It’s a fairly common arrangement in modern times for a couple to buy a home together before marriage, and then later decide to get married. It’s also alarmingly common for that same couple to never look at the deed to their property again, until something tragic happens. A case in point: Melissa and Pat move in together in 2004 and decide to buy a home together a year later. Their relationship grows and they are happy, and so they decide to get married. Several years later, Pat dies unexpectedly.
Under Pat’s will, everything is left to Pat’s adult children from a prior relationship. Melissa doesn’t immediately worry about the house because she and Pat bought it together and she knows as the surviving spouse she has rights to the marital home. But then she realizes that their deed was made when they bought the property prior to their marriage. They owned it as tenants in common and had incorrectly assumed that by getting married, the property automatically became marital property. THIS IS A SERIOUS MISTAKE, but it can be easily fixed.
If you and your partner owned property prior to marriage, you must make a new deed – AFTER YOU GET MARRIED – to create a “tenancy by the entirety,” which is the form of ownership only allowed for married couples, and which provides ultimate protection to the couple in continued ownership after a spouse dies. This is also protective to the surviving spouse if the deceased spouse does not have a will. In either case, with or without a will, a surviving spouse is going to have to deal with creditors or may end up owning his/her marital home with people that should not have any right to the marital home, if the deed to the property was not properly done.
Don’t wait to find out the hard way that your marital property is not titled properly. After losing a spouse, the survivor has enough to worry about without the added legal nightmare created by potentially losing half of the marital home to creditors or unintended heirs. Knowledge is power, so please use this information to avoid unnecessary losses that can happen after losing your spouse.