When my husband and I bought our house, the mortgage papers listed him as "borrower" and me as "co-borrower", and I was really annoyed by that. Not just because I was working full time while he was earning his degree, I was able to produce my W-2s as far back as they needed and he only had his tax documents from the last tax season, and the downpayment was in an account in solely my name, but also because we are partners and equals, not partner and co-partner, person and co-person. At the time I did comment on it and defiantly listed myself first on the rest of the forms we had to fill out, but while my husband understood that automatically putting the man as the primary owner/borrower is sexist, he pointed out that the Latin root of "co-" is "with" and that we will own the property (and debt) equally, so it's not really something important.
I disagreed about the importance, but also didn't know of any problem that would be caused by being the co-owner of our property.
Recently, my car died (transmission) and since the repair costs were more than the car was worth and it just kept needing more and more repairs, we decided to sell it. Even though I was the one who had all contact with the dealership, was the one there in-person signing papers, and was the one whose driver's license they photocopied, I realized when I was about to take the check in to the bank that it was not made out to me, but to my husband, so I couldn't cash it. I couldn't even deposit it because he hadn't signed it yet. I was steamed, because I had rearranged my work day so I could take care of all the "car stuff", but apparently being the one who does all the legwork doesn't make anyone at the dealership think they should even make the check out to both registered owners, let alone specifically to the registered owner in front of them.
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