Apologies in advance for the loooong post. It's complicated. My absentee brother in law wants to penalise us for not getting him his inheritance fast enough.
DP has a brother – let’s call him Bob – who lives in the US. He's been there for 30 years, has a career and a family, and has rarely visited the UK.
In 2014, my MIL (elderly, losing her sight, no longer wanted to be responsible for crumbling home) sold her house and moved in with me, my DP and our daughter. It was a joint decision, as with progressive blindness her care needs were obviously going to increase. She lived a 2-hour drive away so popping in regularly was never going to work.
It wasn't an easy decision; DP and his mum had never got on well but there was nobody else. It was incredibly difficult getting her packed up and out of her house. She was a hoarder, and DP and I were going down every weekend for MONTHS parking our then 3 year old DD in front of DVDs, surrounded by rusty nails and weedkiller, sorting through endless drifts of paper and junk.
Anyway. We bought a property together – most of deposit paid by MIL, mortgage by me and DP.
Her money (less £20k which she kept as cash) went on the deposit and renovations. We built her a lovely annexe and continued to develop the property as a whole after her money was gone. We also the mortgage, bills maintenance etc. It was a bit of a wreck and we've done a lot to it.
We all lived here together until MIL's death in October 2017. Meanwhile she was INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT to live with. She and DD had a good relationship and for both of them it was a positive. But to her children (and me by extension) she could be a nightmare and both DP and I ended up on antidepressants. I became suicidal towards the end. It was literally that bad – and the guilt of thinking we would either have to move her back out again, or go mad, was horrendous. Her final illness was quick, and before that she seemed healthy and strong enough to go at least another decade.
Anyway. Enter Bob. From the start we made it clear both to MIL and Bob that although she was technically gifting DP all of her money (couldn’t get joint ownership at her age so the house is in my name and his only), she still rightfully owned 36% of the property as a whole (the percentage she invested at the start).
We said that after she died, we would get the house valued and we would agree to pay Bob half of whatever her 36% stake was then worth (regardless of us paying all bills and upkeep and spending on further development). We made sure all of this was in writing.
MIL became terminally ill and came home to be nursed in her own place. Over the course of the next six weeks or so we basically cared for her ourselves, with a couple of daily visits from nurses who washed her. She had a colostomy bag which I dealt with entirely except when the nurses were here.
We fitted all this around full-time work and looking after our (by this time) 6-yr-old.
Bob came over for a couple of weeks to help, and we talked a lot about how she’d been. He and DP realised that their mum had been bending the truth to both of them for decades, driving a wedge between them. They each thought the other was her favourite son. They each thought the other had said hurtful things that he really hadn’t. As a result a good decade of semi-estrangement started to heal.
So now she is gone, God rest her basically decent but bloody infuriating soul.
It’s been 11 months since she died and we’ve been on a rollercoaster trying to work out whether we will have to sell up to pay Bob back, or not. There were no timeframes in the will and we never discussed them, but back in April I lost my job and we thought, that’s it, we’re toast. We told Bob we were selling. But then we looked at the market and realised we would struggle to get back what we’d spent. And the thought of moving out of our home after everything else, and putting DD through more upheaval was horrible.
So we went back to Bob and said we wanted to try to avoid selling in a bad market. We said we were confident we could raise the money by spring 2019 to pay him back. (That will be 18mo after she died).
He didn’t really respond to this, and never gave any indication of wanting the money urgently.
Wanting to get things sorted, we wrote out a proposal for him, suggesting that in appreciation of him waiting we would get the solicitor to pay Bob all of the money from MIL’s bank accounts (about £25k) up front to help him with cash flow. (We’d take our half off what we paid him for the house.)
We also said that we would guarantee that should Brexit cause house to prices slip so far that the house is worth less than we’ve all invested in it, he’ll still get half of her original stake.
In his response Bob didn’t acknowledge this, or the offer of the cash, but simply asked us to also guarantee any slippage in exchange rates between Sterling and the US dollar between now and next spring when raise the money.
DP is enraged and their relationship is in tatters again. Bob has never acknowledged any of the work we did moving her out, any of the suffering (he knows, I told him) that we went through over the last few years, or any of the money we’ve spent developing and maintaining the property that he has a share in.
To not even mention that, but to ask for even more???
His response (very much on the high horse) is to say that not insisting we sell last April (6 months after MIL died) was his way of acknowledging everything we have done, and that he feels perfectly justified in asking us to underwrite the UK economy in return for the delay.
He’s acting as though DP has borrowed money from him. I suppose technically you could argue he has. But morally? Legally?
If you’ve made it to the end of this post, thank you! Please let me know what you think of this mess.