Without Angela’s knowledge, he bought a retirement property and took out a $575,000 mortgage. In order to do so, he gave the bank Angela’s financial numbers, because — as the caller suspects — he can’t qualify for the loan without her. “He did this all so fast,” Angela told The Ramsey Show.
Host Rachel Cruze didn’t mince words with her response, saying “there’s a lot wrong with the situation.”
Angela’s instincts were already firing before she called in to the show. “My spidey senses are saying something is off here,” she said. Cruze and cohost Jade Warshaw completely agreed.
‘You have no legal protection’
Cruze and Warshaw laid out two clear objections.
The first was based on principle: don’t buy a home with someone you’re not married to. “You have no legal protection,” Cruze stressed. “Your name is going to be on this loan with someone that you legally are not married to. It ends up being a mess … if something were to happen”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) confirms that when you buy a home jointly with someone, you are both responsible for the mortgage — and signing over ownership doesn’t change that joint liability. If one party stops paying, the other is on the hook.
The second objection was financial: if the bank won’t approve the loan for Angela’s boyfriend without her income and credit, that’s the bank — an institution that profits from lending money — determining that her boyfriend is too risky to trust alone.
“Even the bank is saying … ‘I don’t want to give this debt. We need someone else,’” Cruze observed. “That means they don’t trust that he’s going to pay it.”
Angela said her boyfriend has a government pension that would bring in around $4,500 a month in retirement but has no other savings, and he wants to take on a $575,000 mortgage with additional costs on top. The hosts were direct, stating that Angela’s boyfriend simply can’t afford it.
What Angela stands to lose — and what many Americans don’t consider
Angela’s instinct to question her boyfriend’s actions is well founded, and she’s far from alone in facing this dilemma. Cohabitation among older adults has grown in recent years: according to a Pew Research Center analysis, roughly 7% of U.S. adults now live with an unmarried partner (up from 6% in 2019), and many of them likely did so without fully accounting for what happens if things go wrong.
