Business

Top DOs and DON’Ts To Know While Changing Your Name

By Christy Bella | July 21, 2020

Table of Contents

How long does it take for your name to change?

The process of changing your name may require you to keep a few things in mind.

Indeed, it’s a legal process and you wouldn’t want to make any mistakes. Helping you keep problems at bay, we are discussing some of the top dos and don’ts that you must keep in mind while legally requesting a name change.

Things You Need To Do

Start Using Your New Name

Like said earlier, changing your name in the UK is a legal matter. To establish your new name, you just have to start using it in daily life.

So, the first step to changing your name is choosing your new name and starting to use it in everyday life. After that, you will have to take care of the documentation part.

Be Ready With Documents

Documentation is important for any name change process.

From getting a deed poll for your name change request to getting your new name printed on all of your documents, you will have to do it all.

Here’s a list of documents that you may need to change your name on at the earliest:

Driving license
Passport
Changing the name on flight tickets (This may cost you more than expected, that too only if the airline firm offers such an option)
Bank accounts
Education records
Work records

Note that the paperwork change can take some time. You will first need to get a deed poll, and then the process of changing names on documents will commence.

The deed poll will also help you provide evidence of your new name until your new set of documents reaches you.

Provide Evidence For Certain Titles

If you plan to add a title to your name, you may have to provide evidence to prove that you deserve the title.

For example, if you wish to add Dr. or Er. to your name, you must present the proof for your educational qualifications that make you a doctor or an engineer.

Similarly, if you want to add honorary titles like Sir, Lady, Lord, Baron, Prince, Princess, evidence will be required.

Moving further, here’s a list of titles that you don’t need to provide evidence for:

Mr
Miss
Mrs
Ms
Mx

Things That You Should Not Do

Choosing an Offensive Name

Despite the fact that you can choose to call yourself anything that you like, your new name should not cause offense to any group of people.

For example, your name can not be a racial remark or a religiously offensive term.

Adding Numbers To Your Name

Remember that scene from the movie ‘Dictator’, when Aladin tried made-up names? Adding a number to his name surely doesn’t help him.

The same is the case while choosing a new name. As the rules say, your name can not consist of numeric values. That’s a restriction that you must note.

Including Special Characters or Punctuation Marks

It may be good to choose a unique name, however, adding special characters or punctuation marks to it will be a hindrance to the legal procedure. Your new name application will simply be rejected.

Do yourself a favor and avoid adding characters like !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, or * to your new name.

Wrapping Up

The name change process in the UK has a bunch of legal concerns associated with it. There are certain restrictions and allowances that anyone planning to change their name must know about. In this post, we discussed a few of them.

Hopefully, this helped you learn more about changing your name.