better not to buy a house together til his kids are 18?

[moominface]

That's it really. We've got two little ones together too and are married, but I wondered if it was better to wait before pooling savings (as deposit) / mortgage until his other kids (DSKs) are 18. I don't want to disinherit them (it's a good relationship!) but don't want crazy exW to try and get her hands on anything to do with my DC either.

Unsure of the ins and outs.

I don't think his ex is entitled to anything other than her maintenance is she? Your husband should have a will stating what he would like to go to you and each of his children in the event of his death but I don't think his ex wife has any claim over your marital assets.

My husband and I own our home. As long as his ex is getting maintenance the rest of our finances have bugger all to do with her.

Are you living together at the moment? I would worry first about getting the living arrangements to be what meets your needs right now, and whilst your little ones are growing up and worry later about inheritance.

Though your DP can leave his share of any house you buy to his DCs, but leave you either a lifetime interest in it, or an interest for X number of years (eg until your youngest is grown up). That would keep your DSC's inheritance safe but also give you some security. I'm not sure what the point of waiting til DSC are 18 is though - your DP would presumably still want to leave them something in his will?

Even if he doesn't have a will, if he died the first £250,000 of his estate would go to you and any more would be divided equally between his children. His ex could contest but she can do that even if he has a will. I'm not sure what waiting until they are 18 would achieve.

Yes I wasn't worried about inheritance, more that she could somehow say she needed, like £50K, and steal our house!

(I really am an amateur at housebuying, and she really is a crazy witch!)

It sounds like she can't do that, though.

Or also, I was slightly worried that she could send the kids, when 17/18, to live with us on the grounds that we owned a house -- but no, surely not!

It's horrible having someone you don't trust vaguely linked in to family life!!

Even if she is a crazy witch, she can't just decide to steal your house!

She could decide she's fed up living with her kids at 17/18 and send them to live with their dad - up to you and him how you'd feel about this I guess and whether you'd want to make it easy or difficult for them to do this.

But the only thing the ex can do is require your DH to pay child support until they're 18 - and that depends only on his income, not on the value of his house or your income or anything else. And she can mess him around with contact if she wants, but wouldn't have thought you owning a house together would make any difference to that.

You need to make sure their divorce settlement included a "clean break" clause. If it did then the finances are settled & she can't come back for more than she's already has (child maintainence excluded obviously).

if you have an issue with your partner's children, you should seriously re-consider your relationship. Mum can decide, at any point, that she no longer wishes to be primary carer of her children. She could become ill or worse still, die, and your partner be left to care for them. They may decide of their own accord that they would prefer to live in their father's household. There is an awful lot that could happen way before they reach the age of 17/18.

You need to get a grip on how divorce works and be very clear as to what financial arrangements have been put in place between your partner and his ex. If the finances have never been sorted (and plenty of people don't seem to realise this needs doing) then yes, there is the potential that at some point in the future, his ex would have some kind of a claim on jointly-owned assets. If the divorce has been sorted properly, this could never happen.

What happens if the mother of your husbands children died and somebody 'sent them to live with you' ?

needaholiday - if a divorce isn't a clean break one then there's a court order to pay spousal maintenance, usually for X number of years. This isn't set in stone though so either party can go back to court to argue for it to be changed. But I think that this would only usually be because something had changed a lot - eg high earning ex-husband has lost his job and can't pay any more, or he's inherited a fortune.

Most divorces are clean break, and even if there is spousal maintenance, I don't think that buying a house together would mean that a court would increase the maintenance - unless the OP is actually has a few million she's thinking of throwing at a joint home, in which case she might be better to buy it alone.

Thank all - mumandboys not that much could happen: they're already teenagers.