Name Change
About a month ago, for a few different reasons, mainly around planning for the future, I changed my name legally in the UK. For this, I used Free UK Deed Poll to generate the document to change my name.
I'd strongly recommend triple checking the document before you print it. As for printing out the final copy, my experience so far is that the more copies are better.
In the UK, changing your name is a free process and, unless it is an 'enrolled' name change. But for that, it costs £42.44 (at the time of writing) and more information can be found on Gov.uk
Lots of companies have been really easy and great to deal with, others have been a lot harder.
While I also legally changed my first name, I mainly just changed to only have a shortened version of my name. This actually caused more issues than I expected when changing my name with some companies. More than one company / business so far, has updated my information within their systems to have the correct surname but not first name. One of these included my primary bank account, which is online only.
As I've written this post, as I've yet again updated the software behind it, I've gone back and forth on naming and shaming companies. But my experience today, last month, and the next few months may not be the same experience you may have in the future. I'm not really going to do this, but I will include a few key notes.
More companies than I expected have requested proof that I'm using my new name. This normally requires either a bank statement or a utility bill. Some of these take 3 months to produce a new statement. I got lucky, I hit the point that my RBS account, which I don't normally use, produced a new statement a week after my name changed.
It is weird seeing my new name and I suspect it'll take months to get used to it. I spent many years getting used to my old one and when I see my old one, it is another one to quickly update.
Also, PayPal can get in the bin, it is the only company that outright rejected my deed poll as an invalid document.