Buying out an ex?

A reader's ex-husband is planning to sell his half of the family home to his daughter, but she is not sure if this is possible.

Ronan Marrion, mortgage specialist at Worldwide Financial Planning, part of our team of Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) from unbiased.co.uk, offers a helping hand.

Linda from High Wycombe asks:

My ex-husband wants to sell his half of our house to my daughter, pay off half of what we owe on our mortgage and then she would like to take out a mortgage to pay him while I carry on paying off what's left of the remainder of our joint mortgage.

I understand this can't be done.

Is there any way around it?

Ronan from Worldwide Financial Planning responds:

There are a number of options, but your main aim seems to be for you and your daughter to own half the property each and your husband to be paid for his half.

In order to do this you can remortgage the property and at this point do what's called a 'transfer of equity' which means you will be removing you ex-husband from the deeds and adding your daughter to them.

You will most likely need to increase the mortgage amount in order to have the funds available to pay you ex off.

I would recommend having ownership as tenants in common between your daughter and yourself. There are overriding legal issues here as you and your daughter will now become jointly responsible for the debt etc, and I would strongly recommend you take some independent legal advice from a qualified solicitor about what you intend to do.

If you have a personal finance question for our team of Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) from unbiased.co.uk, go to the myfinances.co.uk Ask the Mortgage Expert section.