What Actually Happens to Your Half of the House If Your Partner Remarries

Nearly every couple carries the same quiet plan around in their heads. First one of us dies, and it all goes to the other. Later the second of us goes, and whatever is left then goes to the children. Simple, fair, and how it should be.

For a lot of families it works out exactly like that. But it rests on an assumption that does not always hold, that the survivor's own Will, years later, will still leave everything to your children. Life has a way of changing that assumption, and one event changes it more reliably than any other.

That event is remarriage. Nobody is to blame and nobody means any harm by it. It is simply what happens where the law and an ordinary human life meet, and it can quietly undo the whole plan.

Here is the piece almost nobody knows. In England and Wales, getting married automatically revokes your existing Will. The moment your partner remarries, any Will they had before, including the one that left everything to your children, is cancelled by the marriage itself.

Unless your partner makes a brand new Will after remarrying that deliberately provides for your children, they now have no valid Will at all. And if someone dies without a valid Will, the intestacy rules take over.

Under intestacy, a new spouse comes first. A large slice of the estate, and often the whole home, goes to the new husband or wife. Your children are a long way down the queue, and in many cases they receive little or nothing.

So the chain runs like this. You die and leave everything to your partner. Your partner later remarries, which cancels their old Will. Your partner dies. The new spouse inherits. Your children, the people you were trying to provide for, get nothing.

The situation is common enough to have a name. It is called sideways disinheritance, because your estate slides sideways to your partner's new family instead of down to your own children.

It rarely involves anyone acting badly. Your partner does not set out to cut your children out. Life just moves them on, they meet someone, they remarry, and the law takes care of the rest without anyone deciding it should. And by the time it has all played out, you are long gone with no way to step in.

Consider a concrete example. Ann and David are married, each with children from a first marriage. They own a home worth three hundred and fifty thousand pounds and have some savings. David dies and, as planned, leaves everything to Ann. A few years later Ann meets someone new and remarries, which cancels her Will. Ann later dies without having made a new one. Under intestacy, her new husband inherits the bulk of the estate, including the house that was once David and Ann's family home. David's children, who he assumed would inherit his share, receive nothing. Ann's own children may lose out too.

Everything David built and intended to pass down has gone to a man he never met.

The way to guard against this is to stop relying on the survivor's future Will and instead put a structure in place through your own Will now. The tool is often called a protective property trust, and it works like this.

Rather than handing your share of the home to your partner outright, you leave that share into a trust set up by your Will. What your partner gets is the right to live in the home for the rest of their life. They stay there, undisturbed, for as long as they need it. What they do not get is ownership of your share. That sits in the trust.

When your partner eventually dies, or if they choose to move, your share does not pass to a new spouse or into intestacy. It passes to the people you named, usually your children. Because your share was ring-fenced in the trust from the start, no later remarriage and no later Will can redirect it.

This is the point worth being clear about. The protective property trust does one main job well: it keeps your share going to your children and protects against sideways disinheritance, while still letting your partner live in the home for life. That is what it is for.

For the trust to work, you and your partner usually need to own the home as tenants in common, so that each of you has a distinct share to place into a trust. If you currently own as joint tenants, the whole house would pass to the survivor automatically, and there would be no separate share to protect. Changing this is called severance and is a standard step.

Once you own as tenants in common, each of you can write a Will that puts your own half into a protective trust on your death, giving the survivor the right to live there for life and then passing that half to your own children.

Take David and Ann again, done properly this time. They own their three hundred and fifty thousand pound home as tenants in common, half each. David's Will puts his half into a protective property trust. When David dies, Ann carries on living in the home for the rest of her life. If Ann later remarries, it makes no difference to David's half, because it is held in trust for David's children and cannot be redirected. When Ann dies or moves on, David's half goes to his children exactly as he intended. Ann's own half is dealt with by her own Will however she chooses.

Both sides are protected. The survivor keeps a home. The children keep their inheritance.

People often ask whether this kind of trust protects the home from care fees. It is worth being straight about, because there is a lot of overblown marketing on this subject.

A protective property trust can, at most, reduce exposure to care fees, and only in a limited way. It can never remove it. The survivor's own half of the home remains fully assessable if they later need care, so at least half of the home's value is always on the table. And while a spouse or partner is still living in the home, it is disregarded in a care assessment anyway, so nothing changes until the first person dies. The trust is not a care-fee shield, and anyone who sells it to you as one is not being straight with you.

Just as importantly, a protective property trust saves no inheritance tax. For inheritance tax the survivor is generally treated as owning the trust half as well as their own, so the whole value still counts in their estate. If someone tells you this kind of trust cuts your inheritance tax bill, that is not correct.

So take the trust for what it genuinely does. It protects your children's inheritance against sideways disinheritance and lets your partner stay in the home for life. Those are real, worthwhile benefits. Care fees and tax are not the reason to do it.

A protective property trust earns its place most clearly where there are children from an earlier relationship on either side, because that is exactly where sideways disinheritance does its damage. If you want to be sure your own children inherit your share of the home no matter what the survivor does later, this is the structure built for that job.

For a straightforward first marriage with shared children and no plan to leave anything away from each other, a simple pair of Wills may be all you need. A trust is not something every couple needs, and we would never bolt one on for the sake of it.

Are you in a second relationship, or do you just want a firm say over where your share of the home lands? Then it is worth seeing how this works for your own circumstances. To talk through whether a protective property trust suits your situation, our team is on 0800 055 4321.