Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

No, the house was acquired before marriage and remains your separate property. However, a married person's separate property is liable for a debt incurred by that person before or during marriage. Since the new refinanced loan will be incurred by you during your marriage (or by you and your wife), regardless, your house will still be liable for the new loan.

Larry L. Doan, Esq.

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I have a slightly different view. Although I don't regularly practice family law, my understanding is that use of community-property income, such as your wages and salary during marriage, or your wife's earnings, to make mortgage payments on a separate-property house, will slowly give the community an interest in the once 100% separate house. This is technically known as a "pro-tanto interest" and arises because of the use of community funds to acquire equity.

Ask your prospective lender if it will be requiring your wife to execute a quitclaim deed as part of the loan closing. This is done, I believe, to extinguish any pro-tanto community interest and restore full ownership to the borrowing spouse.

You might want to re-ask your question under a LawGuru topic heading dealing with family law and community property issues and specifically use the term "pro-tanto interest" and see what a community-property expert will say.

I should add that since these creeping interests don't show up on the public records, they are not true "legal title" interests but are beneficial or equitable in nature and would be taken into full consideration in any kind of court proceeding where the matter came up.

It sounds like you don't want to do anything that would cause your house to be recharacterized as community property. If that is the case, then you probably should not re-title the house in both of your names because the law will assume that you intended a present gift of a half interest to your spouse, unless you have a separate property agreement on the side that dispels that presumption.

Merely refinancing the house will not convert it to community property but, as the post above suggested, I also believe that each payment you make on the mortgage (whether it is the existing mortgage or a future mortgage) using community property funds (such as your income) will be treated as "buying" a community property interest in the house, at least to the extent that the payment is applied to reduce the principal balance of the loan and thus presumably (although this is not always the case, as we now sadly know) building equity in the home.