DH is terminally ill. In his will, everything is left to me, although 99% of what we have is joint anyway. He wants to gift his brother enough money to pay off his mortgage, and do it now before he dies (hopefully he will be with us at least into 2027). It's a secured loan and a mortgage totalling less than 40k, with the house worth around 150k in good condition. BIL is in his late 50s, married, no kids. His wife has 2 adult children. We can very comfortably afford to gift this and I fully support DH.
However, this is the tricky bit. We live overseas. DH hadn't been to BIL's house for about 8 years, and BIL bought it over 20 years ago. We are visiting UK, DH needed to pick some things up from BIL and we drove around to collect them, they were in the back of his car. Afterwards, BIL invited us in for a cuppa and said it was a bit of a mess. We had time, and had been driving for over 2 hours and I knew I could do with using the bathroom, and we accepted. The garage is at the back of the house and we went straight into the kitchen. It's a 3 bedroom terrace.
The kitchen was filthy. The cooker was missing several knobs, cupboard doors were damaged. The table was cluttered including a washing basket full of ripped off wallpaper from the kitchen walls (suspect it had been there ages). We weren't invited into the living room but stood in the kitchen. DH had a coffee and I drank water from a mug as BIL couldn't find any glasses - fine with me. The back door was open and there were 5 or 6 flies in the kitchen, which didnt help. When I went up to the loo, there was no flooring in the hallway, stairs or landing, just bare floorboards, and the landing was heavily stained like the dogs or cats had used it as a toilet. The loo wasn't clean but I really needed to go. All of the walls and doors were really grubby, well beyond finger marks. The wall covering in the loo was peeling off and looked as if you would pull all the plaster off too if you tugged it. There wasn't a sink in the toilet, so I went in the bathroom and there wasn't one there either, just a space where it used to be.
When I got downstairs, BIL offered me soap to wash my hands at the kitchen sink, saying he'd taken the sink out last year. I can't began to describe the dereliction and filth, I was glad there were no children living there. Both BIL and SIL work full time. He said she doesn’t clean at all and he's given up because of the pets.
We really want to gift the money, which we would do by direct payment to the lenders, as BIL has agreed would also be his preference. The dilemma is that the house will still be in this state even if BIL has more disposable income. However, it's a gift, not a loan and there can be no conditions attached. It's just that we wanted to improve BIL's quality of life by easing the strain on his finances as he nears retirement but we didnt picture him living in a derelict pigsty while his bank balance got healthier. DH is convinced that BIL won't sort or clean the house even if he has the funds to do so.