AIBU - inheritance sad story

[whattodo1113]

I’m going to break this down as easily as possible.

my grandad who is now 86 had 5 children. (The eldest is my mum)
he split up with my grandma when the children were young.
all the children are now obviously grown up in their 60s.
all of them have wife’s / husbands and their own children. They ALL live good lives and have done well for themselves are by NO means hard up.

my grandad has worked hard all his life and paid his house off etc and was alone for a long long time with not much quality of life. He then met someone and married her and had a daughter later on in life when he was late 50s. This child is grown up now too. He is still with his wife now and has been for 25 years ish. Sorry my numbers aren’t the best and it’s not really relevant.

the whole family welcomed wife and the new child and I must say she’s always been lovely she’s a lovely woman. The daughter they had I loved and still do very much. My grandad has always been a good grandad to us. I have fond memories with him and I love him loads.

so here’s the crunch….
before he met his wife he put his house in the 2 eldest children’s names (my mum included) his train of thought was if anything happened to him or he got ill etc they’d have that house and all those things and he didn’t want it to end up in a charity or whatever I don’t know.

3 years ago as he’s getting very old now he asked them to sign the house back to him as his wife has lived there with him 25 years now and it’s her HOME and their daughter lives there too. She works part time. He’s obviously planning not being here anymore
they have refused him the house and have said when he dies she can stay for 2 years to get on her feet and find somewhere then they will sell it and split the money between the 5 children.

there argument is he left when they were kids and this new child got more of him than they did growing up.
I personally think this is very revengeful of my mum and greedy and not morally right? My grandad is very depressed and cries and I just hate that this is how the end of his life looks. He said his wife has been there the most for him and loved and looked after him and she’s gonna be left in a mess when he goes and she’s doesn’t deserve it. Which I agree.

I’ve told my mum it’s his house. He paid for it. He worked for it. Give it him back. Am I being soft ?? What do you think?? I just personally feel disapointed in them.
may I add nobody visited him often or cared to see him much but they want his house and money?

they’ve all said wife will have his pension that’s enough. Which is about 500 a month I think.

I just can’t stop thinking about him and I’m the only one in the family who has said how he’s being treated is discusting. They think he’s cruel taking the house back but at the end of the day he bought the house and his life situations have changed now and all the kids are so well off with their own businesses etc they don’t NEED it. Xxx

“Null and void”? 🤣 I think you’ll find that if you took that to a solicitor you’d get laughed at for a long time.

Hence "early inheritance", as he's still alive.

I don't know the reasons he transferred it, but he chose to freely and it's reasonable for the adult children to have included it in their financial planning. I see no reason why they should suddenly have to give it back, incurring all the costs that involves, decades later, because he and his wife haven't made plans in the last 25 years.

IANAL so I can't comment on that. But I don't see any reason why his kids are morally responsible to incur losses and costs for his new wife and kid when he created the entire situation. If he did indeed transfer the house to avoid certain costs or paying rent and now wants it back at his convenience then I certainly don't see how his kids are greedy bitches but he isn't.

Perhaps it never occurred to them that he'd be trying to get them to give it back to him several decades later, so he could leave it to a woman he hadn't even started a relationship with at that point.

He's had 25 years to make provision for his second wife and youngest child. That he didn't is on him, not his oldest two children.

“As he has lived in the house without paying rent the transfer may well be seen as a ruse to circumvent payments and therefore be null and void.”

That only means that it will be considered part of his estate when it comes to inheritance tax. It doesn’t make the actual legal transfer of the house null and void. The house legally belongs to his daughters.

That’s why it’s such a daft move. You get all the negatives of not owning it and still pay the tax. Why people don’t take advice I will never understand.

The rise in “diy” wills and those charity wills have a lot to answer for. Any fool can write a will it’s understanding the law around what you are doing that crucial. This is a classic example of diy.

Oh yeah. I've often seen people online saying they did a DIY will and its fine, as though they haven't noticed that they aren't dead yet so of course there haven't been any problems.

It has nothing to do with how the GF's future unfolded. As soon as OP's mum and her sibling took ownership of a second property they gave themselves a CGT liability - according to OP these people are business owners so they're not stupid. Even if they let his second wife live there for two years after his death and then sell the property, as they've proposed, they will still have to pay CGT when they sell it.

Op is distressed at her grandfather's treatment and is very critical of what she sees as her mother's greed and selfishness.

Op presumably won't want to benefit from her mother's greed, as she rightly or wrongly sees it, so in future she can give away any inheritance from her mother. Maybe to the second wife if she is still alive.

But the GF wants them to transfer the property back. Not sell it. That's what the CGT liability in the post you quoted is referring to.

Any plans made when they took ownership would be about paying CGT when they have the profits from the asset to fund it. That's what was predictable and needed to be prepared for. Not getting stuck with a CGT liability with no asset to show for it.

Is it shit for the new wife? Yes. Is that the fault of the daughters and/or their problem to solve? No, and no.

The blame lies entirely with her husband if he concealed this from her for twenty five years, or with both of them if they knew and yet didn’t bother to secure their own house during that time.

Not entirely of his making - OP's mum and sibling were involved too and they could have refused, saying it's a bad idea. And it's the estate that pays the IHT so it would actually have been his children who would have benefitted from IHT avoidance, not him (he'd be dead).
I think they should all engage in formal mediation to try to find a solution that they can all live with. I don't think the father or his two children have behaved entirely honourably and it seems to me the person who will suffer most from this current mess is the second wife who has done nothing wrong.

the person who will suffer most from this current mess is the second wife who has done nothing wrong.

Other than have poor taste in husbands.

If he put the house in two of his children's names as OP has said, I assume that he did this via the Land Registry and these two adult children are on the deeds as the owners of the property. It is unclear whether he did this by setting up a trust and making them trustees or whether it was a straightforward transfer of equity meaning that they now own the house outright.

OP said the two eldest children are "basically the home owners now" and that he has tried to get the house back and can't.

OP, do you have any further details? The actual legal status, whether he paid rent and so on?

If it's done on paper then it was legally transferred. That's the point!

Is it ok to transfer ownership to avoid tax or other liabilities? I think it’s pretty sneaky.

ETA what payments would they be avoiding? I don’t understand your bit about the ruse.

Are you a family member? What do you mean by practical transfer? Transfer of Deeds? If it’s just a transfer on paper i.e. a written contract then he can transfer the Deeds to his current wife.

I'm not sure I understand what you folks are arguing about here. If ownership was transferred to the daughters, T's crossed and i's dotted, as OP suggested then the daughters own the house, no ifs, no buts.

Only the daughters can then transfer ownership back to the grandfather, the step mum, or if they wanted, Joe Bloggs up the road. The wishes of the Grandfather are neither here nor there.

“before he met his wife he put his house in the 2 eldest children’s names (my mum included) his train of thought was if anything happened to him or he got ill etc they’d have that house and all those things and he didn’t want it to end up in a charity or whatever I don’t know”

“3 years ago as he’s getting very old now he asked them to sign the house back to him…they have refused him the house and have said when he dies she can stay for 2 years to get on her feet and find somewhere then they will sell it and split the money between the 5 children.”

In response to the GF trying to legally get it back:

“Because the 2 eldest children are basically the home owners now. He’s tried x”

I can imagine how that solicitor’s appointment went. It’s frankly ludicrous that he thought, or indeed that anyone thinks, the legal system was or is going to reward him for trying and failing to dodge IHT.

I suspect OP called her mother and aunt ‘basically the home owners’ because she sees the house as belonging to her grandfather, when the reality is that they legally are the homeowners, no ‘basically’ about it.

He’s not getting the house back. That he regrets his original decision does not mean he’s entitled to reverse it. If he wanted a house to leave to his wife, he had twenty five years to secure another one. He didn’t, and that too is on him (and indeed his wife if she spent decades with him knowing they didn’t have secure housing).

And assume that she is financially set for life without doing anything to provide for herself.

What about the fact that the GF worked for and paid for this house. Yes, on paper and legally it belongs to the two daughters but it is the house that he bought and paid for not them. What if his second wife, who has lived in the house for 25 years, is turfed out two years after he dies with no where to go?
Is it just a case of tough shit as far as the two daughters are concerned?
Their father made a bad decision and they don't care about that.

Also, what about the fact that he presumably did not pay rent over the past 25 years, doesn't that muddy the waters for the two heartless bitches?

His two older children were abandoned by their father and probably suffered most of the fallout from their own grief, seeing the effect on their mother, becoming poorer, and having to help take care of three younger siblings most likely. Then as young adults, their father told them he wanted to ensure their future financial security with a legal process that they couldn’t be expected to know anything about. All of that will have had a huge emotional impact on them, so it’s unjustified to judge them harshly for this.

I’d expect them to share what is left after the house has been sold and taxes have been paid with their younger siblings, but they don’t need to do anything more than that to keep their morality in tact. This isn’t their fault, and it probably feels quite upsetting to know that when your father did something meaningful to show that he loved you, what he actually meant was that he wanted the right to take it back and hurt you again if he changed his mind.

They clearly aren’t awful people as they’ve said they would give the wife a whole two years after the death of their father before expecting her to have moved. If they were really being that selfish, they’d be kicking her out after six months.

What about that fact? They are his daughters, it is not unheard of for fathers to work and pay for things that benefit their daughters.

His wife has had her whole lifetime to work towards securing her future. It wasn’t her husband’s sole responsibility to provide for her indefinitely and it isn't her stepchildren’s responsibility either.

The fact that father and wife didn’t pay rent to live there would only muddy the waters enough to reassure the daughters that their father had plenty of opportunity to provide for his new family if he wanted to.

This is such a weird post I can only think you must’ve misunderstood the situation.