarried. I would want him to be happy and would want him to have a good quality of life, but I would also want to ensure that my hard-earned wealth wasn’t being passed to another woman and her children instead of to my own.

I feel very strongly that we should all have the right to leave our money to whoever we like, be that family, friends, charities etc.
Absolutely nobody should expect to automatically receive an inheritance, regardless of the number of marriages their parents may have had. If a parent wants to leave all their millions to the donkey sanctuary, so be it.
So we definitely don't need a change in the law.

Your friend is greedy.

thinking about it inheritance laws factor into this as well.

i think we should do away with the spousal allowance, and make individual
allowances bigger.

for example, I own my house. If I leave everything to my kids, I may exceed the 500k tax allowance and they’d have to sell to pay IHT.

if I leave everything to dh, and he then leaves everything to my kids, they get 1million before they pay IHT. But then I risk dh not leaving it to them.

to know for definite my assets go to my kids I will have to risk exceeding the IHT bracket? Or hope I outlive dh and get his allowance.

many adults could be caught in this cycle. I wonder how many children where assets were left to a second wife miss out on inheriting directly because it’s an attempt to avoid IHT on a property.

People can protect their children though by leaving their assets to them in their Will.They don't have to leave any assets they own to their spouse.
Marriage isn't the issue its the father not prioritising his children. Whether he was married or not he could have still made the same provision in his Will to someone other than his children,
Are you suggesting that the law should make it compulsory to leave your assets to your children?

Quite simply, nobody should feel entitled to another person's assets or wealth. Your friend didn't contribute to her father's earnings so she's unreasonable just for that.

You can ring fence your assets to prevent them being inherited by the family of your spouse but it takes proper planning and mechanisms putting in place. You can also choose to not marry to protect your assets in much the same way as choosing to marry creates a legal entitlement to share them.

Affording rights of inheritance upon death or entitlement to assets upon the end of a relationship shouldn't extent to unmarried persons and removing rights from married persons would be lunacy too as the marriage is the legal recognition of their relationship.

People generally should not marry, divorce causes so much pain for everyone under the current system, it’s not fit for purpose.

This is all so interesting to read, lots of things I'd not necessarily thought about and please do forgive me I don't know the intricacies of the laws across the UK so as many posters have suggested there may be things already protecting in places.

To the points where people say it's their money their choice. I agree. I personally believe everyone is entitled to do and act as they want in all facets of life (but not entitled to dictate how people react to it).

In terms of what I'm wondering my suggestion isn't necessarily to say remove protections for one. I'm saying review and improve things so that people aren't so restricted in how they write a will. Currently I believe the baseline prioritises a spouse in all cases and for me I feel like that's not nuanced enough for today's modern society. If the law protected people who wanted to weight their will to their children if their circumstances were like my friends it gives people more freedom to choose what to do. It's not to say they need to do it (or that many people would think it right to do), but having the option to do so is surely better than not? If that freedom does already exist it's seems to be it's made complicated with trusts legal avoidance tactics, or passing assets.

@theresapossuminthekitchen I couldn't agree more something similar happened to someone I knew it's so devastating.

@SprayWhiteDung I totally understand your point here, more people are benefitting. From what I understand from my friend it's not a case of her wanting lots of cash and them to go without. It's just she has no relationship with them and they're benefiting from something that largely led to the breakdown of her parents marriage so is just difficult to come to terms with seeing.

@Didimum I guess this is just personal perspective, she herself didn't facilitate it, that was her mum and I don't know the details of the divorce settlement so can't comment. I do think where kids might not be the facilitator of something for their parents it doesn't take away that they may have to sacrifice. In her case her dad was hardly there so he could pursue the career that largely led to the breakdown of her parents marriage so I can understand why it's an emotionally charged thing.

I couldn't come back from this. Reminds me of a thread recently where somebody had been disinherited.

Hopefully she cuts ties on principal - there's never been a genuine relationship there

But there are provisions for it, this person just isn’t using them. Both DH and I were married before and had the same issue. We now have trust wills, not mirror wills. We also own our house as tenants in common.

So, let’s say DH dies first. We’ve decided that each of us owns 50% of the estate. His 50% is protected so that even if I remarry/go into a home etc, that money is protected for his children. I am also entitled to live in our home until I pop my clogs as I have a life interest. That means the kids can’t force me to sell up just to get their inheritance.

The person you’re talking about has either been badly advised or knows about these things and is choosing not to do their will properly 🤷‍♀️