Agreement for unmarried couple buying together?

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone knew of a template for writing up a contract between partners buying a home that are yet unmarried. I am currently buying a property with my boyfriend and his parents are giving us a large gift towards it. Naturally we are most grateful to them for this and want to protect their money in the unlikely instance of something coming between us.
I will take out life insurance to cover the amount they are giving us should anything happen to my other half that way I'll be covered to pay them back. However it makes the breakup situation more complicated. Of course we wouldn't be buying if we weren't sure about each other and they probably wouldn't give us the gift right now if they weren't sure too. But we really want to cover all eventualities where possible. All advice welcome
Many thanks

I have been working on some stuff today on this issue which you will find in this forum

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/forumdisplay.php?f=122

Congratulations on doing this. the forum is full of people who did not do any such agreement and are in real difficulty now.

Brendan Burgess said:

I have been working on some stuff today on this issue which you will find in this forum
Congratulations on doing this. the forum is full of people who did not do any such agreement and are in real difficulty now.

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Thanks Brendan will have a good look through that. Its hard to think about and talk about when your very happy together but we're young and FTB so we need to be very careful.

Hi fairy cake

I fired off a quick reply to that post yesterday as I was in a hurry and meant to come back to it.

I am currently buying a property with my boyfriend and his parents are giving us a large gift towards it.

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If you are getting a large gift from people unconnected to you, you will face Capital Acquisitions Tax on it. In general, it would be better for you to buy an amount equal to your share of the house and for your boyfriend to get the gift and to buy a bigger share. When you get married, you can switch it to 50/50 or joint ownership without any consequences.

If you want to tell us the following figures, I will suggest a fair way of dealing with this issue.

Value of house
Savings contributed by you
Savings contributed by boyfriend
Amount of mortgage
Amount of gift from parents

Well its my boyfriends parents are giving the money to him so I think that's OK, I will have a 33% share of the house and he will have 66%.
The house is 290,000 the mortgage is 165,000 and we're putting in 25,000 between us.They're giving him 100,000.
So I guess what I want to know is what other people put into a contract to say what would happen if the relationship ended. My suggestion is that as I have the smallest input that I would leave the mortgage to my partner to pay and have my name taken off it but the bank might not allow that to happen so we need to think of something else.
Thanks again Brendan

If the bank will lend him the €165k based on his salary alone, the simplest thing is for him to buy the house on his own. Even still you should do an agreement.

However, if you buy jointly with him, you will be able to get tax relief on the mortgage interest as well. Are you going to close the sale and draw down the loan before the end of December? If not, this won't be an issue.

The following would give you both 50% of the house. If you split up, he would have to pay you a net €15k for your share, assuming no change in the price of the house

Alternatively, if you want to split the mortgage

We hope to close the deal in the next two weeks so we should be inside the deadline - all going to plan. We've tried to cover every aspect with detailed surveys and costings of any work that needs to be done - it costs a lot so we really want to be able to do as much of this end ourselves as we've been quoted up to 500 euro by a solicitor to write this agreement for us. On one hand it seems a bit of a waste as we plan to marry in 3-4 years time but on the other reading all the posts of people that have split on this has convinced me to go and write it.
The first option seems reasonable I hadn't thought of paying more of the mortgage - that might be possible as I will be changing to a more highly paid position in the new year.
Thanks for all your help its much appreciated.

we've been quoted up to 500 euro by a solicitor to write this agreement for us

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I suggest that you write the agreement yourselves and ask the solicitor to check it pr reword it for you.

If it's relatively simple, I don't think it should be €500.