AIBU to think my Uncle was taking revenge

[DumbestBlonde]

My grandparents were life-long private renters. They never got onto the property ladder for various reasons, and there was not the stigma against renters that there is now. I grew up with them, and in that rented property - leaving when I got my career underway.

There may not have been stigma in the same way (or I was oblivious to it) but there was still insecurity...... The house was owned by an elderly lady and it happened that she (or her children) wanted to sell it. My DGPs were late 70s.

My father and my uncle are both wealthy men. My father at that time lived in I think France, my uncle quite nearby to DGPs. However, I was not informed about the situation, which happened the same year as my daughter was born. My father would never have helped them, that's a given.

My uncle took money out of his investments and purchased the house (which was a character property but unmodernised) outright. I am not sure of the terms that they arranged between them at the outset.

After four years my grandfather died quite suddenly, although he was a good age. My grandmother was left living alone there, with my uncle and aunt a mile or so away and the favourite of the cousins also not too far away.

My uncle has four children - and although he and his wife said they had wanted to adopt me when I ended up (not legally) with my father/uncle's parents - they didn't follow through, or weren't allowed possibly due to my DGP's dislike of their religious beliefs (LDS).
At some point, my uncle admitted to me that he hated the fact that his parents brought me up, as it "took away" from HIS children......
There is always an edge to my dealings with him (religion, and them being so judgemental aside) - for example; my father stood me up for my wedding (well, two day's notice) so my unlce stood in to "give me away" in - but the price was that he humiliated me and made fun of me (spitefully, not affectionately) in the "father" of the Bride speech.

So, he continued to charge my GM rent - at the going rate. When the rent she paid had covered the money he had paid for the house - which was of course, increasing in value, he continued to charge her rent. Never at any point, did he consider granting her some sort of ownership of the property, in full or in part.

So, when she died - again, suddenly - there was apparently no will. And he told me that she left me nothing, and that when he sold the house, the proceeds would be divided between HIS children......

He also did not allow me to speak at her funeral - or even travel with the hearse (almost everyone there knew that I effectively her daughter), and instead, the favourite cousin delivered a eulogy - and words that she spoke were actually carved into the headstone.
(Note, she was not my grandmother's favourite grandchild.)

And, speaking of the headstone - he delayed getting it put at the grave for over four years... I was not allowed to sort it out , because he owns the plot, apparently. Four years! In fact, nearly five...

Am I being paranoid/unreasonable to think that - although not his primary objective - the side effect of my feelings being hurt massively (and not abiding by his mother's wishes) was ahappy consequence for him, given that he hated that I displaced his children somehow?

More nonsene then:

I think he should - if anything - have paid for the house(no mortgage) - and either -
NOT made them pay rent (possibly dependent on the benefits situation - but definitely NOT if they had no SS input) - or an amount uequivalent to the interest he was "losing"

• or

IF they paid rent, STOPPED charging them whenhe had received the equivalent of what he had paid for the house

• he did NOT have to somehow let THEM have ownership - but HIS asset was appreciating, so he would ultimately have profitted from the sale, which I do think is perverse (I don't care what anyone says), so all the more reason to stop charging rent

• IF ownership was somehow transerred to them, THEY could have decided what would happen to it upon sale. Not that it would go to me - but that they could have had a choice. He made sure they didn't have any choice at all.

He took most of their choices away under the guise of "generosity".

You’re in a weird position when you’re brought up by grandparents.

You have the hard bits of (basically) being their child and the good bits of a grandchild.

It’s a tricky position that’s a bit like bobbing around not actually fitting in properly anywhere.

@anon12345678901

But if they could have afforded the house, they would have surely? If they didn't have the cash and were too old to get a mortgage then they couldn't have brought it. The terms they agreed is nothing to do with you. You are not entitled to the house or a part of it rather as you are not one of his children.

You are not entitled to the house or a part of it rather as you are not one of his children.

I was effctively one of THEIRS....... Which is the whole issue.
It was partly revenge. You don't need to read the whole thread, but it was explained at the start. I am not some random off the street.

But they didn't have a house to give you. Your grandparents never owned this house. If they wanted to have the choice of what to do with the house then they needed to be the ones to buy it and they clearly weren't in a position to do so.

@JustLyra

You’re in a weird position when you’re brought up by grandparents.

You have the hard bits of (basically) being their child and the good bits of a grandchild.

It’s a tricky position that’s a bit like bobbing around not actually fitting in properly anywhere.

The worst part was actually knowing that is annoyed other people - also that I could not escape my father (their son) who popped up (and messed with my head) when he felt like it - years apart. I am also not sure of there were any "good bits" for me, as I know that our relationship was more complicated than a a typical grandparent/child relationship usually is. I was always aware (told) that they kept me becuse "no-one else would".

My father once jokingly said that he would not expect me to "care for" him in his old age. But that is -again, his MO - of making sure I know that I should not have expected any interest - or, you know, love - from him at all. Ever.

I was effectively one of THEIRS....... Which is the whole issue.

But they didn't own the house.

as a side-effect, he knew that, rather than helping them (earlier) to purchase themselves, he took away THEIR option of what to do

Can you see that this is really irrational thing to say. If the GPs were late 60s when he bought the house, then he was what..... mid 40s? At what point in his life should he have helped them? I'm guessing that in his 20s and 30s he will have had less money to spare and was probably paying his own mortgage. But you're blaming him for not giving his parents enough money to buy a house earlier in his life?

And then, in his 40s, he was able to buy them a house, but you don't actually know the details of how he financed it, do you? Did he need a mortgage? If so, he'll have needed the rent.

If he'd given them the house, it could have ended up being used to fund care fees.

This man doesn't sound nice (the funeral behaviour etc. is really unpleasant), but blaming him for what he did with the house is irrational. Most people in their 40s cannot afford to just chuck money out of the window without thought. He made an investment and helped his parents in the process.

(Also, your timescales don't make sense - you say the house doubled in value in the "13 years" that he owned it, and that it's since quadrupled. The house sold in 2000 (£47k) , 2006 (£160k), 2011 (£155k), and 2018 (£180k). Which 13 years were his?)

@DumbestBlonde I’ll not clog your thread with my story, I posted a few details earlier, but with regard to thr “no one else would” I kinda get that.

My Nana adored me, but when my grandad died when I was 12 she had to put things in place so that I wouldn’t be homeless if anything happened to her. So I kinda get you.

My father tried to pop up but he was mostly too drug addled by the time I was 10.

Your relationships with everyone in your family will be different because your place is so odd. Your a grandchild, but also a child. You’re a niece but kinda like a much younger sibling. You’re a cousin, but you’re also not.

It took me a lot of counselling during my first pregnancy to get into a good place.

You have some legitimate issues in relation to how your family has treated you, but you are muddying the waters with the house thing.

What you are saying re: the house is that, in your view, your uncle should have given his parents the house outright, so that they could have made the choice to leave part of it to you. That's not reasonable. Not in the slightest.

Are you not glad that your GPs had a secure home to live in?

@DumbestBlonde

More nonsene then:

I think he should - if anything - have paid for the house(no mortgage) - and either -
NOT made them pay rent (possibly dependent on the benefits situation - but definitely NOT if they had no SS input) - or an amount uequivalent to the interest he was "losing"

• or

IF they paid rent, STOPPED charging them whenhe had received the equivalent of what he had paid for the house

• he did NOT have to somehow let THEM have ownership - but HIS asset was appreciating, so he would ultimately have profitted from the sale, which I do think is perverse (I don't care what anyone says), so all the more reason to stop charging rent

• IF ownership was somehow transerred to them, THEY could have decided what would happen to it upon sale. Not that it would go to me - but that they could have had a choice. He made sure they didn't have any choice at all.

He took most of their choices away under the guise of "generosity".

Yes it is nonsense. Sorry, but it is.

If he did not buy the house, HE WOULD HAVE THE SAVINGS SOMEWHERE ELSE WHERE IT WOULD BE MAKING SIMILAR RETURNS. If they didn't pay rent, he would be LOSING money by helping them stay in the house. If he didn't buy that house, the money would have been put into another house (probably with HIGHER RETURNS) or into a similar investment vehicle.

Look you're clearly not some anti-materialist Buddha as you're obsessed with getting his assets, so stop trying to phrase things that way. You can't spend thousands of words talking about how anti-materialistic you are when you are blatantly just saying you want a chunk of his money.

A couple of things OP, you need to remove the link to house as it could be identifying especially if your grandparents lived there for many years. Also your uncle has not made that much profit assuming he was the buyer in 2006. Your grandparents were renters and never owned the house, so could never leave it to you. They were also unlikely to get a mortgage at their advanced age so would never have been able to leave you a property.
I think other posters have touched on your hurt and wanting to belong and be a daughter to them, but maybe being their granddaughter and from all your posts the favourite grandchild should be enough.
Your uncle might resent this and you (there's enough threads on here about golden kids and grandkids to prove its a thing), but you're an adult now and don't need to be involved in each others lives.

Look you're clearly not some anti-materialist Buddha as you're obsessed with getting his assets, so stop trying to phrase things that way. You can't spend thousands of words talking about how anti-materialistic you are when you are blatantly just saying you want a chunk of his money.

Yep

@DumbestBlonde

www.zoopla.co.uk/property/222-old-hall-road/chesterfield/s40-1hj/20221430/

Not sure about links - but here's the house.

Which sale was his?

*He made sure they didn't have any choice at all.

He took most of their choices away under the guise of "generosity".*

Yes it is nonsense. Sorry, but it is. - agree
So did he force them to stay in the property? He took away their choice to live where they wanted?

@BeenAsFarAsMercyAndGrand

I was effectively one of THEIRS....... Which is the whole issue.

But they didn't own the house.

as a side-effect, he knew that, rather than helping them (earlier) to purchase themselves, he took away THEIR option of what to do

Can you see that this is really irrational thing to say. If the GPs were late 60s when he bought the house, then he was what..... mid 40s? At what point in his life should he have helped them? I'm guessing that in his 20s and 30s he will have had less money to spare and was probably paying his own mortgage. But you're blaming him for not giving his parents enough money to buy a house earlier in his life?

And then, in his 40s, he was able to buy them a house, but you don't actually know the details of how he financed it, do you? Did he need a mortgage? If so, he'll have needed the rent.

If he'd given them the house, it could have ended up being used to fund care fees.

This man doesn't sound nice (the funeral behaviour etc. is really unpleasant), but blaming him for what he did with the house is irrational. Most people in their 40s cannot afford to just chuck money out of the window without thought. He made an investment and helped his parents in the process.

(Also, your timescales don't make sense - you say the house doubled in value in the "13 years" that he owned it, and that it's since quadrupled. The house sold in 2000 (£47k) , 2006 (£160k), 2011 (£155k), and 2018 (£180k). Which 13 years were his?)

1988 - 2000. I do have the ages wrong - DGF was born in 1908 and died in 1992, so actually 80, when the arrangement was made. DGM was born in 1912 and died in 2000, so she WAS in fact in her 70's. She lived as a widow from '92 - 2000. My Uncle paid around £23,000 for it, due to how unmodernised it was. If I had known what was happening and the "plan", we could have increased our own mortgage as we only had a minimum. I was NOT told what anyone was doing. My Uncle did NOT (again, I was told after the fact) use a mortgage for the purchase.

He probably IS nice - just not to me - because of the whole "cuckoo" situation.

It is a recent life event that has brought this up - I amnot raking over the ashes for fun. (Before anyone accuses me of that)

He took most of their choices away under the guise of "generosity".

He cannot possibly have taken something from them that they never had in the first place. They never had the option to choose who to leave a property to, not because of your uncle, but because they didn't own one.

Look, plenty of my family live in rented housing. When they die, they don't have the choice of who to leave property to because they don't own any. That's life.

(I'm a bit by your references to renting carrying a "stigma" btw. It doesn't in my experience, it's just another way of keeping a roof over your head.)

She would have turned 80 in 1992 if she was born in 1912. So, if she was in her 70s when the deal took place, it was just barely.

Could you have bought the house without a mortgage? What was their monthly rent? This all happened 21 years ago?

Ok so they had the house as a rental off him for 12 years.

Firstly they did not pay the value off the house--a high yield property (which I doubt this is) would be around 7%, from which you can take all the costs such as insurance, plus consider inflation. And are you calculating that as paying the cost of the house at the point it sold, as that is more relevant? Do you think zero repairs or improvements were made in those 12 years?

Yes the house went up in value, but nowhere near as much as you seem to think it did.

You have told multiple different ages--so the grandad was 80. So they had ZERO chance of buying a house at this point as they neither had the cash nor the ability to get a mortgage. And at this point (in the nicest way) they were old and needed somewhere comfortable to live out their last few years.

Their "plan" was not your business at they clearly approached him or involved him in sorting this out. He stepped up and sorted the situation for them, they didn't need a family round robin.

Oh, I'm sorry, I misread, the deal was 1988. So she was 76.

My Uncle paid around £23,000 for it, due to how unmodernised it was.

£23k was reasonably pricy for a 2 bed in that area in 1988. And given the state of the property market in the 90s, a house was by no means a sure-fire winner of an investment.

With hindsight, yes he made money. At the time, that won't have been guaranteed.

If I had known what was happening and the "plan", we could have increased our own mortgage as we only had a minimum. I was NOT told what anyone was doing.
My Uncle did NOT (again, I was told after the fact) use a mortgage for the purchase.

So your uncle was able to do it without borrowing, while you would have had to borrow the money (at very high interest rates in those days - it wasn't like it is now), but he's the bad guy for buying the house?

You seriously think they should have approached you and asked you to borrow the money at interest rates of c. 10%? And you think that you would have asked for less rent from your grandparents, when you would have been paying interest at 10%?

You have lost the ability to look at this rationally.

[quote JustLyra]@DumbestBlonde I’ll not clog your thread with my story, I posted a few details earlier, but with regard to thr “no one else would” I kinda get that.

My Nana adored me, but when my grandad died when I was 12 she had to put things in place so that I wouldn’t be homeless if anything happened to her. So I kinda get you.

My father tried to pop up but he was mostly too drug addled by the time I was 10.

Your relationships with everyone in your family will be different because your place is so odd. Your a grandchild, but also a child. You’re a niece but kinda like a much younger sibling. You’re a cousin, but you’re also not.

It took me a lot of counselling during my first pregnancy to get into a good place.[/quote]
I don't mind if you do - it is nice that you can understand. Bu I am sorry for your experiences too....

It does distort everything and I wish I had been kept away from the whole family to be honest. But I say that with the dubious benefit of hindsight and the life I have lived.

You are lucky that you had a Nana who loved you so much. I guess the harder way of things is to loose them earlier..... You have been lucky though - but there I go, "lucky" - sigh - should luck really come into it?

I personally have found my relationship with every single person to be slightly "off" - and I certainly had many many isues through school - let alone, the perfect storm of my father procreating when I was sixteen, my mother showing up at the same time with another bunch of people I was expected to like by osmosis, and my DGF retiring so there was no money, scuppering my chances of pursuing more education.

You see it so perfectly - and I admire your wisdom and appreciate your compassion. Thank you. Please do not let any of what I am saying be a bother to you xx

So he only (I'm not disputing thats still a good sum of money) made £23k which was split amongst several of his children. I was thinking of 100s of thousands.
Whats happened thats brought something that happened 21 years ago back to the fore?

@BeenAsFarAsMercyAndGrand

My Uncle paid around £23,000 for it, due to how unmodernised it was.

£23k was reasonably pricy for a 2 bed in that area in 1988. And given the state of the property market in the 90s, a house was by no means a sure-fire winner of an investment.

With hindsight, yes he made money. At the time, that won't have been guaranteed.

If I had known what was happening and the "plan", we could have increased our own mortgage as we only had a minimum. I was NOT told what anyone was doing.
My Uncle did NOT (again, I was told after the fact) use a mortgage for the purchase.

So your uncle was able to do it without borrowing, while you would have had to borrow the money (at very high interest rates in those days - it wasn't like it is now), but he's the bad guy for buying the house?

You seriously think they should have approached you and asked you to borrow the money at interest rates of c. 10%? And you think that you would have asked for less rent from your grandparents, when you would have been paying interest at 10%?

You have lost the ability to look at this rationally.

I wish they HAD approached me, or I had know - and I would have approached them. If I could have avoided them paying rent, I most certainly would have. And I do remember the rates of even as high as 15%. My circumstances were different then to now.

@MichelleScarn

So he only (I'm not disputing thats still a good sum of money) made £23k which was split amongst several of his children. I was thinking of 100s of thousands. Whats happened thats brought something that happened 21 years ago back to the fore?

Do you really think that it was OK to split that money between his children? Really? Why not put it back into his investments......

Do you really think that it was OK to split that money between his children? Really?
Why not put it back into his investments......

Why wouldn't it be? Seriously?

If he put it back in investments, they'd likely get it further down the line anyway. He obviously wanted to set them up with a nest egg.

This is utterly barking, and if it's real I sincerely hope you seek some help.

Do you really think that it was OK to split that money between his children? Really?

Can you explain why it wasn’t? Why it’s wasn’t okay for a man to give his children some money from an asset he’d sold?