Help please. Are we liable for stamp duty?

blister1066

Hello,

Thanks in advance for any help that you are able to offer. We seem to be in a fairly uncommon situation. 

Before I met my now wife, I owned a house. When we married, my wife moved in to "my" house. As the house was fairly small and we planned to have children, we considered that it was not worthwhile to add her name to the deeds or mortgage as we would eventually buy something bigger.

9 years ago, we decided to move to a larger property and decided to keep "my" house as a rental. Due to the fact that the property still had a mortgage under my name we applied for a mortgage for the new house in just my wife's name. It was approved and we both moved in to the new house with our growing family.

Fast forward...and we are about to re-mortgage the house that we live in due to the current deal ending and thought it would be a good time to add me to the deeds and the mortgage. However, someone has said that this would make us liable for stamp duty?

Would this be the case? We are not moving just adding my name to the deeds and mortgage.

MWT

blister1066 said:

9 years ago, we decided to move to a larger property and decided to keep "my" house as a rental. Due to the fact that the property still had a mortgage under my name we applied for a mortgage for the new house in just my wife's name. It was approved and we both moved in to the new house with our growing family.

Fast forward...and we are about to re-mortgage the house that we live in due to the current deal ending and thought it would be a good time to add me to the deeds and the mortgage. However, someone has said that this would make us liable for stamp duty?

Would this be the case? We are not moving just adding my name to the deeds and mortgage.

Presumably you paid the higher rate on the SDLT at the time due to it being a second property and you both being married?

blister1066 said:

Fast forward...and we are about to re-mortgage the house that we live in due to the current deal ending and thought it would be a good time to add me to the deeds and the mortgage. However, someone has said that this would make us liable for stamp duty?

Would this be the case? We are not moving just adding my name to the deeds and mortgage.

You do have an exposure to SDLT to the extent that you are taking on a percentage of the mortgage debt, so your liability is based on that amount, not the value of the property itself...

You should of course take advice on this from your solicitor....

blister1066

MWT said:

Presumably you paid the higher rate on the SDLT at the time due to it being a second property and you both being married?

 Did they have this higher rate for 2nd properties 9 years ago? 

You do have an exposure to SDLT to the extent that you are taking on a percentage of the mortgage debt, so your liability is based on that amount, not the value of the property itself...

So I guess it would be the percentage on half of the outstanding debt?

Thanks so much for the reply.