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lady lion · Jun 3, 2012, 07:29 PM

Me & my exhusband was lease purchasing a house. It was our intentions to buy the house when our lease was up. The owner required a down payment & I paid the down payment alone with no help from my fiancée but we did make the monthly mortgage payments together! We did get married but unfortunately our marriage did not last & we split up before the two years was up! The owner was nice enough to let us out of the lease but I did not receive any of the down payment back that I paid to him.. My question is, can I ask my ex husband to pay me back for the down payment that was put on the house? I have proof that I paid it & he didn't & we both signed the lease agreement.. He is the one that vacated the marriage. It was a significant amount of money & I would really love to be able to get some of it back. Please let me know if this is possible & if so, how do I go about doing it??

Fr_Chuck · Jun 3, 2012, 08:21 PM

You may ask for it during the divorce, but I doubt you get it, but it can be a bargain tool to use when you try to deal for who gets what during the divorce procedure.

ScottGem · Jun 4, 2012, 03:56 AM

Apparently you willingly paid the down payment to secure a marital asset. If you sue him for his share, I doubt if you will win.

Your best bet, as Chuck suggests, is to make this a part of the divorce settlement. By the way, I don't think the owner was being very nice. As a matter of fact, he made out like a bandit. He got to keep the down payment and whatever rental you paid and he gets to sell the house again.

AK lawyer · Jun 4, 2012, 05:05 AM

Originally Posted by lady lion

... It was our intentions to buy the house when our lease was up. The owner required a down payment & I paid the down payment alone with no help from my fiancée but we did make the monthly mortgage payments together! ...

If I understand correctly, you would have exercised your option to purchase when the lease was up. Accordingly, since the landlord let you out of the lease early, the option was never exercised. If this is the case, you were not making mortgage payments, you were making lease payments. And it doesn't appear that it was a down payment on the purchase, but instead some sort of a lease deposit.

I suppose it's possible that exercise of the purchase option could have happened before the end of the lease. But in any event, and as others have said, your ex husband's liability to you for his share of the down payment, deposit, or whatever it was, should have been litigated in the divorce. If you didn't then, you waived it.

By-the-way, the title of this thread seems to be misleading. It's not about pre-marial leasing at all, is it?