Possibly marriage for other reasons...?

How does this affect your credit down the road? Being married, you are both tied into his and hers loans, right? What if, years down the road, she hasn't paid off her loans or files for bankruptcy? Won't that affect your credit reputation or pull you into the fray?

Maybe someone with more knowledge on the matter should comment on this aspect.

Re: Possibly marriage for other reasons...?


This is interesting. Can you expand on why you don't think the fraud issue wouldn't be a problem Joe?

It appears that the sole reason here for getting married is to obtain an advantage over others for purposes of getting Federal Student Aid grants. Why would the government look on that any differently than they would for somone attempting to enter the country of collect SS benefits based on a sham marriage?

Re: Possibly marriage for other reasons...?


although i'm not a lawyer, i would think that it wouldn't be considered fraud simply because there's no real way they could prove that was the only reason i was getting married. marriage is a financial contract as much as it is anything else, so i don't think they would allow marriage for certain financial liberties and not others. that's just my opinion, however.

Declare Independence
Hey, not that I'm telling you, you shouldn't be married; but if you don't really want to marry for any other reason, why not just declare independence from your family? I'm pretty sure it's a fairly simple procedure.

Re: Possibly marriage for other reasons...?

I may be going out on a limb here (matrimonial law is definitely not my area of expertise), but courts rarely look for the reasons that people get married in order to determine if they are doing so for some kind of economic benefit -- perhaps because married couples expect some kind of economic benefit to result from their marriage. To give one anecdotal example: a very good friend of mine lived with her boyfriend for some years. Although neither put too much weight on the institution of marriage (they were members of the "it's just a piece of paper" crowd), they eventually decided to get married because of the tax benefits and for purposes of insurance coverage. Now, was theirs a "sham marriage?" Were they attempting to defraud the IRS and their insurers? That would be hard to say, since they also happened to love each other and were already in a committed relationship before they got married. But it's also quite true that they would not have married had it not been for the financial benefits.

The only instance that I know of where the government is actively interested in the motives behind a marriage is in the area of immigration. In any other respect, marriage is presumed to be for love, not money -- even though money often plays a prominent role in the decision.

MrIVI, this is what lemontree said about emancipation:

i'm not sure if this topic has been officially declared as 'dead'/'finished'...

joe: do you know someone i could ask about marital laws?

MrIVI: as sozobe said, there's pretty much no way i can declare independence from my parents. until 1991, the law was that my parents only had to remove me from their tax forms for two years, at which point i was considered 'independent', but they changed it. i don't exactly know why, to be honest, but that's history for you.

Well, an attorney who specializes in domestic/matrimonial law would be a good place to start. I don't know if there are any such folks on A2K.