[theOnliest]

Depending on where you live, changing your name can be much more of a hassle than this. My wife did it recently, and the whole process took several months and cost nearly $1000 all told. It involved filling out a bunch of paperwork, taking ads out in two legal newspapers, and a court date.

[reustle]

Could you elaborate on the ads? Those seem unnecessary.

[detaro]

Some jurisdictions have rules that you need to "publicly announce" important events, and newspaper ads are still considered "the" way of doing so.

[theOnliest]

Yep; this was in Pennsylvania, which is apparently one of the more onerous states.

The stated purpose is so that you can't change your name in order to (for example) escape debt. So the way to do this is to pay to put an announcement in a legal periodical. She had to do it in two separate places: one was mandated (The Legal Intelligencer, which sounds like something out of Harry Potter), and she had the choice of a few others, of which she picked the cheapest one.

The ads themselves didn't cost $1000, but the whole process (including changing the name on her passport, etc.) came close to that.