Marraige questions

AdamOHare wrote: »

I was going to post this in the wedding category, but I figured it would probably get a better response here as I doubt "single" men would visit the wedding section very often.

So Im wondering about marriage.

Now forget the religious end and forget the "what if you dont like her in a years time" end of things. They're whole different arguments for a different day.


The cons are:

The obvious big one is if we do split up I lose half my stuff..... but I think I can live with that.
The second is apparently married couples get hit harder on tax, and will be provided with less welfare if they need it... (is this true?)


The pros are:

Keeps her happy
Makes life easier AFAIK if you want to adopt (which probably will)
She can change her name (trust me, she has a certain distant relative that everybody asks about when they hear her surname)


Now is there anything Im missing on either list? Im particularly interested in things like the tax and welfare point. Id hate to pay higher taxes every year just because married :mad:

Hmm, where to start. Firstly: I'm married.

Cons: Losing half your stuff... first off all how do you know it's all your stuff? If your wife makes contributions to income etc it may be shared. If you mean you only get half of your combined 'stuff', I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly by saying you could live with that. What about your family home? The place you've built all your memories since you were married, who knows what else you may have to lose that may be very hard to be separated from. It's not a case of wife keeps the PS3 and you keep the Xbox (Personally I would make sure I'd have the Xbox).

I don't see how married couples get hit with more taxes... anyone have references for this?

Pros: I'd hope you'd want to both be happy, if you're just trying to make her happy that's not going to end well. I don't even know why you brought up those other points, but anyway... IMO, marriage has the following benefits:

• Gives you a very clear direction in life. The two of you are working together to make yourself happy and have a great life together.
• You always have someone there to accept everything about you, friends are great but if you have a really deep relationship with your partner it's healthy to talk about everything with them.
• It gives you a certain 'status' which can be beneficial in the workplace and in social circles: Boss may consider you more responsible, more settled now that you're married. He knows you have commitments and will work hard to fulfill them.
• New female friends seem to trust you more easily since they figure if a girl dedicated her life to being with you, you must be doing something right.
• Dude, overall you have to love the hell out of her, if you're thinking marriage is a bad idea just because of tax/welfare stuff I think you've got it all wrong!

As to the cons:

Losing half your stuff - If you do break up, all your stuff (and hers) is up for grabs. But, since a law change a bit over a year ago, this is also true if you are simply shacked up, as opposed to married.

The law change is too recently made to be able to say whether the the courts will take the same approach to dividing the assets of unmarried couples as they do to the assets of married couples. We’ll need to have a few cases, and a few appeals, under our belts before we know the answer to that one. While they have all the powers that they would have on the breakdown of a marriage, they may tend to exercise their powers differently where the couple have never made any commitments of mutual support, etc, to one another.

But, at a minimum, it’s no longer true to say that by not marrying you protect your assets in the event of a breakup. They are very much in play.

Tax - As others have said, the tax effects may be neutral, or they may be beneficial - sometimes very beneficial. They are never disadvantageous.

The tax benefit is greatest where one partner has low income, or none. As long as you are both working, and earning a reasonable salary, there is no benefit, but if you think that in the future one of you might work less or not at all for a time - while providing childcare, while caring for an elderly relative, due to personal ill-health, while going back to full-time education, whatever - then the tax advantage would really come into play.

As to the pros:

Adoption - Yes, a considerable help, if you want to adopt as a couple.

And, though you didn’t mention natural childbirth, as a bloke I’d very much want to be married if and when that happened - legal presumption of paternity, no issue or doubt about guardianship, absolute equality of position as regards parenting with the mother.

Pros you didn’t mention:

Myself and herself lived together before we married. Then, we married, and it did make a difference. Hard to put your finger on it, quite intangible, and yet we both felt it changed our relationship signficantly, and for the better. Deciding to make that commitment, and to make it formally, and to make it publicly, and to share it with our family and our friends, couldn’t but be a signficant development for us. But of course I can’t guarantee that everybody will experience this the same way.

And there’s lots of smaller stuff like your position should she die without making a will. Of course, you can both make wills. And there are various other things you can do to secure legal, administrative, social etc treatment as a couple. But the fact is that if you marry all the adminstrative and bureaucratic “defaults” line up with the reality, which is that you are a couple. At a minimum, you are saved hassle and expense going around making wills and executing powers of attorney and whatnot, and it could matter a bit more if, heaven forbid, one of you is medically incapacitated and the question arises about who has the right to make medical and care decisions. This would probably get sorted out if the situation arose, but it’s a hassle you could do without at that point.

AdamOHare wrote: »

I have to be honest. I didnt realise there was so many married lads on here. Thought marraige was pretty much dead in this country.

Jaysus no. Being a long-term unmarried couple in your 30s or 40s would still be pretty rare in Ireland. We tend to be in relationships for a long time before getting married, but that's a cultural thing which has been around since before our grandparents.

The only real difference is that someone in a relationship saying they have no interest in marriage wouldn't be controversial any more. Noteworthy, if only because it's not typical, but very few people would find it offensive that a couple weren't married.

Even 30 years ago an unmarried couple living as if they were married would be the black sheep of most towns/families.

In relation to the tax thing, if someone tells you that they will lose money by getting married, then they're probably pulling some kind of welfare trick/scam.