Dara Ladjevardian explains what happens when one person is on the mortgage but both are on the property title. It affects credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and ownership rights, with different outcomes if someone dies or the couple divorces.
There's two people looking to purchase a home. One person has higher credit than the other, or maybe one person has a lot of debt. That hurts the qualifications. It might make more sense with the mortgage. Just one person's name, you still have the option to put the title and the deed in both parties names. Now the upside to this is if something were to happen to that person on the mortgage, the house still has to pass through the surviving spouse. They still have a chance to obtain their own mortgage to hold on to their home. The downside is if, let's say both people survive but they get a divorce, they split up, things don't work out, that other spouse who didn't have the name on the mortgage and had no risk still gets to take half the equity from the home.
