Resentment of what parents did with their inheritance has wrecked our relationship

[MalePoster9000]

Parents are late 70s. I’m mid-40s.

I could go into details but it might be outing.

Anyway my mother always says “family is everything” but this has really not been reflected in any decisions / actions she and my father took with all that they inherited and didn’t need from the generation above them.

Anyone experience anything similar?

OP you have an unusual attitude. You seem to think that your life has been extraordinarily hard and that other people’s are extraordinarily easy.

For example I find your attitude in the quote above very naive - a property that “you’d just never, ever sell”. Of course loads of people would choose to sell an inherited property abroad. Keeping it would involve working with letting agents, builders, project management, paying bills, managing tax in another country with language and cultural barriers. They also needed liquid cash - and lots of it- for renovations. Perfectly reasonable choice to sell.

Your attitude to the values they got for their properties is also naive. Yes house prices have risen, they have always risen but it’s always a lot of money at the time. Most people who have ever sold property have the “wow look what it would be worth” conversation 20+ years later - they still enjoyed the money.

I think when some people are saying that they would “help” their kids and can’t understand when other people don’t might be overlooking that you were not asking for 10% of a 200k flat in a town. You seemed to want 100% of a flat in London - what’s that 500k? And as you have said you were on universal credit and your parents helping you at times - it seems, at least at times, that you wouldn’t have been able to afford the service charge or maintenance costs. How many “ordinary middle class” parents are going to be buying their child a London flat and bankrolling the ongoing costs also. How does that fit in the “fairness” that is so important to you between yourself and your sibling?

You seem to have champagne tastes on a lemonade budget. This is not helped by all the people you know that were bought flats and had trust funds. Most people are mature enough to realise that some people are rich. That doesn’t make us or our family rich. “Whaa Bartholemew has a trust fund and bought a London flat and I want one too” is a pretty ridiculous look. No need for your parents to cash in all their assets and buy you a London flat in my opinion. In fact I think they would be foolish to do so when you can’t afford to run or maintain it and it would cause resentment with your sibling.

Perhaps once you get another job and can raise a mortgage your parents will consider lending you a 10% deposit (for a reasonable modest place) and changing their will to reflect this. They might have done this years ago if your requests were realistic.

Edited just to say I think when you are working you should look for a shared house of professionals. You sound like you would really enjoy that form of living. You could stay at your parents to save faster but that might be an uphill battle for your mental health.

You have a victim mentality. You need to take some responsibility for yourself.

And now to add to all that blame you are shovelling onto your parents it’s their fault for not “directing you” to make a better degree choice.

You have very clear opinions on their shortcomings as managers of their OWN assets, but by your own admission never applied your fabulous foresight to improving your own situation. You’ve done fuck all work by the sound of it. You have a total brass neck. Plenty of people who are deaf in one ear have excellent careers. As do plenty of anxious people Your abuse of medical issues to cloak your idleness is appalling.

YANBU, your parents were very fortunate to have inherited a lot and given that they had plenty they should have shared it with you. It would be different if they’d needed it to survive or if you yourself were already wealthy but this doesn’t seem to have been the case. I imagine most parents would have helped out in this situation.

I'm just waiting for "thread has been deleted because the OP has privacy concerns" message

No context.
My parents were emotionally abusive.
If there was no inheritance, I would expect to stay no contact and live my life peacefully.
If otherwise, I'd still give my time and energy.
Difficult.

Op the only person to blame for the situation you find yourself in is yourself.
You keep mentioning being single, why on earth do you think someone would be attracted to someone so bitter. You have a total victim mentality and seem to take no accountability.
You say you probably can't drive due to your anxiety and partial deafness. Neither of these would stop you from driving if you really wanted to.
You're middle aged and living with your DP's paying no rent, again this is a choice you've made.
It seems you're happy to wallow in self pity hence the reason you have done nothing to change it

Op I suggest you get some therapy

you are blaming everyone else for how your life has turned out. Take some responsibility then set about turning your life around it’s not to late to get a job retrain and learn to drive.

How your parents spend their money where they live is nothing to do with you and you should appreciate them letting you live with them rent free instead of being bitter and resentful

you are going to ruin your relationship with your dp and potentially your db and his dc if you continue

It sounds very fair to leave 1/3rd to you, your bro and his kids each. If you had had kids they would have got some, but you didn't. Why do you resent your brother being well paid?

I’m surprised that anyone thinks it’s OK for a will to be split three ways because one sibling has children and another doesn’t. Surprised but of course respectful that this appears to an opinion that many posters hold.

I have several children, my sibling none. But when my parents died their money was left equally between the two of us. It would never have occurred to me in a hundred years that my children would share a third to the detriment of my sibling. How terribly unfair to my sibling that would have been.

My will is the same, everything left equally between all my children. I adore my grandchildren but will not penalise their Aunts and Uncles who are childless. In my opinion that is the only fair way to act, and a way that is guaranteed not to cause division within the family after I’m gone.

I’m single, there are loads of single people round me (small town with good transport links). You need to give yourself a kick up the arse and get a job and then move out, something transferable to anywhere in the UK would be good, like council or NHS admin.

I can't believe you're criticising your mother for only working for 20-25 years when you don't work at all and are living in their house in your mid-40s.

Hah no, that’s not a path I ever went down fortunately. I’m too old for that subculture I think. I don’t play computer games or read comic books or any of that.

I do need to watch my consumption of news and Twitter as it can feed my helplessness / hopelessness, however.

There's no point torturing yourself with inheritance "what ifs". It just creates resentment that destroys relationships.

Also, you criticise them for wanting to leave a third to the grandchildren, but it sounds like you would have wanted your grandparents to do this very thing.

I’d have to add it up but I’ve worked 10-15 year on and off. I’ve also lived independently for 25+ of the 28 years since I turned 18.

Though when I say independently I mean away from parents, I was still being supported
by them financially to varying extents for perhaps two thirds of that time.

Even from their perspective it’d have made a lot more sense if they’d just bought somewhere in their name where I could have lived, given how small their own mortgage was.

They made decisions, which in retrospect weren’t terribly sensible decisions, but then so did you. And a culmination of those lead you to where you are now.

No point in dwelling on the past. Make the best decisions for the future based on the resources you have now and make the best of your life going forward.

You sound unbelievably entitled OP. What your parents chose to do with their properties is entirely their own decision.

FWIW, my parents once owned a house in a. very desirable part of London that they sold in the early 1970s for a 5-figure sum. The same house is worth £8-12 million now.

They live in a different area in a house worth maybe £1 million now.

But they don't regret it and nor do their children because it was the right decision for them at the time. And no-one Ould have predicted how much property prices have risen in the last 50 years.

Take some responsibility for your own life and stop trying to blame others for your misfortunes.

I don't think video games or comic books are specific to "that sub culture". It's more the way they behave towards other people, specifically women, that causes "that sub culture".

The way you blame everyone else for your life choices and suggest your mother had "time off" to raise you is why you're being asked that.

The fact you say that while not working definitely makes you a hypocrite, if not an incel, although I do think you probably are.

I agree - he’s an incel.

What a hypocrite. Choose a cheaper area to live and get a bloody job.

🤣🤣🤣

"Lived independently" while they supported you financially.

That's not independent.

You are whining that they didn't give you any physical money, while they have supported you financially for the majority of your 40+ years.

And you don't see how ridiculous that is.

Not much info on here. Do you think it your right to inherit. It's their money to do as they wish.

You certainly sound entitled.

"I’d have liked them to have kept hold of the properties they inherited, which there was no need to sell. Or to have bought a flat in London that I could have lived in. Or even a holiday home for themselves which would have appreciated in value."

"But they never thought of me when it came to the big decisions"

Perhaps you should figure out your life so you make more money and not spend so much time complaining how they may not give you theirs.

you can't be for real. Why was it your parents' responsibility to stop you from doing an arts degree? Why was it their responsibility to buy a house for you? Why shouldn't they have made the choices that suited them re the properties they inherited?

They really don't owe you any of the things you think they do. They are not to blame for your life not going the way you seem to have wanted it to. And if they're letting you live with them and leaving you 50% in the will I think they've more than fulfilled any obligation they may have to you. I really don't understand your entitlement in all this. You are not at all hard-done-by.

Thanks for this post.

I’ve lived inside zone 2 for 25 of the past 28 years. 2-bed flats in the area where I lived from 2011 until recently increased from £200k to £600k in that time. Given what they’d inherited yes I’d have liked my parents to have bought one, back then. But I wasn’t arguing for it at the time so I can see perhaps I’m not being fair.

I had flatmates and lodgers throughout that time (it was just me on the contract and I’d often renr to students who were much younger, so more like lodgers). I don’t think I could go back to living as equals with anyone, and flatshare of people in their 40s sounds like hell. But I could imagine being a lodger with a live in landlord, if the location was good.

Anyway yes I see I need to move out and on from here, I just have trouble imagining how it won’t be impossibly grim.

And yes I did know someone on my course whose father gave him £200k to buy a London flat, in 1997! But bully for him, it won’t do me any good dwelling on it now.