Successful buying and living together

Buying a home with someone else is one of the biggest joint decisions you’ll make, and getting the living arrangement right matters just as much as getting the property right

Buying a home together doesn’t need a ring.

Working out what happens if it all goes wrong does need a conversation, and right now, most couples haven’t had it.

“We’ve been together long enough that this must count for something”

It’s an easy, entirely reasonable assumption, and it’s wrong. There’s no such thing as common law marriage in England and Wales, however long you’ve lived together. The law doesn’t build up protection the way a relationship does, and finding that out partway through, rather than before you buy, is the worst possible timing.

Why this conversation feels like planning for the worst

Raising money and ownership before you’ve even moved in can feel like you’re expecting things to go wrong, or worse, like you don’t trust the person you’re buying with. It’s the opposite. A married couple gets this protection by default and never has to have an awkward conversation about it. You don’t get the default, so the conversation is how you get the protection instead, not a substitute for trust, the actual mechanism of it.

If one of you is putting in more than the other

This is usually where the avoidance really lives, nobody wants to be the one who brings up an unequal deposit, or feels petty asking for it to be recognised on paper. This needs saying plainly: without something written down, an unequal contribution defaults to being treated as equal ownership if things ever end. Sorting this out isn’t about expecting the worst of each other, it’s about the numbers actually reflecting what really happened.

Doing it now, while it’s easy, rather than later, when it isn’t

The best time for this conversation is the one you’re least likely to want to have it, right at the start, while you’re both saying yes to everything and it feels unnecessary. It gets harder and more expensive every year you leave it, and near impossible to untangle fairly if the relationship has already broken down by the time anyone tries.

Common questions about buying as an unmarried couple

You can technically write your own, but it’s a genuinely bad place to save money. Courts have thrown out DIY declarations that turned out ambiguous or badly worded exactly when they were needed most, which defeats the point of having one at all. A solicitor’s fee is small against what the document is actually protecting.

It doesn’t just disappear, and can still matter, particularly for money one of you brought in before the wedding. But marriage brings its own legal framework on top, so get a solicitor to look at the original document again rather than assuming it still says what you need it to say unchanged.

Yes, and updating it is better than leaving it as is. If one of you ends up paying down more of the mortgage, or funds an extension or renovation the other didn’t contribute to, the original document can be redrawn to reflect that, it isn’t a one-time snapshot of the day you bought.

Treat that as information in itself rather than pushing past it. It’s a reasonable, common reaction, and a solicitor can help frame the conversation as protecting both of you equally rather than one person’s document. But reluctance at this stage is exactly what needs working through before you’re committed, not after.

How I can help with this

While the legal documents themselves need a solicitor, I make sure buying couples understand early that this conversation needs to happen, and I can point you toward the right specialist advice as part of your search, rather than leaving it as something to sort out after you’ve already found the property.

If you’re buying together, married or not, I’ll help you work out what’s right for you.