Legal paperwork for newlyweds

Re: Legal paperwork for newlyweds

• blondie42107 member

  

  June 2014 edited June 2014

  Once you are married you'll likely want to add each other to your bank accounts. Also adjust to make each other beneficiary for any accounts/policies. (My parents were my beneficiaries until I was married.)
  
  My cousin and her husband had wills, POA and an estate set up within the first few months of marriage however I don't think it's necessary. They are in law and finance so they did everything themselves.

  

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• Wulfgar member

  

  June 2014

  All you really need is just a marriage license to be legal.  I would also change over beneficiaries on your life insurance etc.
  
  In the future you will want to get living wills and other paperwork in case something happens to either of you.
  

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• jjbmstinco member

  

  June 2014

  We merged car insurance because it ended up being cheaper.  Beneficiaries. I added him to my retirement account as well as bank accounts.  Make sure you get multiple copies of the marriage license.  I have used those when changing my name.

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• CuriousKiddosMama mod

  

  June 2014

  Yeah, all we've really done is the marriage license and changing beneficiaries. We have been meaning to get a will done and have finally contacted a lawyer to do so now that LO is almost a year old- but never felt we needed it before he was born.
  

  

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• smerka member

  

  June 2014

  If you are going to change your name, you have to go to the Social Security office. Otherwise you have to use your maiden name when filing taxes. Whatever name SSA has is the one you need to use. Other than that, what everyone else said.

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• hoffse member

  

  June 2014 edited June 2014

  You need to follow the laws in your state for the getting married part.  It varies.

  
  

  After the wedding H and merged our bank accounts and made each other the beneficiaries of everything we couldn't merge (retirement accounts primarily).  Our respective parents are the contingent beneficiaries on those accounts in case we die in an accident together.

  
  

  We're about to enter into a mortgage together with the house being held as joint tenants with rights of survivorship.  This basically means it's jointly owned and if one of us dies the other automatically assumes the other's share.  It's exactly like a joint bank account.

  
  

  I'm a lawyer, but we don't have a will yet.  We don't need one because our asset base is primarily tied up in cash and our retirement accounts.  Obviously the house will be our biggest asset after we close, but that's going to be held jointly too.  Beneficiary designations on bank accounts trump wills anyway, so a will would be redundant in our case. We don't have enough money yet for us to send some of it to other people - it all needs to go to the surviving spouse for now, and our beneficiary designations take care of that for us.

  
  

  Once we are pregnant I'll write a will for each of us, primarily to designate caregivers for our children in the event we die.  And I'll also probably set up a trust for him/her as contingent beneficiary to all of our accounts so that the money is held for our kids, but gets doled out over time instead of coming to them all at once.  I do suggest having a lawyer write a will for you.  Small-shop folks will do it for a few hundred bucks, and it's a pretty good investment.  Please do not use legal zoom.  Estate law varies tremendously from state to state, and legal zoom's forms aren't necessarily compliant with the laws of each state.  

  
  

  **Not legal advice

  

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