Background - I am SAHM, two young kids, have initiated separation during to lying and general shit from my wife. We own the house and have good equity in it. House was bought jointly after marriage. Kids are both legally ours, I'm bio mum.
Wife always refused to have joint accounts, so we roughly paid half the bills. Wife paid mortgage and some other bills, I bought food, and other bills and it was usually a similar amount. Even when I wasn't working and was home with the kids, I had to pay my half through savings and crappy bits of online surveys etc.
Wife has just moved out. She offered to pay all the mortgage but hasn't offered maintenance. I assumed we'd consider half the mortgage to be her contribution towards maintenance ie. instead of messing about with each paying half, then her giving me other money, her paying my half was in place of maintenance. I've since found out that she wants to keep paying the whole mortgage because she thinks she can keep the whole house if she can prove I never made a mortgage payment. I know this is false, that being married means I'm entitled to half (or more because of the kids, I'm very much primary carer).
My plan was for us to pay half each from now, as this is the point we officially financially separate. I'm putting the bills in her name into mine and taking her off the council tax. So in my mind, we draw a line now as to having an equal share in the house and from this point forwards we need to share the mortgage payments, or the equity will not be equally split.
However... I know that if I pay half the mortgage I'm going to have a fight on my hands to get maintence out of her. She's got debts coming out her ears so she's trying to get out of paying what she needn't. So her paying all the mortgage would at least mean I'm seeing some financial help off her. But if I let her do that, am I risking getting my full 50%? We'd be looking to start selling the house in a year or so if all goes well. So that's a year of her paying full mortgage 'for me'.