i’ve been procrastinating changing my last name and it’s coming up on our year anniversary. i really need to get on top of it! where do i start?

8 comments

1. I way over thought it and put it off for 2 years but it’s pretty simple, you just have to go to a few different offices to get the process started.

   Go to the register of deeds where you got your marriage license and get the marriage certificate. I’m in NC and it cost me like $10 I believe. It’s also good to just have one on hand, you might have one with all your marriage paperwork, in NC you have to request the actual license cause what they give you in the paperwork is just for decoration really.

   Take that cert. and go to the social security office, tell them you want to change your name and they’ll give you the paperwork and everything, spell it out exactly how you want it.

   SS will give you a piece of paper that declares your new name is whatever you wrote down. You can take that paper to the DMV so you can go ahead and change your name on your license and not have to wait for the SS card to come in. Your new SS card will come in the mail in a couple weeks. Once you get your social security and license then you can start changing your name on everything else (banks, other accounts etc.) Make sure you tell your employer of your name change so they can update it as well.

   It might vary a bit for how Texas handles it but this is what I did for NC and I was able to get the license and go to the SS office all in one day. The DMV took longer since our NC DMV is still very backed up from covid and doing apps only as of right now.

2. I started with my social security card, and then you can do your license. Then everything else – bank cards, credit cards, etc.

3. So this is what you don’t want to happen. The first time I met my wife (now of 31 yrs) ‘s parents, I said “nice to meet you mr & mrs jones.” “it’s smith.” my then girlfriend, who married straight outta college and divorced 5 yrs later, had never changed her name.

   Talk about awkward

4. I found that I needed my new social security card to do my driver’s license, then everything else was easy once I had both of those things!

5. It’s not that hard. I would make a to do list of everything that needs to be changed, and just tackle it piece by piece by piece. It took me about a week. You can google what to do by state

6. I too have been putting it off because it’s a lot to change over and my husband hasn’t made a thing of it anyway!

7. I waited 5 years to change mine. I have no idea why I didn’t do it when we were filling out the marriage certificate. Lazy I guess lol. I started by going to the social security office and requesting to change my name. The website told me what paperwork to bring. It took a couple weeks and then my new social security card came in the mail. After that I was able to change my name on my bank account and other bills. It was pretty simple but it took some time and a lot of phone calls. This is in California btw.

8. HitchSwitch is a company I used. They send you all the forms and tell you what order to go in terms of changing things like social and driver’s license. It was really easy.