How can we structure our home ownership to be fair?
Blake Crayton-Brown accidentally started hunting for his first home in September. Here he continuals his trials and tribulations of trying to get a foot on the property ladder.
It’s not a question of who wears the pants. It’s not even about who brings home the bacon. But there’s an unavoidable reality that’s going to bite when my girlfriend and I find the house we want and it comes time to sign the paperwork.
Our situation must be a common one for couples who have lived with quite different lifestyles before they got together.
You see, my 27-year-old girlfriend is a lawyer who has saved hard and spent thriftily all her working life.
I’m a 25-year-old journalist (definitely not as well paid as a lawyer), have lived away from home for seven years, and have only in the last couple of years begun seriously saving.
We come to the house-buying party with very uneven savings to use for a deposit. It’s like I’m paying corkage and she’s paying for dinner. They’re not even close to matching.
When it comes to mortgage repayments, though, I like the idea of us paying half each so it’s as fair as possible.
So far, so good, but what if things went wrong? Say I only pay 10 per cent of the deposit and half the repayments, but the relationship faltered.
I could end up walking away with half of the deposit if we owned as ‘‘joint tenants’’ and had to sell. If one of us died, the whole property would pass to the other automatically.
That’s not fair. So we could instead own as ’’tenants in common’’, which means that if we sold the house, we would get a fixed percentage each.
If one of us dies, that ownership share goes to who is listed in our will, not the other person automatically.
But choosing a percentage figure for each of us is tough.
My girlfriend might pay most of the deposit, but I’m intending to pay half the mortgage repayments, so how do we reconcile that?
Perhaps a second loan could help make things fairer, from her to me, the amount being half of the deposit, interestfree, payable upon sale of the house.
That way we could have equal tenantin-common shares, but if something goes wrong and we have to sell, she wouldn’t lose out.
It’s a bit grim to be thinking about these sorts of things, especially when we’re happily in love.
But when it comes to making sensible decisions about such important financial decisions, what’s love got to do with it?
Now we can enjoy dinner and the bottle of wine I’ve borrowed.