Gifting daughter money to buy house,

Skyzthelimit

Me and my wife are gifting our daughter 15K towards purchasing a house, while I have nothing to hide in a legal sense, and happy to show bank statements and give all anti money laundering details to lender/ solicitors etc, I’m hoping they will only ask for relevant bank accounts.

I have a bank account my wife is unaware of, mainly for gaming/ nonsense/ silly spending and it’s very small amounts, just nice to have my own account that I can spend what I want and is just mine…. Nothing dodgy at all.

my worry is will the solicitor ask about this? It has no connection at all with the money we are gifting. This could cause an issue in our relationship, any experiences you can share would be appreciated with what bank accounts are usually checked in these circumstances…..and please don’t judge! 

user1977

They'll only be interested in checking the source of the gift, so unless you've got winnings forming part of the sum I can't see it coming up.

Brie

It'll be a simple case of you confirming in writing that it's a gift with no expectation of having an interest in the property and your regular bank statements to prove the source of funds.  If there were a lot of credits from your secret account that might be the only reason for questioning anything.  

Spouses do have a track record of knowing about things the other one thinks is secret.  Just saying....

The_Unready

If you really want to be super safe, get your wife to make the gift (if she has sufficient funds) and you can subsequently transfer your half of the deposit to her with no checks.

That's what we did - it saved having both of us going through the rigmarole of the AML checks.

Skyzthelimit

Thanks for the reassurances and suggestions,
 ( and for not saying I’m an idiot lol) it will be coming from our joint bank account I’m afraid…

you are right in saying she is aware of the other bank account, just not that I actually use it….

just sometimes like to have my own pocket money as it were, now coming back to bite me it seems….

If it comes to it I’ll tell her, I’d just rather not, more through feeling embarrassed than anything. No amounts have come into the joint bank account from my account. So fingers crossed. 

Bookworm225

money laundering requires the solicitor to confirm the source of funds
if the £15k is self evidently a "surplus" from the joint account which is itself sourced from employment pay from one or both of you then there is no need to look further 

saajan_12

They'll want to see any accounts that materially fed that 15k. So if its surplus from income over the last x months which gets paid into that account, then they will likely only need that joint account. If there were large transfers from another account then they'd likely also need that other account. 

So assuming you're not making large transfers from your 'pocket money' account, then shouldn't be needed. 

Dont do this:

The_Unready said:

If you really want to be super safe, get your wife to make the gift (if she has sufficient funds) and you can subsequently transfer your half of the deposit to her with no checks.

That's what we did - it saved having both of us going through the rigmarole of the AML checks.

They'd see the large transfer form your account and ask to see that account for AML purposes. 

Skyzthelimit

So basically it’s the “source” of the funds they need to check are legitimate. 
although I had read that before, your comments have helped my understanding, and made that clearer. 

None of my pocket money account goes into the main joint account at all.

We have taken a lump sum from a pension to do this, assuming statements from pension and wage slips will be required, along with the bank statement it went into….thankfully we have all this.

It’s all quite in depth and complicated. But really want to help our daughter, just hadn’t quite thought through how intrusive this could become….but it will all be worth it to help her.

at least my pocket money will hopefully be kept to myself and I won’t have to be embarrassed. 😳

Bookworm225

of course it is "in depth", that is the whole point of the exercise, to check if the property is being funded by money that came from somewhere that cannot be explained as being an "ordinary" source. 
cash from selling drugs > purchase of second-hand car for cash from Arthur Daley's Dodgy Motors ltd > sale of car > money into bank account > money into savings account > oooh look here is our nice clean lump sum deposit for my daughter's house purchase 

Skyzthelimit

We definitely don’t come under any of the above categories… everything all above board.

Its been a number of years since we have been involved in buying a property in any way, and everything has changed, I understand the reasoning, just all seems quite daunting and a bit stressful…especially the first time gifting in this way.

Prepared to jump through all the required hoops. 

BungalowBel

We gifted our son £25k for a house deposit in 2012.  IIRC, we didn't have to show proof of funds.  We were just told it had to come from his Bank Account and not ours.  So we put it into his bank account a couple of weeks before. We also had to sign a legal document to state that the money was a gift and that we had no interest in the property.

I appreciate things may have changed since 2012!