transferring endowments when married

hebe

First post here, grateful for any help!

I got married last year and sold my flat, freeing up my two endowment policies. Our current mortgage is just in my husband's name, we haven't added my name to the mortgage as the Woolwich want us to remortgage in order to do this. However, I'd quite like to assign my two endowments against the mortgage, at a suitably reduced expectation of value. NU and Scottish Widows have both said that I'd need to talk to an IFA to do this.

Can I assign endowments to a property where my name is not on the deeds, but where I'm married to the name on the deeds? Or can I add my husband's name to both endowments and then he can re-assign them? Not sure about that last one as it covers various health payments too, and the premiums are currently only for one person.

If anyone has any views/experience I'd be grateful. Thank you.

dunstonh

Amending endowment sum assureds can turn a qualifying endowment into a non-qualifying plan and create a tax liability. This is why the insurance companies are saying that you need an IFA as they are not able to give the advice to transact that (most insurance companies no longer hold FSA authorisation to give advice).

The endowments themselves operate independently to the mortgage or property ownership. Nowadays, they dont even need assigning to the lender.

You are probably best left leaving them as they are and if your husband needs life cover, then arrange it on a term assurance as you wont be able to add him to the endowments.

hebe

That's very useful, thank you.

My other half has sufficient insurance and endowment cover in place, plus is overpaying to help compensate for endowment shortfall, so I think we will leave it as is for the moment. There seems nothing to be gained by remortgaging purely to add my name to the mortgage. We were just looking at ways to reduce the mortgage during possible maternity leave, but think I'll stick with just paying off a chunk of it with equity released from my flat. We're planning to move again in 2 or 3 years so at that point we can set up a mortgage in both names and apply all of our endowments to that one.

Thanks again.
edited to add - just looked at this again and realised I didn't word it clearly. I would not be changing the amount of the amount of endowment, but rather I would assume that they would return rather less than the stated value and would pay more as the repayment part of the mortgage to compensate for this. However if we need to pay to add me to the mortgage, it's not really worth doing when we're planning to move and remortgage soon. The main question is whether I can assign endowments in my name to my husband's mortgage, and I'm guessing not without adding my name to the mortgage.

hebe

... and sorted. The Woolwich no longer allows endowments to be transferred to an existing mortgage. So we'll just see what it pays out in a few years and pay off another chunk with that.