to start charging my sister rent?

[cerealnamechangers]

My dsis has lived in my mortgage free house for seven years with her adult daughter since we moved to a bigger property, in that time i have never asked for a penny in rent as we were pretty comfortable but she has paid all the bills for the house e.g. council tax. I was intending to keep the house incase any of my dc ever wanted to move in. The market rate for rent would be about 650-700 pounds per calendar month.
However we now have 2 dc at university and money is tight so we could really do with the extra cash to help them out. Dsis is not short of money and her and her daughter drive nice cars and go on multiple long haul foreign holidays, so aibu to ask her for a contribution for living there? I feel awkward asking her as she has never offered.

Pretty unambiguous IMO!

I already explained this, you can read that as "My dsis has lived with me in my mortgage free house for seven years with her adult daughter since we moved into this house which is a bigger property (and thus has room for my dsis to live with me)".

The fact that several different people all read it and had exactly the same misunderstanding should be enough to demonstrate it could be read differently!

I would not be doing what some suggested, i.e. £300 a month when it's worth £700. If you do that, given it a couple of years and you find your rent could now be £900 and your DSis is still paying £300 and there is no way you can ask for an increase.

Start as you mean to go on. A reduction maybe of £50 as she is family but that is it. Especially bearing in mind how much you have given to her over years, enabling her to buy nice cars and longhaul holidays.

Your sister and her adult daughter seem to have had a pretty good deal for seven years, and frankly I think she's been unreasonable not to have offered some (even nominal) rent since her situation presumably improved.

I think a below-market rent ~£500 would be suitable; you can use the money yet retain a reliable tenant which in itself is valuable. She, can't be so naive to believe she was going to live there forever?

Tell her you need to rent the house out money is tight and she has first refusal. Give her 50 pounds off the actual market rent as I'm sure she minds the housr better than a stranger iykwim !
I mean seriously you have made a serious rock for yourself. She needs to move on as this scenario will get extremely messy as the years go on. Try asking an oap to leave their house. Best scenario all round is for her to move on

I think 7 years rent free is enough time and more to sort out finances and put some money together to buy a home or have savings for security. I agree with whoever asked about solicitor advice. I'd charge market rent, proper LL/tenant agreement.

It's a shame as she is your sister that she may make things difficult. If I let me sister live rent free she'd do so many other things to make up and would offer money as soon as she had it. I'm sorry about this OP as a lot of it for me is the principle too.

Get some legal advice.
I rented from family who said I was getting a bargain. It was probably 25% off of market value. The previous tenant wrecked it. They never saw me as a proper tenant. They sold it. It caused a lot of resentment on both sides tbh.
Get ready for her to kick off,sob stories etc.
I think you'd be better to say you have to sell & give her first refusal. She will be panicking, pissed off etc so prepare yourself. Definitely mention the £100 pcm that never materialised & have dh to back you up.

Good luck at the w/e OP. Not sure if I am right but I am getting the feeling you are worried about confronting this sister. Could your dh be in on the conversation as back up?

Yes, as PP said, get your DH in on it because you're obviously far too nice and your sister far too sly.

To not even stump up the miserable £100 is shameful

Yes I agree get your DH in on it - after all presumably it is his house as well.

How would you feel if you were scraping by and one of his family lived in it rent free?

The sister has some brass neck. I couldn't for shame spend money on fripperies like expensive holidays or new cars knowing I was living off my sister's coin the entire time

But the house is completely paid for, therefore it costs OP nothing to let her sister use it, therefore it is right that the sister pays nothing. OP would be a complete cunt to charge for providing something that costs her nothing.

That paragraph I've just written is of course complete bollocks, for reasons so obvious to me that I refuse to waste my time spelling them out. However in a thread a few days ago, where that OP complained that a boyfriend she planned to move in with wanted to charge her market rates to live in his paid-for flat, that was essentially the conclusion of the OP. Almost everyone who replied said what a cunt he was, I was the only one that argued that the fact he had no outgoing cashflows (to pay a mortgage) should have no bearing on what she should pay, if they were going to remain financially independent for the time being.

It's amazing that (what appears to be) the same crowd can vociferously display completely contradictory opinions when the same issue arises twice in a few days.

I think you just need to sit down and tell her you're struggling for money so either need to sell the house or start renting it out. Market rate is X amount, she gets first dibs on renting it, if she doesn't want it either look for a tenant or sell.
Don't offer half market rate. If her adult daughter is living there too they'll split the rent.
It's bonkers that you can't afford to fix your car (but have two houses and don't get anything out of one of them) whilst they live rent free buying whatever they please.

It's not going to be an easy conversation but you can't afford it anymore. Be matter of fact, I'm out of money - want to rent it from me? No? Then you need to move out so someone else can or I can sell it.

First sentence. Pretty unambiguous IMO!

I take back what I said in my earlier post about the OP having been clear. I at first interpreted the situation as everyone in one house, then when it became clear I was wrong I re-read and managed to interpret it different. Now looking at it for the third time, I see why I made a mistake in the first place.

Theoretician that is based on the notion that the same posters were posting contradictory things on the two threads. My reply which you quoted would be the same if it had been a boyfriend/girlfriend or Whoever living in a house. I didn't comment on the other thread as I didn't read it.

I think you have been a lovely sister and that was a great thing to do for her. Now circumstances have changed. I don't think it is unreasonable to charge her rent now.
Maybe £300 pm for the first 12 months, which is less that 50% is a good compromise. Sit her down and explain it to her. I suspect she is waiting for it.
You can always go up in £50 increments per year.
Good luck.

It may sound a bit harsh, but it's not "berating" to point out that, had OP sold or rented out the second property for £750 p/m for the seven years Ds has been living there she would have made over £60000, more than enough to pay her DC uni fees. Therefore her DC are (if getting student loans) basically paying for their aunts and cousins rent and expensive holidays. Which is crazy.

Also agree to start asking for mine than half rent straightaway because tbh I don't think you'll get it anyway. If you ask for a miserly £100 and she moans about that you'll only cause now aggro when you need more.
I can't believe you, your Dh, or even your parents if they are around ever thought thus was reasonable for anything longer than the very short term!

You should absolutely be charging your DSis rent! I would charge usual rent for your area and house size but maybe offer to knock £100/£200 off (depending on what you can afford)

You will have to take on all the decorating and maintenance costs though! (All of the costs and responsibilities of a usual landlord) you can't expect her to keep paying for them if you are charging her more than a nominal rent.

LikeDylan, I have no issue with you, that quote was just a convenient hook for the point I wanted to make, I could have used any of many other posts in this thread, none of which I disagree with.

It may well be that that this thread and the other one have no posters in common, apart from me. Even so, that implies that the overwhelming consensus in a thread is some how determined by the opening posts, and that contradictory opinions fail to appear once a consensus gets going. Though that seems unlikely to me, as many threads do end up as bun-fights.

That leaves me with the frightening conclusion that people really do come to completely opposite conclusions depending on how the issue is framed, or maybe even just whose side they want to be on.

Theoretician. The argument in relating the two threads is borne out of a false fallacy imo.

The sister and her dc moved into an empty property owned by her sister and dh because they'd been given notice on their former rental property. They then continued to live in the property rent free for 7 years. Had they not moved in, the property could have been rented out for profit for the past 7 years. This is a property, where the ops sister agreed to pay nominal rent, yet no money ever exchanged hands. The ops sister and daughter have freeloaded for 7 years.

The boyfriend in the other thread lived in the property. Therefore it wasn't standing empty. As far as we are aware he never rented out a room to a lodger. Yet he wanted his gf to pay market rent as if she were a lodger even though a lodger doesn't share a bedroom let alone a bed with the landlord. Even if the op had moved in, the spare room would have remained unoccupied. Furthermore, the op was not asked to pay rent until after she had handed in her notice on the rental property. She made it clear that she wasn't looking to freeload but didn't want to be seen as a cash cow.

There are so many differences. Moreover, the op in this thread is not setting up home with her sister and child, not planning on potentially getting married or having children together. Intimate relationships are completely different from familial ties and cannot be equated to this scenario. I find it normal that couples, who intend to be together for a long period of time pool resources to ensure both parties have a similar standard of living. As long as neither party abuses the other's generosity, this is a synergistic and mutually beneficial arrangement.

I do not consider myself to be a hypocrite in any of my comments on either thread.

Good luck with the conversation this weekend. I would strongly recommend:

Asking for a decent amount of rent, not some token £100, because it doesn't seem worth going through the aggravation for a paltry amount, you might as well go the whole hog. I get the sense that your sister will make it difficult anyway..

Agreeing what you're doing about home maintenance, etc - I would suggest that, if you're offering her a discount on the rent, you explicitly agree that she continues to take care of small repairs but that any major expenses are for you.

Having your DH there and let him back you up if needed.

Do not allow yourself to be guilt tripped - you have effectively gifted your sister thousands of pounds already, she should be grateful to you.

Theoretician, I wasn't in the other thread but I agree with everything Mummyoflittledragon has said.

If the boyfriend in the other thread had been getting a lodger then of course he could charge market rent, whether or not he had a mortgage was irrelevant. But 'asking your girlfriend to move in with you' is not the same thing to most people as 'getting a lodger'.

For most people, a couple moving in together is about becoming a partnership, and supporting each other (legally the government treats couples that live together as financially responsible for each other when it comes to benefits etc). The girlfriend in the other thread was clearly expecting this, but the boyfriend apparently just saw himself as her landlord, not her partner. Her moving in when they had such radically different notions of their relationship would be a disaster.

Theoretician I commented on the other thread too. I said that if he wants to charge full market rent for the spare room the spare room should become hers only but ultimately the fairest is to share the savings made 50:50

There are some differences though as in that case the gf and bf were going to live together and share a life whereas the sister in this case gets the actual house to live in the same as a tenant. For me did not feel the gf on the other thread should pay full market when she did not have the associated rights.

I think the bf thread was very different too as he was not incurring any cost or loss due to her moving in, and there were no expenses to share either.

Theoretician I also agree with mummyoflittledragon - there are huge differences between the two threads:

1. difference between relationships - it is culturally normal in this country for adults in a romantic relationship to not financially benefit from one another/to combine finances. It is not the norm for one sibling to subsidise another long term
2. difference in property - if OPs HOUSE was not occupied by OPs Dsis she could legally rent it out at market rate to anyone else. If boyfriend on other thread's ONE BED flat was not jointly occupied by his girlfriend he couldn't rent out a HALF SHARE in his bed to a stranger, or even a friend!
3. difference in personal finances - other thread suggested boyfriend was not paying anything for the property and was not struggling at all, so did not need the extra money. OP on the other hand is still paying of her mortgage while sister pays nothing, can't afford to repair her car, and is struggling with DC uni fees.
4. difference in greed - OP initially suggested a meagre £100 which Dsis still didn't pay, and even now is only considering asking for significantly less than market rent. Other thread wanted full market rent.
5. difference in piss-taking - boyfriend only recently suggested payment. OP's sister has been living rent free while swanning around having lovely holidays for SEVEN YEARS!

I didn't comment on the other thread but don't think anyone who did is being hypocritical in the least - they are very very different scenarios

I think you may need legal advice on this OP. A sibling of mine has a mortgage-free house that another sibling is living in, technically rent-free afaik. However, they have a legal "caretaker" contract signed between them so that there is no claim by Sibling2 on the property should Sibling1 want or need them to move out.