bankruptcy

[Whatdowedonow]

Not sure if this should be in legal or money. Just found out partner may be made bankrupt. :(

We are not married and the house is in my name. I pay all the mortgage and most of the bills. The odd bill comes from his account. Can they make a claim on my house? How will we be able to prove that most of the items in the house are mine as I doubt we have receipts for the TV and various other expensive items like a piano.

Also, for other reasons (to do with making sure he is entitled to my pension should anything happen to me) we were wanting to show some mutual dependency such as setting up a joint bank account and most of the bills are in joint names even if they come out of my account. We haven't got around to it yet but should we not apply for an account now or will it make no difference to whether they consider he has an interest in the house?

Would we be wise to halt plans to get married? :(

The Official Receiver will do a Land Registry search of the property. If your partner is not registered as having a legal interest, they can't touch it.

They are very rarely interested in household contents unless they are worth a very large amount of money (antiques etc).

He will be asked to complete a booklet with all his income, outgoings etc. He would be able to put joint outgoings, dependencies, children etc on there.

Please don't think the OR in anything like you may have seen on tv. Ultimately, there're there to help your OH as much as creditors. If there's no money for the creditors, so be it. They won't sell loads of your stuff to try & make money for them.

Creditors like tax man, mortgagors come first for any dividend anyway.

You should close the joint account. He's not allowed to run a current account I think until his bankruptcy is discharged. Don't transfer anything into his name. It will only go to the creditors.

Thanks all, that is some reassurance. We haven't opened the joint account yet so we'll hold off on that for now and keep things separate until it's all sorted out one way or the other.

The "Guide To Bankruptcy" published by the Official Receiver [OR ]was recently updated. A bit dry but very informative about the detail.

http://www.bis.gov.uk/insolvency/Publications

The important first step is the questionnaire that your partner will be req'd to fill in. Its important to put in ALL that they pay for in the household. If your partner had been paying the mortgage I would tell you to get advice too but if that's not the case then emphasising their contribution will really count when the OR comes to calculate whether your partner has "surplus" income [which they will then recover for the creditors

www.bis.gov.uk/insolvency/Publications