Unmarried and separating

[Calipso32]

I'd be grateful for any help making sence of a way forward out of my situation. I'm a mother of two amazing little girls, 5 months and 2.5 yo. I am unmarried and have been with my partner coming up to 10 years now. I've come to the realisation that we need to separate, things haven't been right for several years and delaying things will make it harder on the girls. This way my youngest won't even remember us being a family.

We own our house 50/50, and he has another apartment he owns 100% of,
that he's currently selling (the plan was to put some of that equity down against our shared mortgage). This won't be completed until October/November. Our house is worth roughly £698k (we bought for £545k in 2019 and we have a mortgage of £355k remaining. He's a high earner and I earn a decent salary (46k) but I'm currently on maternity leave for the second time in 3 years, so my career is on the back burner. I really wanted to leave my job to start a small business but that now seems impossible.

I want to stay in our house with our girls, but I can't get my head around now I can achieve this. I've been a naive idiot not to insist on marriage. I never thought it was that important and assumed one day we would get married. He was never keen on discussing it and always questioned my reasons every time I bought it up, insinuating I was out to get his money or something. I now realise he had good reasons for never proposing. He has probably 15k in savings more than me, his pension and the other property, which will sell for £100k more than he bought it for. He'll need to pay me child support but only if I get more 100% custody I believe. Which I know he'll fight me on. What are my options and how should I proceed?

Get any child benefit paid into your own bank account.
And any wages.
Save up shop points like Boots/Tesco/Sainsburys.
Do you have a joint account ?

Can you afford to buy him out of his 50% share of the equity?

That's the only way you can keep the house really. Can for afford the remaining mortgage payments by yourself?

Being unmarried you will only be entitled to 50% of the shared asset. This would give you over £170k. Which is enough to secure housing for you and your children. On that basis there is no obvious reason for the house not to be sold straight away.

It is worth highlighting that it is possible for people who are unmarried to secure court orders to remain in the family home. This is allowed under the children’s act where there is no other housing alternative. But you would be expected to pick up the mortgage costs and this wouldn’t increase your share of the equity. it would be large monthly mortgage repayment for you.

Realistically you cannot afford a £700k home. It might be better to make peace with the idea of downsizing and moving.

You get 50% of the shared house, assuming you’re joint tenants and there was no ring-fencing of deposits.

You’ll get CMS depending on how many nights a week he has the children- there’s an online calculator.

You have no claim on his other property, his pension, or savings.

You won’t get an automatic right to stay in the house. You would need to buy his share off him.

Mesher orders are rare and often don’t work out well, for the person remaining in the house. I am not even sure if you can apply for a mesher order if you are unmarried.

If he puts a load more money in the house he could fight to get it all back.

Child maintenance is dependent on nights, mainly. The more nights he has the less he pays.

Anything is possible with legal provision but high,y unlikely in your case given assets and income. Work on the basis of living with what you have got and moving house

How can I find out if the deposits were ringfenced? He put down much more than I did on the deposit - about 75% compared to my 25%. At the time he was making a big deal about this and discussing splitting the ownership % based on how much we each put down, but next time I asked him about he seemed to have changed his mind and told me we each owned 50%. I've never checked this for certain and just trusted him...

As he’s just a boyfriend, you have zero legal protections and the only thing to sort out between yourselves is a child contact schedule and one buying the other out/selling the house. His savings, pension and other property are not your concern. Sounds like he knew what protections marriage would entitle you to, and chose not to do that.
The housing situation is urgent though.

you might need to pay a solicitor to untangle the house situation, find out if you’d only get the quarter back that you contributed, but it sounds unlikely you’d be able to pay the mortgage alone. Why did you think you could stay in the house? Have you looked in to any figures?

Assuming there is evidence of what each contributed and no other factors he will have a good claim to disproportionate splitting of the proceeds. Depends whether either of you have the stomach for the fight and wallet/purse for legal fees

Does he know you plan to break up? If you were being fair to him you’d probably want to tell him before he completes on the sale of his flat, as he may well want to live in it rather than take the equity out.

It sounds like the house will be sold and you'll get 50/50 after selling costs. You could downsize to a 2 bedroom house/flat. You might choose to move to a cheaper area to live and buy outright with your share of the equity. You could buy a 3 bedroom semi in Hull and have some change left over to do it up as you would want it. Do you work from home? If so I'd be moving.

Yeah, Marie, I’d hope so. If I were ever in the scenario of contributing 75% more money to a very expensive item, that I’d get it back in the future, rather than be made to only accept 50%. The legal contract of marriage has so many protections it’s a shame so many women don’t look in to this extensively before having a kid with a boyfriend, if they’re the one who stands to lose out.
Anyway, seems like you’ll have a rough road ahead, OP. Child contact is about what’s in their best interest, rather than finances, so if they’re used to living in the same house as their father and he actively parents them, equal or as close to equal would be best for them, and it sounds like he’d want that too.

(The bit where I said about it being a shame that women choose not to know what legal protections marriage brings is not just about you, OP, there’s a thread daily on here where a woman is staring down the face of homelessness due to being dependent on some boyfriend to house her, it’s depressing, I don’t know what would help publicise the fact that no legal documents=no rights)

You'd have bought the property as tenants in common and have signed a deed of trust to the specify the ownership split. If you didn't sign a deed like that then it should be 50/50 split.

Realistically, you can't afford to keep the house on by yourself. If things reasonably amicable, you might be able to persuade him to stay on as a joint owner, at least until the kids are grown up.

You didn’t sign the contract at the solicitor’s?

You can own the property 50:50 but still have deposits ring fenced. It’s sensible if you aren’t married.

What it means is, that if you sell you each get your money you put in. Then the rest is split 50:50. But you still own the house 50:50.

@Calipso32 hi OP, not sure if you’re still around here… just trawling the boards looking for people in similar situations to me and wondering how you are getting on?