<prompt> Human: My girlfriend and I are close to bring engaged. We hope to actually be married next year. Besides the point tough...Were both aggressively looking for our first house. Were confused how the ownership will work. I make about 5 times as much as her, but due to a family loss, she has the money for the down payment and closing costs. Shell initial pay a lot up front, but Ill quickly catch up to her initial investment...Renting right now, she pays 20 of our joint bills, based on a previous recommendation from here Thanks!. It works out perfectly and fairly. We are very unsure how to move that into joint home ownership. Rent splittingis easy. Someone else gets it all. Haha sadfaceWe understand that accidents happen. We could even break up. We want to think positive, but plan for the worse. Both of us want ownership, because we dont feel it would be fair any other way. Whats the best way for us to both own the home and pay for it? If she puts 20k down, but after that Im paying 1,600mo., while she pays only 400... who owns what? Seems confusing!  <response>: Anything you want can be put down in a contract. Literally that means you can even write a contract that says after 17 months and 17 payments of X person A will have of the house and person B will have You can even get married and the contract still holds true. With that said, when you are not explicit, depending on where you live, by default some marriages prescribe a different type of asset division in case of divorce. I am from Brazil so I am not familiar with the exact legal terms in english in the US, but the general idea is something like Basically you have to remember that even though someone paid more money than the other part, in a marriage there are always more factors involved than purely money. For example, one of the partners was able to stay longer hours at work and thus get a promotionmore money because he or she didnt have to worry about food, since the other partner spent 2 hours making dinner.Marriage or legal union is REALLY different from regular dating, but you can override all that with a pre-nup or some other contract. Theres no best way here, and you have to weight the financial aspect with the emotional stress of having these really, really hard discussions with your girlfriend. 