Dealing with money when you move in together

[FebruaryUsername]

My partner and I are talking about moving in together, my partner owns their house and I rent so we agreed that it makes sense for me to move in with them.
We're struggling to work out (note: we're not disagreeing!) how much I should pay in 'rent' and we wondered how everyone else does it?
DP owns their home with a mortgage at around £900 a month. I won't be contributing to the mortgage itself as it is DP's house, but we both feel I should contribute some 'rent' towards things like wear and tear.
We agreed to split the rest of our bills 50/50.
We earn similar salaries, and we have enough money that we're not struggling financially.

I think the difficulty comes in at what point does it become your house too, if ever? I had a relative in a similar situation and in the end she got fed up with having no security. Maybe something to think about/discuss.

Splitting bills, fine, you said you both earn similar. So it's the wear and tear factor. Personally I'd just go with 50% of what needs replacing as it happens. So say washing machine breaks, half each on repair or a new one and so on.

If it's only ever going to be "his house" then you need decent savings of your own for if it all goes pear shaped. Or if later you decide to make things more permanent and buy something together then you have money to put towards it.

But go into this clear on what the long term plan is. You don't want resentment later on.

How much rent are you paying now? I agree you should be paying rent. He needs to be careful that doesn't count as you contributing towards the mortgage.

What about you paying half what you pay now? You both will benefit financially. You can save the other half towards buying somewhere in the future and he can do whatever he likes with his half.

I think £450 per month as rent. He can save it or pay it off the mortgage. You will both be better off and you won’t be any worse position than when you rented. This is a clean split with the bills and mortgage.

I know a couple who did this. They agreed that he would pay the mortgage, and she would pay the bills (energy, water etc)

I pay £600 in rent now, and we both pay full bills for our separate homes, so we will both be saving money by moving in together.
The long term plan is for me to save so we can buy a house together, or buy into DP's house if we decide to stay there. But certainly for the next year or so I will be 'renting' from DP.
DP's stance is "I guess you should pay something but I don't know how much" and my stance is "I absolutely need to pay something but I don't know how much" as neither of us have been in this situation before.

The arise I is

Sorry , posted by mistake. People usually advise the person who owns the house not to take "rent" as it could mean that they have contributed towards the mortgage (if you were to split).

Yes we have been warned about this, DP isn't concerned as they know I wouldn't try to claim ownership of their house and we both see this arrangement as a relatively short term one.

We split the mortgage and bills by 50%. Not sure if legally it was right but we felt secure in our relationship and like you, I wasn't going to claim anything if the relationship broke down. If it went pear-shaped, I was still saving and was spending less than if I had continued to rent in my old place so it was win-win really. We earnt similar amounts so that helped. Since then, we've bought together (and got married and had three kids!)

50/50 sounds fair. But keep enough savings for yourself that if it doesn’t work out you have a cushion of a deposit to rent again. Keep yourself financially secure.

One option is you pay 50:50 bills. Then, you put half of the mortgage payment into a savings account in your own name. At the point you are ready to buy together these savings go into the pot, so in the long term benefits you both (but in the shorter term you are protected).

If you're both earning similar enough amounts that neither of you would have significantly less than the other left over, then my starting point would be 50/50 bills, and half of your current rent rate.
That way you're both saving equally on the bills. But you're also saving £600pcm on rent, and you're sharing that saving 50/50.

If there are factors like, one partner earns a lot more, or the bills in DPs are higher, so costing you more, I would take that into account.

I can understand wanting to pay rent, but I'm not sure that you should. Splitting bills of course, but it's a bit weird for your dp to effectively be your landlord.

This is really helpful, thank you.
We both agree we want to share the financial benefit of me not paying rent so I think we'll do this.

£300 a month rent is fair and I’m sure will stop any resentment setting in from him

Years ago I moved in with BF who owned house paying low mortgage
I figured out £250 would be fair. (Maybe equivalent to renting a room) We split bills.
I didn't want to feel 'in debt' to him or that I was using for free accommodation.
We did focus lot on saving for our own house. He mostly used the rent money I paid towards annual lump sum payments towards mortgage I think.
We did end up having children and getting married can't remember when I stopped paying but presume kept it up until we moved out.

Yes I agree, you should pay half your rent so you are saving half and he is gaining that amount. I don't think you should pay towards any repairs on the property and if you do buy anything like furniture I would just buy it yourself so that if you do split up you can take it with you.

I think this is actually the worst of all worlds- no better off and no security.

We did 50/50 on bills, he paid half his old rent to me, and I paid for improvements to the flat (knowing that we'd get a deed of trust when we bought together, so any increases in value would be mine). In practise that meant that I e.g. paid for a new garage door or boiler, but anything like a new kitchen bin was split half and half - this felt fair as a lot of the smaller changes were things I wouldn't have needed to do without him moving in.

We also agreed on a timeframe for this and after that (I think it was 6 months but can't quite remember) that he would increase the "rent" to half the mortgage. And that if all was going well we'd start to look to buy together at that point! It all sounds a bit heavy now but at the time it was fine, we were like you in that we both felt he should pay something but weren't sure what, and we knew we'd want to look to buy together reasonably quickly if we did feel compatible living together so the timelines felt sensible rather than pressured. We would have been happy to discuss changing timelines if needed, it was just so a) I didn't feel I would be paying more for ages and b) he knew when he might get some security again.

Now in the house we bought jointly, trying to move again, and married - but more importantly we both felt we had options and money to finance those options throughout the "middle" phase where I owned and he didn't.

To clarify, the deed of trust was important when we bought this property as we were unmarried but since we've married it's a different matter - but we were both keen for both of us to be protected throughout.