One child has inherited AGAIN

[EWAB]

A decade ago my younger son benefited from a massive inheritance.

Essentially my MiL bypassed her three children and left everything to her 6 grandchildren.

The grandchildren: 2 siblings, 3 siblings and my younger child.

SHE WAS ENTITLED TO DO AS SHE PLEASED. IT WAS HER MONEY.

The fallout was quite seismic for lots of reasons. My partner felt that as he only had one child the family of the brother with 3 children benefitted disproportionately.

It was said at the time and I believe this to be the case that the will was designed like this. to stop my elder child from a previous relationship from benefiting as he might have done 40/50 years later if the money had gone directly to my partner.

As for my relationship, my partner refused to consider changing our wills leaving more to elder child who was at the time very unlikely to inherit from his own father. He is now on property ladder but any inheritance will pale into insignificance compared with younger child’s

Well it’s happened again!

Late MiL’s half brother has left his entire estate to the MALE grandchildren of his siblings. Younger son and partner’s nephew and we think 2 or 3 others.

HE WAS ENTITLED TO DO WHAT HE WANTED WITH HIS OWN MONEY.

I genuinely can’t contemplate my two sons having such vastly different lives.

I want advice to come to terms with it . I have disabled voting. I can’t talk to anyone.

I can’t actually believe all this fuss over inheritance, over the years, over lots of different issues, and OP isn’t even married.

That’s on OP. She is his parent.

The older child isn't MiL or UiL's relative. I think that's fair enough. Older DS has a whole other family he could potentially inherit from. You could use your own will to level the playing field but I don't think you can expect DH to reciprocate. It seems clear he doesn't regard your elder son as a child of the family.

I thought they were married at the beginning of the thread. That makes her entitlement and expectations even more unreasonable.

Her son's are 18 and mid 20s. She wants to disclose the younger adult's financial status to the older and calls not doing so keeping secrets. I find that really shocking. The older has no business knowing all about his younger brother's finances.

She also said her partner is now feeling angry about how he was bypassed for inheritance and 3 kids got more put together than his kid as a result. OP had better take note, she's becoming a liability to her partner with regards to his family

I think you need to box this problem up and put it on a shelf marked ‘things I can’t do anything about’.

If, at some future point, you are in a position to give some of your own money to your elder son to contribute towards a deposit on a home, then that might ease your sense of imbalance and enable you to keep your will 50:50 so there is no sibling strife after you die.

Thank you for your honesty I had an incling. As long as his family are respectful and are careful not to show too much imbalance then what's the problem. Be thankful for what you have. You have a loving partner/husband who is loves you that much he took on your children.

Ops partners family don't see her oldest as a full member of the family. She isn't married into the family so she has no say on what should happen to the money that is bequeathed to her youngest son.

Her partner wants to share assets and money equally that they have earned together to both children. That's fair?

Op expects her older son to be gifted money from his family. Ops partner cannot force his family to leave money to his step child and they don't have to. It has nothing to do with her partner op is the issue. Her older son has his father's famiy who he will inherit from. You have to really wonder what it was she saw in her partner. Was it the silver spoon coming out of his mouth and then realising he has no standing in the family wealth. When people work hard for their money they don't just give it away they saw the op coming.

Very fair.

Not yr money so not yr choice, nothing in life is fair, as my best friends dad said when u don’t bread with thoroughbreds yr children end up with the sh*ty end of the stick.

sorry- I mean OP's partners son

Haven't read the whole thread but I know two half brothers with wildly different lives. One loved by both parents, stable, affluent family, good schools. The other, abandoned, rejected by his father, grew up in poverty, went to shit schools.

It's horrible to witness

That sounds very different from this situation.

it sounds almost Dickensian. I assume in your example the brothers didn’t grow up in the same household if only one lived in poverty? Same dad, different mothers?

in this example one boy has simply inherited some money from family members not shared with his older half brother.

Absolutely! Everyone seems to think in a family unit (a ‘household’ to use official parlance, whether they’re married or not, of twenty years duration, in which the mother and her first son are very much an item (!)…and IF married, he would be called her partner’s stepson, though if not, he’s still his de facto stepson…half brother to his sibling)…it’s all fine and dandy for him to be treated as an outsider and interloper in his own home. His mother is fighting for his interests. It’s not just financial. He’s the older brother and should be embraced by her partner. They brought him up together? If not, if the partner isn’t there for him…I still can’t fathom why she got together with him at all. And if they aren’t married, (which would ‘legitimise’ this whole thing it seems)…why not? Is that HER fault as everyone seems quick to imply? Could it be the father just isn’t prepared to share his worldly goods except with his ‘own blood’? Don’t get together with a mother and child then! I can only imagine how her first son feels.

The mother was, and is, the one responsible for her child. The onus was on her to not continue a relationship with/have a child with her partner if neither he nor his family were willing to offer what she wanted. So yes, it’s her fault for expecting something from them that weren’t going to provide. Her partner and his family were not responsible for him, she was.*

Married or not, stepparent isn’t a legal title, and it doesn’t reflect a legal relationship.

OP has been fighting a battle she’s never going to win for two decades. It’s not even for her son, as he’s straight up told her that her approach only hurt him. They ‘should’ have done X, Y, and Z? Well tough shit, they didn’t. OP chose to remain 🤷🏻‍♀️

*and it’s hardly like she actually thinks that stepparents should ‘step up’ for their stepchildren - she was vehemently opposed to her ex adopting his own stepchild lest her son lost out on any inheritance.

*lose out

The DP here does actually appear to buy into this view, as he wants to leave the same amount of money to both sons. That's a pretty significant sign that he's 'embraced' DSS, albeit I take your point that we don't know why they're not married.

OPs problem is that other people she and DP don't control have declined to give anyone other than DS2 their money. There's not a lot he can do about that. The seismic ructions she describes after the first inheritance evidently haven't inspired family members to do anything differently.

Different information keeps coming up from different threads which I am unfamiliar with. According to this thread…DP does not agree their wills (hers and his) should reflect the fact their younger son has ample inheritances from his father’s family, also he intends to leave the whole of his share of their property (half) to the younger son. She is concerned about the disparity of resources that will be available to her two sons, and DP apparently has no such concern. They have been a family unit of four, for twenty years. A long time to have an inferior position in his own home, for the elder boy.

I thought DP wanted to leave his assets to the two sons, and the issue is OP wanted them both to leave more to DS1 due to the other bequests? That's how I interpreted 'my partner refused to consider changing our wills leaving more to elder child who was at the time very unlikely to inherit from his own father'. Hence the bit about DGM not having left money to DP in case it went to DS1 ultimately. I may be wrong. There's a lot going on here!

Is your view because of the 'As it stands he will inherit half of my property and half of his dad’s' sentence?

You say, "Could it be the father just isn’t prepared to share his worldly goods except with his ‘own blood’? Don’t get together with a mother and child then! I can only imagine how her first son feels."

Could it be that he recognises that his partner's first born son has a biological father, who is responsible for him?

The child did come with the mother but that does not automatically make her partner responsible for her son. Marriage or not. Adoption is an entitely different matter.

Each of their responsibilities are to their own biological children. She is responsible for two. One of which has a shared responsibility with the natural father, and then she shares responsibility with her partner for the younger one.

I'm not sure many biological parents, especially if actively involved in their childrens lives, would appreciate a boyfriend/girlfriend or SP's even, trying to play daddy or mummy to their child(ren). Love, care and respect are really the only things necessary. There should be no expectations on anything else, in my opinion.

Yes I thought the same as you.

It was on another thread. The DP is leaving his share to his only son and the OP is leaving her share to both her sons. She now wants to cut her youngest out of her Will so she can leave it all to her eldest who in time will also inherit half of his own father's property. Her DP is against this plan because he believes she should treat her children equally and that it would be an awful final message to send her youngest child.

I understand how she feels for her DS1 and I think instinctively I would be minded to address the vast imbalance by leaving my property interest entirely to him. I would try to explain to both Dc the reason for this in the hope that DS2 would know that it was not a reflection of any greater/lesser love for each of them.
My DF left specific property for 2 of my siblings and none specifically for me (the residue was to be distributed at the executors’ discretion and I may in time benefit, but maybe not).
I never felt any rancour about this as I knew that he believed that I would do well in life but was less sure about the 2 siblings. I would say that he did make the right decision.

I'm fucking confused. This is a very tangled web being woven!

Wonder why the DGM was concerned enough about money going to DS1 to write DP out of the will, in that case. Perhaps she thought DP would end up changing his mind.

That confused me as well but it does work out the older son will inherit half of ops assets alongside his brother and his dad's half of his assets. Ops youngest son will inherit his dad's half plus ops half of her assets. Each child will receive 75% from their biological parents. It looks unfair because that's how the op dressed it up but her ex now owns a property so her older son will inherit.

Had similar. Stepfather, knowing my mother had dementia, arranged new will, passing all to her, then her to all evenly... then the moment she went into care a few months later, changed his, to take back the property, leave nothing for her and distribute all but 10% to his own 3, knowing that my mothers will could no longer be changed. I caveated the Probate and my step/half sibblings saw sense and the house value was distributed evenly as per my mothers will.
Now my mother has passed. I suspect that after distribution in a year or so, I will probably never hear from them again.