About my children's inheritance?

[BonyPony]

My MIL sadly passed away a couple of years ago and left a large sum of money to my husband and kids. My FIL is very into financial management and has virtually total control of the account. We have to get his permission to withdraw any of the money.
FIL has been very generous and paid off our previous mortgage so we could move house. Husband hated the previous home, which increased his grief, stress and anxiety. We were happy to move but are now struggling financially with the bills from the new house. I cannot get this money out of my head. It is way more than I could earn in 10 years and it is just sitting there.
Meanwhile, I have been a full time at home parent for many years but husband is now pressurising me to get a job to make ends meet. I don't want to disrupt our home life, especially when all our financial worries would be solved by husband getting FIL to let him have the inheritance he was given!

Should I give up and get a job or stand my ground and insist husband fight for the money? (Also am I evil?)

can you answer why, after being gifted the luxury of being mortgage free you then, went and got a mortgage bigger than you could handle. Taking into account the preexisting big contracts?

This is exactly what I'd like to know, but anyway the answer's simple: if you can't afford the current house, downsize to one you can

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids. I thought a few grand out of hundreds wouldn't hurt.

We're boom and bust. If I earn more, we'll quickly be very solvent again. But I won't ever get that time back with my kids.

I imagine my future teenagers will be quite keen for me to earn them money and I'll happily work 60 hour weeks. I just don't want to miss out on time with my 6 year old and especially not because my FIL thinks you should never spend money.

OP, your attitude just sounds really off. Its actually making me feel quite uncomfortable somehow. You don't come across as a responsible adult at all.

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids.

"Buy time" with your children. wtf.

I thought a few grand out of hundreds wouldn't hurt

In addition to the tens of thousands you've already been given to pay off the mortgage?

What do you give in return OP? You do realise that nearly everyone else manages without this strange attitude?

Really horrible to listen to someone speaking this way. Please don't pass this attitude onto your children.

I thought a few grand out of hundreds wouldn't hurt.
How would it only be a few grand when you've said yourself that you're living at a deficit of AT LEAST £1000 a month? How long would you expect your children's money to last at that rate?

my FIL thinks you should never spend money.

Your FIL who paid off your mortgage and paid for your holiday. He doesn't think you should never spend money, he thinks you shouldn't spend your children's inheritance to support you living a lifestyle you can't afford and he is completely right. Downsize your house. Get a part time job that earns you enough to cover the shortfall in your outgoings. Stop expecting your children to provide for you and do what you need to do to provide for them.

You are actually so money-obsessed and living in such a fantasy world OP that you're not making much sense. I feel really sorry for your FIL and I wonder if he needs protection from the pair of you.

@BonyPony

Oh love. You’ve over glazed it now with the sentimental spiel about wanting to buy time to spend with your 6 yo.

If it’s really only a few thousands that you need, your apparently solvent DH who is flourishing in his career should be able to cover that. If not, you either lied to the mortgage provider about your expenditure - or your DH isn’t doing as well as you and he want to believe.

Either way you need to get real and face the truth. Either you downsize or you find a job. I am in utter sympathy with your FIL over the state of you and your DHs grasp of real life and finances. No wonder he’s taken it upon himself to ensure you don’t end up in the street!

In fact your attitude is so off that I’m wondering if this is a reverse. From the point of the FIL.

I imagine my future teenagers will be quite keen for me to earn them money and I'll happily work 60 hour weeks.
Teens need time and attention too.

You really don't see how fortunate you've been do you? I suspect the fact that you seem unable to manage finances despite his financial assistance in paying off the mortgage etc is why he is acting as he is. I think you said in an earlier post that your FIL's assistance was in addition to / separate from the inheritance. Why not look at that as a positive instead of whinging that your FIL isn't in effect allowing you to access to money that wasn't intended for you because you can't manage your finances and don't want to work. I get you want time with your kids, but you have chosen to live beyond your means and seem to expect others (your kids) to pick up the tab.

You genuinely don't see the issue and come across as grabby, entitled and frankly extremely ungrateful.

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids
Try swapping your unpaid hobbies for paid work then.
I was right - you are a lazy scrounger!

my FIL thinks you should never spend money. I imagine he thinks you should never spend money you don’t actually have, which is a completely different prospect and which you claim to be already doing to the tune of a grand per month?
You sound like a petulant child with no grasp of finances whatsoever.
Your children will one day be very grateful to your FIL for keeping your blindly grasping mitts out of their legacy.

Did you bring anything to the marriage yourself, OP? Or were you always banking on spending the in-laws’ life savings? What about your parents? Anything from them? Any major financial contribution from you (other than the washing)?? It all seems to be a one-way street with you.

@HeadintheiClouds I Couldn’t have said it any better!! It’s exactly what I was typing!!

@BonyPony you need to start pretending that the money doesn’t exist and act like you are up shit creek without a paddle because technically you are!! That money is not there to bail you out of your inability to manage your finances!! I’m starting to see why your FIL has the purse strings!!

I think this is a reverse.

@BonyPony

Well played!

You had us all going and frothing for a while then.

So who are you really?

The DH or FIL?

I bloody hate reverses, they’re so fucking tedious.

I understand your point of view about wanting to spend more time with your kids. That was my plan too while we could afford it. And childcare fees are nuts! Like not even worth working for £2 an hour once you remove childcare costs from your salary. However, you and your husband are a team. Our plans changed when my husband unexpecantly lost his job. Within 2 weeks I had a full time job and he stayed at home until he got another one. Then suddenly we were both working fulltime with a small child in childcare. It costs a bomb but it's not forever. You need to be living within your means and not relying on this money. It's not even yours. It's your kids. I suspect your fil is in charge of this money with good reason. Totally disregard this money and start living within your means.

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids

You don't need to "buy" it - you could use some of the time you spend volunteering. Even if that's done when they're at school, you could use the time for the housework you're struggling with, so you can see more of them once they're home

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids

No, you wanted your kids to pay, out of their inheritance, for you to continue to avoid working and your lifestyle choice.

We all want to spend time with our kids but in the real world most people have to work. Especially if you're living beyond your means.

If you wanted to be at home with them you should have planned for that financially without having to rely on an inheritance.

I just wanted to buy more time with my kids.

I'm one of a large group of siblings, with a SAHM (we were all born late 50s early/60s) - it was more usual then for women to automatically drop out of work on having the 1st child - in fact, in some jobs they were required to resign on marriage & children.

As a child growing up with a SAHM, I took a lot of things for granted, about my mother's availability. But you know what? I know that if my mother had had fewer children and worked in paid work outside the home, I"d actually have had more time with her.

My memories of my childhood are of a harried harassed parent, and an absent parent. We were not poor by any standards (we sailed, had boats & took ballet lessons, did Girl Guides etc etc) - all the aspects of an affluent middle class family life. But there was always a worry about money, and there was tension between my parents, and my mother's mental health was never very vibrant. She didn't have a mental illness, but her well-being wasn't great, when look back.

She was a brilliant home maker& household manager - we ate cooked from scratch meals every day, she baked weekly so we only ever had home made cake, biscuits & bread; she made all our clothes. We lived rurally so were ferried everywhere and had a wonderful childhood. Not with the kinds of materialistic possessions (we always had practical cheap cars, and no television or stereo systems & all of the modern stuff).

But my memories are also of an harassed busy mother who rarely had time just to hang out. And the tensions about money.

So, you know, OP don't valorise "time with your children" over everything else; don't use that as an excuse. Because your DC will pick up on the other things.

I also think my mother would have been happier and mentally healthier if she had had some relationships outside of the family, through paid work and the recognition and satisfaction that comes from that. She got rather lost after we all grew up & had to find a way to remake her life.

And paid work was really out of the question for her after 15 years out of the workforce. She had qualifications, but she just could not take the pressures even of job-seeking.

So my final point is that if your plan is to work FT when your DC are teenagers, you need to start working towards getting back into your professional field now - sooner, rather than later.

Because as you've already experienced, sadly there is discrimination against women who've taken time out to do the SAHM thing. You used to "walk into" jobs, now you don't even get an interview.

So you need to start working to build up a CV so you do get that interview for the job you really want.

Quit the volunteering. Get a full time job. Or move to a cheaper house and go down to one car. Sorted.

because my FIL thinks you should never spend money.

How dare you blame your extremely generous FIL - it's YOU that's done this. You've decided that despite being mortgage free you'll mortgage yourselves to the hilt. You've got these thousands of expenditure each month that you're not dealing with. You've decided to continue with a lifestyle you can't afford. You have done this, not your FIL.

When my DC were little I worked weekends and evenings no childcare was ever required.

But surely you have already thought of that and you wouldn’t want to do that either

You either work when they are at school or you work when they aren’t at school