I apologise in advance: this is long, but I don't want to drip feed.
Before we bought our house, PILs gave husband £30k. I wanted him to put it in a pension for himself, but he wanted to use it towards the house. So we used it as our house deposit. We bought the house for £150k, with the £30k deposit and a £120k mortgage. We then built up a lot of loan/credit card debt and so we lent £30k against the mortgage to consolidate debts, giving us a £150k mortgage - the original house purchase/value. We subsequently couldn't afford the mortgage repayments, so switched to interest-only on the mortgage.
Ten years later, we had built up more debts and we still owed £150k on the mortgage. But I had taken sole control of managing our money and cleared all our debts by careful credit card snowballing. I switched our mortgage from the terrible interest rate we were paying and got us a much better rate on repayment so we could start paying back the £150k mortgage. I also did a ton of research into investing and sorted us both out with pensions, S&S ISAs and cash ISAs. I did all the legwork and research: husband did nothing apart from sign things I put in front of him.
Another seven years on, we have no debts, have a nice stash of savings and pensions and are paying down the mortgage: thanks to all my efforts.
A few years ago PILs gave husband another £60k. Again I suggested it go into his pension, but he wanted to use it on the house. We spent £20k on the house: updating decor, new windows and doors, and a new drive, fencing, plants, and so on. We used the rest to overpay the mortgage.
We are now splitting up. The house is worth £350k. We have £270k in equity in it. Husband wants to stay in the house and I want to move out. The pensions and savings are simple enough to deal with: we have equal amounts in each of our names anyway. That leaves us with the £270k house equity to split and the question of the money his parents gave him.
There is nothing tangible to show of the original £30k. We did use it as a house deposit 15 years ago, but we took the equivalent amount back out of the mortgage to consolidate debts. Those debts were from things like cars that we no longer own, holidays, a computer we no longer have.
I've proposed we take off at least £40k from the £270k equity and then split the remaining £230k. Thus giving husband back the £40k from his parents that we overpaid on the mortgage. As he's staying in the house, he gets to keep the benefit of the other £20k from his parents that we spent on it.
He has proposed we take off £90k from the £270k: the original £30k from his parents plus the later £60k - leaving us with a remaining £180k to split equally.
I have no idea what would be reasonable here. While I know I'm officially entitled to a straight 50:50 split of everything, I'm certainly not after his parents money: after all, my original suggestion for both money gifts were for them to go into a pension for him only (and if that had happened, I wouldn't take half his pension now we're splitting up). But that original £30k doesn't exist anymore as we have nothing tangible to show for it, and £20k of the second lot of money was spent on the house that he's keeping. I do appreciate, however, that the equity that we do have is likely greater because of the £20k we spent on it and also because we could 'afford' a bigger house with having a £30k deposit in the first place. On the other hand, the reason I mentioned above all the work I did to get us out of debt and research into investing is because we wouldn’t have this level of money to split if it wasn’t for the efforts I put into our finances.
What do you think would be reasonable?