Civil Partnership vs Living Together?

RolandFlagg

We are a hetrosexual couple who have no intentions of getting married.

We've been living together for a long time now and have mirror wills, but the although we have a joint account and spilt everything down the middle, the house and mortgage is in my partners name only (long story).

Apart from being able to give my partner my personal tax allowance are there any other financial or legal benefits for entering into a civil partnership?

Thanks.

DE_612183

Not sure but if there was a split and it was not amicable when the division of financial assets is done it starts off on a 50/50 split - not sure if this is the same case if not married.

TonyMMM

Advantages of CP, or being married ( legally they are the same - except for CPs not being recognised in a few countries), are mainly to do with pensions, inheritance rights and IHT thresholds.  Some, but not all, of these can be worked around with properly set up wills.

If either/both of you have occupational pensions you should check what the scheme rules are about a surviving partner being eligible to "inherit" any pension rights ....they can be very different.

For most couples thinking about estate planning, it makes a lot of sense financially.

DullGreyGuy

Pensions and inheritance tax are the main two. Occupational pensions can only pay out to married/civil partners and not to unmarried partners - obviously this does vary by scheme. 

A friend got married after 35 years of being together exactly because his pension only pays out to a married/civil partner at the time of retirement. 

If you were to split up after partnership then the stating position is everything is 50/50 unless it can be proven that it should be otherwise. As an unmarried couple right now the stating position is you each own your own stuff unless you can prove you contributed to the other's. So more likely to have an uneven allocation unmarried. 

Personally, don't know why they still have civil partnerships, should really have been dumped when gay marriage was legalised. Yes there is the 1% who have some issue against what marriage was 300 years ago but they can make their choices as they did before civil partnerships existed. These days just adds more crap to write to explain that when you say marriage then that also includes civil partnership 

Keep_pedalling

If your partner dies and has assets exceeding £325k then you could find yourself needing to sell your home to pay an IHT bill. CPs have spousal exemption so regardless of the level of assets IHT will not be an issue on the first death.

You have wills in place but do you also have lasting powers of attorney in place? If not that should be one of your priorities. 

Mojisola

If you decide not to become CPs, it's worth getting sorting this out -

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.royalfree.nhs.uk/next_of_kin002.pdf