Would it bother you never getting married?

[Wineandmorewine]

Hi all,

DP and I have been together for 6 years, we have a DD2 and I am currently 5 months pregnant with our second, have also just bought our own house and due to move into that in November.

Last night we were discussing the upcoming wedding of our best and DP stated that he has decided he never wants to get married and is totally against it! This has come as a bolt out of the blue as it is something which we had always planned to do (have had many conversations about what type of wedding we would like etc) and also something that is very important to me. When I asked why the change of heart he said that he has seen so many go wrong eg. His parents and grandparents and he wouldn't want to put out DC through that.

Whilst I understand his point, I also said that regardless of whether or not we are married, a break up would effect our children either way and that if we are married we will be in a better place legally.
So I'm asking, what would you do? Do I give up on ever getting married and keep things as they are? Do I leave him in pursuit of marriage?? Which seems silly as it's him I want to marry! Do I try and convince him or is it best I leave it and hope he changes his mind?
Has anyone ever been in this situation?
Thanks for any advice

It depends how wealthy you are. If one of you owns assets over £325,000 then you have an inheritance tax problem should you or your partner die. This could mean your children's home would have to be sold to settle the IHT due.

If you are SAHM or a lower earner because you've taken the rump of the childcare, you really aren't being very smart if you are resisting marriage.

I'd like Hakluyt to tell me how she would 'put in place' arrangements in the following scenarios.

Susan and Rupert aren't married. They own a house in Streatham. They have 3 children (10, 14 and 16). Susan gave up her management consultancy job when she fell pregnant for a second time. She does all the house stuff and childcare which has allowed Rupert to travel extensively for his career. He is a management consultant too. He is now a partner and has a big pension. He works long hours and his job is very stressful. He earns £130,000 per annum plus receives bonuses. He has very sensibly been investing in his pension. Their terraced house is worth £1,300,000 (they bought it in 1991 so are lucky to only have a £100,000 mortgage outstanding).

1. Rupert drops down dead on assignment in Bournemouth.

2. Rupert falls in love with a fellow management consultant, Jayney, in Bournemouth. He has decided to break up his family and go and set up home with Jayney. He needs to marry Jayney though as she is a US employee and due back home at the end of the month.

I'm in a similarish situation OP. Except DP and I always said we'd never get married and I've done a complete 180 since we've had our DD and now really want to be married. He still doesn't.

I said if he wouldn't marry me then I wanted to go to a solicitor and get legal advice, which he was fine with.

The solicitor said it was much easier to tie everything up legally by getting married!! But the same protection does exist in common law and statute, it's just piecemeal and more expensive and difficult to access if you need it.

Here's what she told me:

Own property as joint tenants, that way the rule of survivorship applies if one of you dies.

Make sure our wills now leave everything to each other and, if estate is over the inheritance tax threshold, the difference is put in trust for our children and we are trustees.

On the issue of separation, she said that that's where you're most vulnerable. Because if you give up work and your earning potential to look after the kids, normally that hit to your career would be recognised in any divorce settlement. What she suggested was, if I was ever in a position where I was going to make myself completely financially dependent on DP, we should draw up a cohabitation agreement which says how much of our savings, assets, etc, I should get if we split up. It's not legally watertight but it does show a court the spirit and intention of the partnership when the agreement was entered into in case things get messy later on.

There are other things you can to like getting lasting power of attorney to be next of kin if one of you becomes incapacitated, etc. But that's quite fiddly and expensive.

Anyway, all that being said, is your DP willing to share everything with you in this way? What was crucial for me was that my DP is happy to go 50:50 on everything, he's even happy for me to change my name to his if that's what I want to do. He just doesn't want 'the government getting involved in our relationship'. Fine. whatever.

But if he wasn't willing to do all of the above, I'd be questioning whether he was serious about a long term commitment.

Wow thanks for all the replies everyone, I really didn't expect so many. Just sat down with a so will read through and then get back with any answers

Yup - assets over £325,000 you pay 40%.

HallowedVera Do you really want all the value of your partner's estate over £325,000 to go to your children's trusts? In my case that would be the vast majority of it. So if my husband died, I wouldn't be able to buy a house. I might be able to buy a house in my children's name depending on their ages (not if they were over 18).

Owning a property as tenants in common doesn't mean there is no inheritance tax to pay if the person's total assets are more than £325K. I just checked it on HMCR.

Or even joint tenants.

I think for him to turn about face and say he never wants to get married after being with you for 6 years, previously discussing wedding plans, and with you pregnant with a second child is something he must provide a better explanation for.
I would be upset because it would imply his feelings towards me had changed in order for him to change his mind so completely. Or even worse is the possibility he was stringing you along with the idea of marriage knowing it was what you wanted but not ever intending to follow through with it.
And not wanting to get married because of the divorce rate is one of the crap excuses men make, it's code for 'I do want to get married but not to you, I think something better might come along'

Will try and answer as many questions as I can remember. Firstly, until my first maternity leave, I was the higher earner and DP was financially dependant on me for 6 months whilst he was in search of a Jew job. However, I now only work part time so my wage has dropped significantly.
The house we have bought is in both our names. We currently don't have assets over £325,000, however god forbid anything happened to my parents I would be set to inherit an extremely generous amount.

DD has DP surname, something which is now going to really upset me if we were never to marry.
I have said to him if he didn't want to marry then we would need to see a solicitor and get everything drawn up legally - he was fine with this, didn't see it as a problem at all.
Also, somebody asked if he is tight with money etc, the answer is no, because he's never really had that much and I've always been the higher earner.
I have said to him tonight that it is something that is important to me, and that I will drop it for the time being and focus on the arrival of our second baby as I don't feel I have much choice at the moment other than to do this.

We have our Wills written in Trust so Inheritance Tax not an issue.

Typo New job

Polonium - is Streatham important? I don't think a terraced house there would be worth £1.3 million.

Scenario 1: They own the house jointly and Susan immediately inherits Rupe's half on his death. They wrote wills and tied everything up legally when they had their first child, so Susan inherits everything. After dabbing her eyes with grief for the first three months after his death, Stanko, her 25 year old Ukrainian gardener moves in. Susan is very happy because Rupert was a boring old fart and crap in bed. Stanko is very happy but wonders how to tell Susan that he is bringing his wife and three small children over from Lviv next month.

Scenario 2: There is a legal agreement in place on what happens if they split up, including what happens to the children and Rupert's maintenance payments. After a bit of grumbling, Susan agrees to sell the house and moves to a lovely flat in Putney with the children. She gets herself a little job in Waitrose. The 16 and 14 year olds don't like Putney so decide to move into Rupert's love nest in Covent Garden. Jayney can't stand the kids, sees the error of her ways and jets back to New York. Rupert realises that he is gay and shacks up with an Italian stallion. The kids move back in with Susan quite quickly.

HallowedVera - That's amazing of him to let him change your name to his. Wow. And the advice you've given here from your solicitor is inaccurate.

Twinklestein we're hardly rolling in it so the inheritance tax issue is a bit moot at the moment anyway unless we win the lottery. But to answer your question, if I'm the life tenant of a property held in trust for my children, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with that.

Polonium I haven't given advice, I've recounted what my solicitor told me. I would never hold myself out to give legal advice.

Care to say which bits you think are inaccurate, for the benefit of the wider discussion?

And why are you being snarky about my changing my name to his (and my children's, which is the important bit for me)?

Seems like you've got a bit of a stick up your arse about this subject and I'm not sure why.

Streatham house prices

As you were...

Owning a property as tenants in common doesn't mean there is no inheritance tax to pay if the person's total assets are more than £325K. I just checked it on HMCR

Yes exactly. So you put the difference in trust and give your spouse a lifetime interest (make them a life tenant? - can't remember the exact terminology) in the property. My grandfather did it for my great aunt. We couldn't sell his old house until she'd died as she was living in it.

But if you wanted to move house you couldn't. I know everyone's circumstances are different. But why not just get married. It's a lot simpler.And as for the Government not being involved in your lives. The Government is involved in everyone's life. Whether or not these rules are fair is a different argument. But the law as it stands now does not favour unmarried couples.

If you split up are you still entitled to part of your parnter's pension. They could change their minds about the beneficiary but as a wife you would be entitled to claim.

Well, Vivienne, if it was up to me we would get married! But what can I do? What can the OP do? You can't force someone to marry you if they don't want to.

I don't buy my DP's 'philosophical' objection to marriage. I think it's pretentious fuckery. But that's how he feels. And as I've said, if he wasn't prepared to share everything with me straight down the middle, then I'd be worried. As it is, he's perfectly happy to be financially and legally committed to me; he's just a pretentious fucker :)

A few younger women I believe are now starting to insist on marriage before children. Quite happy to live together for years until they want a family and then it should be marriage. But I agree that there isn't any way to force a partner to marry you. And even if they do it's not always plain sailing and the answer to everything. From one who knows.

One of the reasons my DP cites against marriage is that his mum sunk all of her life savings into helping him and his ex buy his house (the ex never put any capital into the house or paid the mortgage, but she was on the deeds).

The only thing that stopped his ex walking off with half his mum's life savings when she left him was the fact that they weren't married. That really scared him.

Mrs Schadenfreude

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-28817016.html?premiumA=true Susan's has a better kitchen and a longer garden.

Owning a property jointly (whether as tenants in common or joint tenants) does not protect against IHT.

If R & S owned their house as joint tenants in equal shares. R's half share in the house is worth £600,000 (they won't include his 50% share in their joint 100,000 interest only mortgage in his liability for IHT but of course the mortgage still needs to be repaid.) is 275,000 over the nil rate band for IHT.

R's 50% share will be passed to Susan but after using R's nil rate band, 550,000 - 325,000 = £225,000 is subject to IHT at 40% Plust all his other assets are subject to 40% IHT including the £20,000 he put into an account for the eldest's university fund last year when he got that big bonus. In face all gifts he made during the preceding 7 years are potentially exempt transfers and will remain within his estate for iHT purposes.

Now Susan doesn't work and has an outstanding mortgage of £100,000 plus an IHT bill of goodness knows what. She must sell the house as she has no way of raising funds to cover the shortfall to pay the tax and no way of servicing the mortgage. . She has to buy a much cheaper house out in Norbiton, quite some way from hers and the children's friends. ANd to make ends meet, she takes in Stanko as a lodger because she learns that she can earn £4,250 tax free under the government's rent a room scheme. Stanko smells horrible but in ten years she will have received sufficient income from him to pay for the SDLT on the move from hell.

Scenario 2. The agreement they made before Jayney arrived on the scene isn't legally binding. Susan is a waste of space and doesn't understand him and isn't even fun any more. The only thing legally binding is their jointly owned property and their jointly owned debt. Rupert agrees to let Susan keep the P reg Volvo Estate with the alternator problem in honour of their years together.

Next year Rupert will be able to take 25% of his mighty pension as a cash lump sum. Rupert also decides to leave McKinsey and set up on his own. Although he commands a very handsome day rate he sets himself up as a limited company and although he bills clients in the region of £155,000 per annum, he only draws £22,000 in salary the rest either goes on huge slugs on pension payments or sits in his company account. Susan will receive child maintenance calculated on the £22,000 figure.

Susan has a pension lump sum of £1,812. Oddly the same amount as the outstanding balance on 14 year old John's forthcoming rugby school trip to New Zealand.

£1.5million is more realistic for a decent size house in Streatham. Carry on...