Stepchild wants to see finances and money spent on his stepsiblings.

[Greenhairedmonstor]

My late FiL who I never met, left school at 15, fell into the right crowd while he was doing a labouring job and ended up with a little empire.

There is something in place that is not quite a trust. It allows SiL to choose to live frugally without working, and has enabled my husband and his brothers an income which supplements their incomes.

Their children will benefit after their parents’ deaths when whatever is in place will be dissolved.

My husband has his own business as well.

My stepchild is 18 and will go to university next month. I also have another stepchild who is 13.

The eldest has asked that now that they are an adult that they want to look at my husband’s finances. Essentially they want an account of any money that is spent on my children and they wanted my husband’s estate to be reimbursed from my share of the house when he dies.

Now Mumsnet always asks, no I was not the other woman, my ex meets more than his share of his financial responsibilities and I also work and rent out a house that I own in my home country that I will eventually return to. Husband’s ex is comfortable and I don’t believe this has come from her.

Inevitably my husband subsidises our life.

This has been a bitter blow to my husband and he doesn’t see how his relationship with his child(ren) will recover.

You think the loss of the relationship with the child you fathered is “not the end of the world”.
Maybe the child’s behaviour would be better if he didn’t have to deal with his dad moving a mother family on with him. Oddly hurt, pain & insecurity tend not to bring out the best behaviour in children.

All parents have to do is prioritise their kids for 18 odd years yet many can’t manage that.
Blended families all over the place, thousands of MN threads about step this and step that.

Yes, I think that.

Some people aren’t nice, the world contains some very shitty people. They’re all sons and daughters of someone.

If DH would really give up on an 18 year old that easily he shouldn’t have had him.

RTFT? It is absolutely clear that the adult male does not want to give up on the infantile and demanding junior male, but is afraid that the younger one's behaviour means that the younger one may intend to sever the connection.

Personally I think the adult is worrying over nothing, because Master Entitled is not going to cut himself off from his sugar-teat, but he clearly does care about the young creature, and doesn't want him to cut off his nose to spite his face.

Watching you inventing more and more stuff is entertaining, though; keep on going.

Hold my beer 🍺
I’m just nipping to let Axel Rudakubana‘s Dad know he shouldn’t have had his son. BRB.

If my daughter said this to me I'd ask where this was coming from, but I wouldn't have allowed my daughter to be pushed out like this in the first place

I have to ask: pushed out of what? By whom? In what way?

Because we have gathered that his two sons by his previous wife have lived mostly with her (the sentence by OP about the younger of them "visiting frequently" seems to make it clear that their father's has not been their main residence), but that doesn't mean that he pushed them out, nor that the OP did; it may mean that was the arrangement on which the ex and the children insisted. I know from reading in Mumsnet that it is not always the fathers' choice not to have 50/50 residence with their children.

I left home when I was sixteen by my own choice and remained on good terms with my parents, who lived together perfectly happily until both were dead, but until the second of them died neither I nor my brothers had ever felt any need to quiz either of them about their finances or to know about their finances at all; and of course there was no point in trying to after they were dead. This young fellow needs to wind his neck in and be told to MYOB.

Little brat! Really feel for your DH here. Talk about entitled.

My uncle sold his house for a tidy profit a few years ago and moved into a home owned by his wife of 20 years. It was his second marriage. He'd divorced his first wife (mother of his kids) but he was very involved in their lives all throughout their childhood and essentially had 50/50 custody. I'd have sleepovers with them at his house all of the time and he absolutely bloody adored them and they adored him, they wanted for nothing.

Once he sold his house, 2 of his kids began to make all sorts of requests from him. One wanted a £100,000 campervan so she could quit her job and travel Europe with her kids. Another wanted £200,000 off him so that he could start a property flipping business in the South of France. My uncle declined their requests, stating that he wanted to retire enjoy life with his wife and that they would receive a large inheritance upon his death. It didn't go well.

The campervan one still speaks to him in a civil way but the one that wanted to start the property flipping business disowned him, and had apparently said that he felt his dad owed him due to the trauma that the divorce had caused him in his childhood. My mum had to break the news to her brother that we'd been invited to his son's engagement party which her brother didn't even know his son was having.

My uncle did nothing wrong, and neither would the OP's husband if he put distance between himself and his son after this. I'm not saying he should cut this lad off straight away - he needs to talk to him and see his point of view and put a lot of effort in and be understanding of the lad only being 18. But if his son's attitude persists, he's got every right to take a step back.

So an 18 year old gets out of line and asks to know about his father’s finances - that’s not great at all but eighteen year olds often do and say foolish things. On the back of this you say his father is now thinking about the whole relationship AND with his younger brother who is twelve. Why on earth would a father blame one child for what another has said or done and why wouldn’t that father de-escalate and laugh off the request of a clearly jealous son.
Interesting too that your child feels the need to show his gratitude for his ski-ing holiday and more in front of the step brother he knows is already jealous and struggling to accept your new set up.
Your step son’s behaviour does not sound great, but you sound like you are gleefully stirring the pot and enjoying the upset of your step son.

Nowhere has the OP suggested that the father is contemplating punishing the new-adult son, or cutting him off, or any such thing; as for the suggestion he might punish the younger child for the offensiveness of his older brother, I would be interested to see the quote from the OP (as opposed to any of the other people posting here) that leads you to it. And the younger brother of the husband's ex is not twelve; that's the OP's child, the one the eighteen year old, then seventeen, bullied about the school skiing-trip. Nor has the OP suggested the twelve year old did anything other than go on a bit about something which had just happened and he'd greatly enjoyed.

I notice you don't mention that same seventeen-year-old demanding to know who paid for the OP's sister to take the OP's younger child out for the evening. Is there a "she was taunting him about his dad spending money on her" explanation for that?

This.

You are right the OPs other stepchild she mentions isn’t 12 she says the younger one is 13 my mistake. Read the OPs comments again she states
‘This has been a bitter blow to my husband and he doesn’t see how his relationship with his child(ren) will recover.’ and
‘My husband is really upset and thinks this is the end of their relationship and it will affect his relationship with his younger child as well.’
So I’d still like to know why the younger DC is being brought into this.
It’s also interesting you say the 12 year old gets bullied - even the OP never says this. Then you quote some stuff that isn’t even in my post.
As my post does say, he’s totally in the wrong but he’s 18 and clearly jealous and not OK with this new family set up. It must be hard to hear all that gratitude for the skiing holiday etc when your family has been split up.
So I still advocate de-escalating instead of causing permanent family turmoil.

Can you conceive of the possibility that the elder of his sons by the ex might be the one influencing the younger sib with whom he lives? Even (gasp) following the ex's lead and influencing the younger boy against their father, his new wife and her children? Because that seems to me to be likely to be what the father is afraid of. I see no suggestion there that the father intends to punish the younger son in any way whatever.

But then, posters here have invented him having been reported by the OP as planning to punish the older son, so there is no limit to the ingenuity employed to bring blame to bear on him (for inhumanly planning to help his eldest son financially at university, the evil bastard that he clearly is: "He supports them and SS will be supported at university."), and on the OP for "stirring" – which I find particularly ironic given that her apparently automatic reaction to the trouble was to try to work out how she could make a (misplaced) effort to try to make things better between father and son by trying to pacify the son and obey his command to explain her private finances to him.

If the son will de-escalate, it seems very unlikely that the father, who did not start this incivility and prying and who has not done anything to perpetuate it as far as we know, would not be perfectly happy to accept an acknowledgement that someone else's financial affairs are none of his child's damn business except insofar as the involve an inheritance for the child from his grandfather – all about which we have been told the son already knows.

In the matter of bullying the (then eleven-year-old?) child: quizzing him about who paid for the school trip he was excited about having been on is the specific instance of bullying to which I was referring. Thoroughly nasty in the elder boy, that: who is he to spoil someone else's pleasure in a holiday by questioning the child's right to it?

He shouldn't be challenging any younger children on who paid for them to go somewhere. I would love to know why he asked about the funding for a trip that the OP's sister took her niece on. There is an answer but nobody likes it, apparently, because it makes us all meanies.

Ach, it's Mumsnet; it is always a father's fault, and always a stepmother's fault, and when both are involved in the question around which a thread is being spun, it would not be possible for neither of them to be turned into baby-barbecuing bastards who torture fluffy kittens in their spare time while burning ten pound notes rather than letting the man's children have an ice-cream. In general they both will be.

Sigh.

The idea that someone other than a stepmother or a father might be culpable is very difficult to grasp, but those of us who live in the real world do know characters we'd cross the road to avoid, who are neither step-parents, nor fathers, nor the products of broken homes, but are just gits, often from an early age. (And they are not ND, before anyone thinks that might excuse them; just nasty.) I mean, goodness, some of us were even at school with such people.

One of the girls who bullied me in school came over to me in a pub a few years later & apologised and has since taken her own life. Life & human emotion are complicated things.

One of the girls who bullied me at school bounced over to me about ten years later, greeted me by name, and started burbling on about what fun we had together at school.

Sorry, I am not sure what your point was. That Mumsnet goes for simplistic answers? That Mumsnet posters will go along with the loudest voices when seeking explanations?

I don’t think he should let this ruin his relationship with his children. They might be afraid that they won’t be able to afford university or to become independent. They might be afraid everything will be taken off them and given to you and your children? Maybe they were encouraged to ask by their mum/friends? All legitimate fears and finances shouldn’t be ‘secret’ really.

I think your dh should simply explain there’s money to support them but they don’t get to scrutinise his personal finances.

So I met someone that did change and you met someone who didn’t, or arguably so did if she was being friendly? So some people change. Just like this 18 year old may well grow up and change. And people do bad things for emotionally complicated reasons.

And yes I think MN ignores basic psychology - like maybe daddy moving another family in didn’t do wonders for his son’s emotional wellbeing, when it suits a certain agenda

He won't change if nobody ever challenges him on his behaviour, will he?

The Son is planning way ahead he wants all current spending analysed and recorded and repaid to his DFs estate at the time of his death. This could be 10 20 30 years away. How can this be about affording university ? it is pure greed. When someone receives an inheritance, be it the income or the capital it is theirs to do with as they wish .
In this case the DF can spend the income as he wishes and when the DS receives the final
distribution of the capital he can make his own choice.

Fair point.

Key point here is that it’s not the father’s income that is a direct inheritance for DSS. His inheritance is the trust assets that create that income.

the income doesn’t appear to be depleting the assets, it’s the interest so DSS would NEVER have access to this income, the income itself comes from the assets, is then divided up between those inheriting once his dad and the surviving siblings are dead.

there is nothing to reimburse per se. There are no arrangements or stipulations on what DH can do with any liquid savings he accumulates, he could spend the lot if he so wishes.

the vitriol aimed at @Greenhairedmonstor is astounding, but this is MN, all stepmothers are evil.

even when previous threads showing actions by this DSc mother show that SHES the one winding people up, she’s the one grabbing and causing rifts.