Tenancy in common advice please

multimum

Hello,
I wasn’t really sure which board to post on, but here goes.

My husband and I owned our previous house together as Tenants In Common. We started out buying it together as normal, then when we had paid off the mortgage, he had a Notice of Tenancy In Common Amendment drawn up giving him a share of 66.67% and me a share or 33.33%. This reflected how much we had each put into the house (we were both married previously and have children from those marriages and I suppose he wanted to protect his children’s inheritance). On reflection I perhaps should not have agreed.

The paperwork states “the property and the future proceeds of sale”. Now that we have moved house, does this still apply? We were not asked by our Conveyancing solicitor if we wanted to be tenants in common or not, so I am unsure if it carried over legally or not.

I don’t want to ask my husband as I think he has forgotten that this paperwork existed (as had I until I found it recently with our wills), and he can be very awkward about things like this. He very much likes to remind me that his money is his, even though he feels mine is ours! I have no intention of leaving him, but a few months ago he said he was very close to leaving me. Would a divorce leave me with only a third of our assets? This worries me greatly as we have a dependent child together and I am a low earner. Or would it only become an issue in the event of his death or a divorce once our youngest is an adult?

Thanks in advance.

Tom99

No. How you own the present house will depend on what was declared on the transfer forms when you bought it.
Do you each have a will?

multimum

Yes, we do each have a will. We recently bought a house to rent out and we have put that as 50/50 on the forms, but strangely I can’t remember being asked the same for the house we live in now, even though it was only a couple of years ago. Would the Conveyancing solicitor we used have that information? Presumably if we didn’t specify it will be 50/50?

Tom99

multimum wrote: »

Yes, we do each have a will. We recently bought a house to rent out and we have put that as 50/50 on the forms, but strangely I can’t remember being asked the same for the house we live in now, even though it was only a couple of years ago. Would the Conveyancing solicitor we used have that information? Presumably if we didn’t specify it will be 50/50?

Yes the solicitor should have kept a copy of the details returned. You might own it as joint tenants in which case were one of you to die the surviving owner will inherit no matter what your will might say.