Help me feel ok about this will

Complaining about being given 50K, absolutely tax free? Have a word with yourself, OP!

Op asked how to get over it, what is the relevance to what they did for the aunt going to answer the question?

I used to work for a charity, receiving £200k would have made SUCH a difference to those we cared for. What a wonderful person your husbands aunt was to recognise that she could have such an impact on other people’s or animals lives.

£50k is also life changing for you.

What I find fascinating is that @TerryWogansWig is resolutely ignoring those questions about how much she and DH did for Aunt and WHY they were expecting a 1/4 split. From which I think we can surmise that the answer is “fuck all” and “because she was child free and we made assumptions”…

This one is tricky and I think people are being a little harsh.
Yes 50k is a lot of money. Yes you should be thankful for it. But I can also see that when you all knew she had over £1m, the amount is a bit of a disappointment.
You asked how to help deal with it.
I would suggest thinking about the charities and how they will hopefully help so many more people than just the 4 in her family that she felt worthy enough to leave money to.
It's a disappointment but at the end of the day you're 50k better off and a lot of people will be helped by the charities.

None of your business. You had no reason to expect anything. There ought to be nothing to get over.

Nothing like that amount in my will but non of it is going to family Inc my kids. They have shown who they really are as adults and only ever contact when want something. So most going to charities and mostly animal ones as I have received more loyalty from animals than humans, with special items of value (to the reciver) going to 3 close friends. Don't understand why people who receive something from a relative to whom they are not even close expect more??

What a horrible, selfish, entitled individual you are. Sounds like your aunt was wise to this and you got what you deserved.

Count your blessings.

If she doesn't have a will, then, given she's an intelligent person and will understand that it would go to family in the situation of no will, I'd see that her either as choosing it to go to family, or at the very least, not caring enough to write a will as it doesn't.

So no, I wouldn't reject it in those circumstances.

That's a very different situation to my sister having a will and choosing to leave it to others which is a conscious decision I'd respect.

Obviously it would be amazing if my sister left my children something, I'm not pretending otherwise, but she's entitled to leave it where she wants.

The scenario you describe is entirely irrelevant to the situation at hand. The aunt did leave a will and actively chose not to leave it all to family. So she obviously did care- if she didn't, she would have let rules of intestacy apply.

I just can't imagine feeling aggrieved if my sister didn't leave my children everything. I would hope she'd leave them something, of course, but she doesn't owe my children anything, the way I feel as a parent do.

If this was a parent leaving everything to charity I'd understand the disappointment. But this is an aunt- she left 150k to the family, and it's complained about so perhaps she was right to not leave the lot.

Have read up to page 10 of this thread.

OP, I think your dejection is understandable (many ppl would be dejected if they’d thought they were in line for a 250K inheritance) but I can’t relate to your feeling that ‘this is just not right’. It was your aunt’s money to leave as she wished.

Also, don’t know if this has been mentioned, but if she hadn’t made the charity bequests, the estate wouldn’t have been as large, as more of it would have attracted Inheritance tax. I’m no expert on this, but on an estate the size of your aunt’s (£1,000,000?) and no direct descendants, I think that anything over £325K would have created liability for IHT at 40%. So if the estate had all gone to her relatives and her friend, the total estate would have been significantly reduced.

Indeed this may be why the charity bequests may have been discussed in the first place. But another point about the charities. I’m older, I don’t have children, and my partner is likely to predecease me. In the event that he does, I have set things up so that a proportion goes to a charity that is doing work that’s important to me. This because it makes me happy to do that. My siblings family are all reasonably comfortable and I know they will understand.

If anyone’s circumstances change, I will look at things again. But here’s the thing about wills: you usually don’t know how much you’ll be worth, when you go; and you don’t know what others’ circumstances will be. And you don’t know if you’ll lose capacity at any point to make a will in the future. You’re writing your wishes for a future scenario that you can only guess at.

"Elderly lady does a huge amount of good for people in need"...... and the OP is complaining! F*ing hell! OP, she could have left the entire amount to charity, which would have been a wonderful thing, but she also remembered her awful, ungrateful family, Lord knows why.
£50k is very generous, so maybe just keep quiet and be grateful......

What kind of person would try to "fight" a charity for their dead Aunts money because they're not satisfied with their £50k?

Most people don't, no. But you know, most people, I would think, are aware of the fact that according to intestacy rules, any inheritance has a strict order that it must go in, according to blood lines. if your sister didn't leave a will you would stand to inherit her estate if she doesn't have a spouse or parent surviving. I wonder if in that situation you would be prepared to reject it if you knew she had expressed a wish all her life for any money she leaves to go to charity, but never got round to writing a will? Or would you keep quiet....

How inheritance works is that the aunt was the only one entitled to decide what she wanted to do with her money, regardless of how ludicrous you consider her choices to be. OP and her DH set themselves up for disappointment by banking on money that was never theirs, that they had and have no right to. At the very least this was foolish, and the resultant injury is a self inflicted one.

Believe it or not there are those of us that don’t go through life counting on money/assets that aren’t already ours.

Good for her. She obviously thought the charities needed it more than you.

What a lovely lady leaving all that to charity.

Why do you feel the will was unjust?

We were expecting a 4 way split between DH, his sister, their late mother ( recently deceased also), and a family friend who’d done a lot for her

This is the problem, your expectations.

It wouldn't occur to me to "expect" to inherit anything at all from anyone other than my own parents. Even then, it's not something I've given much thought to. I think of it as being their money, to do with as they wish, not my inheritance. I don't even like thinking about it really because these are people I love dearly and whose deaths will inevitably cause me pain that no amount of money could take away.

Your OP reads as though you and your DH have given a lot of thought to how much you stand to inherit from this Aunt, probably talked about what you might do with the money etc. Basically, you started to think of the money as yours. Now you feel "dejected" and that it's "not right", as though you've had something snatched away from you when of course of it was never yours in the first place.

Essentially, someone related to your DH has made a very generous donation to some worthy causes. This person has also generously gifted you £50k. Instead of seeing those two facts as seperate and good, which they are, you've decided you have personally been cheated because money you wrongly saw as yours has gone elsewhere. That's not a problem with the will, that's on you.

How often did your DH see her? Help her? Had she promised him 25%?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with leaving money to adults, if you want to. But this was an aunt, not a parent. She left money to her relatives, £50k is very generous. We don't know what charities she left her money to, they may well be smaller excellent ones or ones that were important to her. Either way it doesn't matter, it was her decision to make.

Imagine being disappointed at just being handed £50k on a plate 🙄

That’s entirely your choice obviously. But I hope that if you have children, that they are securely housed. Because I think that’s an obligatory part of parenting,
regardless of age, but barring serious criminal activity.

Good for the aunt! In making the will she was trying to make a positive difference in the world. None of the beneficiaries were her children, and they presumably all have their own families who they are likely to inherit from. You’re being incredibly ungrateful and entitled.

Who said they didn’t?

Exactly. MN is so weird about inheritance. I can't get my head around feeling this entitled to other people's money.