Posting under Elderly relatives as I think this is specific to my mum being older and hoping that there may be someone here who can offer some advice or at least some solidarity. Sorry...its long.
DM is mid 70s, fit and well but obviously slowing up. Widowed for the best part of 30 years, she still lives in the family home which DF built and died in. It’s a 4 bed detached house with an acre garden. I’m one of 3 siblings. I’ve always said I wanted the house when the time comes for DM to downsize and both siblings have been fine with that.
I moved away from home for uni but once DH and I had a family we actively started looking for a property back where I’m from. This was 2015. We were very clear with DM that we wanted her home and she has acknowledged this. Over the last 7 years DM has intermittently muttered about downsizing, but done nothing more than mutter.
We had a purchase local to DM fall through in 2015, and then finally moved with a purchase in process in July 2019. We were temporarily living with DM, again having been very clear that we really wanted her house. That purchase fell through, so we’d moved, were living with DM and had no house. We found a house that ticked enough boxes, but neither of us loved, but it was well under budget and we thought we’d either grow to love or hate it, and at least we weren’t paying rent or living with DM (we were there for 4 months). We grew to hate the house we bought. DM knew this. In Nov 2021, a suitable 'downsize' house very close to DM came on the market (she wants to stay in the same village, wants detached, wants a largish flat garden and wants 3 bedrooms....so not really downsizing at all). She offered us her house (at full market value) and put in an offer on the house she had viewed. We scrabbled about to find a mortgage and a bridging loan that would allow us to buy her house and enable her to be a credible bidder. In the end DM decided she didn’t like the house enough and withdrew her offer. In Feb 2022 we became aware of a private sale of a house that we liked and had an offer accepted on it. Bear in mind that this is peak covid housing boom time and most family homes around us were having at least 30 viewings and going to a bidding war; we were incredibly lucky to have this opportunity. At the time DM asked if we still wanted her house and I said we did, but she didn’t appear to want to actually move and we really liked the house we were buying. I told her that ultimately we wanted her house, and that if she told us 4 months after we moved into the new house that she was selling I would be very pissed off and not in a position to buy it. Nothing else was said. We moved in July 2022 and haven’t finished unpacking. We have appointed an architect. Yesterday DM asked me if rather than pursue renovations on our new house, would we rather buy hers and renovate it as she now wants to move.
There are not words to describe my anger and upset.
I asked DM if she had any idea how much stress and money was involved in moving house and she said “well you made lots of money on the other house, so that isn’t a problem”. She has totally failed to appreciate that the house we bought will also have increased in value and has zero concept of the stress having not moved in over 40 years.
On top of this I know that had I said to DM back in February that yes we would pull out of the purchase and buy her house we’d still be sitting in the house we didn’t like and she wouldn’t have moved forward at all.
In the interests of not drip feeding this comes on a background of DM telling me a year ago that she wasn’t including me or my DC in her will because we “don’t need anything”. All her assets are being left to my 2 siblings both of whom have 6 figure household incomes and one of whom is childless and a borderline alcoholic. That’s a whole other thread that I’m not going to get into. I’ve parked it because its her money and she is entitled to do what she likes with it….but I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. With regard to her Will I pushed quite hard a few years back for her to sort it. She refused and eventually told me it was “like you want me dead”. I’ve not mentioned it since. On the same vein, I was very clear when she did put the offer on the house that I didn’t want her moving if she thought she might be miserable in it. I didn’t want her or anyone else to think that I’d in effect kicked her out of her own home. The family home is hers. She’s also entitled to do what she likes with it but I don’t know where to go from here. DM seems to think we can just put our new house back on the market and move. Aside from not having the headspace to move again, financially we can’t. I am utterly devastated and heart broken. It will kill me to drive past her house with another family living in it knowing that we could have bought it had she made the offer 3 months previously. Furthermore I think this is the final straw to our already fragile relationship. The Will was bad, this is just about to finish what was left of us off. I’m even more sad about that. All through my 20s and most of my 30s she was my best friend and my rock. Over the last 4 years she has been increasingly unhelpful and difficult and our friendship has just imploded. She accused me today of never making time for her. Over the last 3 months I’ve organised 3 different days out with her. She makes no effort at all.
I am just sitting crying.