People who pool resources with parents to buy houses

[UnquietDad]

Someone talking about doing this on Jeremy Vine this lunchtime.

I may be really dim, but if you do this, with your surviving parent selling their house and joining with you to buy a massive house - what happens, in the future, when this parent dies? Surely their equity is then tied up with your property, so if you have siblings they won't be very happy about the fact that a chunk of their inheritance is basically paying your mortgage now.

But as the person who has taken the parent under your roof, you may feel that you are entitled to this financial perk... and why should the brother /sister who had less to do with your aged parent benefit from it?

Oh, I think this could cause huge problems. My brother suggested this to my mum when a) he lived in a small house and wantd to move to a larger one and b) my mum has a lot of equity. Fortunately, my mother was savvy enough to anticipate teh problems this could cause. I expect it can work if everyone is open, mature and legal documents are correctly drawn up etc but I think it's tricky

my sister overheard me (jokingly) suggesting to my Mum that she and step-dad should sell their large house in the home counties when they retire, and spend the money on converting our barn to a Granny annexe. Sister thought I was serious, and, living in the same town , has designs on the house herself and doesn't want to see it disappearing! Mum is determined to live in the house till she and step-dad die, then the house will be sold and we'll all get our cut.

I don't think anyone should ever count on inheriting anything - the parent might need to spend all the money on paying nursing home fees.

Or they could leave it all to charity

It's not the counting on inheriting it bit (their money, do what they )that's the issue really. It's the all being tied up with a siblings house bit that causes problems - what happens if the parent does need to go into a nursing hime - who pays and how? Forced sale of the shared home? Don't know.

i'm about to do this with my ageing grandmother. my sister and i are her next of kin. we're very much up in the air with how to go about it. does it come down to tenants in common and joint tenants? i'm thinking if it's tenants in common then the house just goes to the surviving party (ie dh and i) but if it were joint tenants then my gran's portion of the house would be spilt between my sister and i. so i would either have to sell up or buy her out.

if this is the case, and things are written up as tenants in common then really there just isn't anything to leave to my sister. i mean as harsh as it sounds, it's not like half my gran's estate is NOW my sister's..it depends on what the situation is when she dies. if my gran got so ill very soon and had to go into care, then she'd lose her house anyway to pay for it.

I would assume that this would get thought out at the time of the joint purchase, and would be reflected in the ownership of the house. Nothing wrong with the equity being bequeathed to all the children equally - either the other siblings could hold on to their percentage of the property until eventual sale, or trigger a sale (whereby the insitu sibling would have to extend thir mortgage to buy out siblings). No solicitor would let parties enter into such an arrangement without checking that they've thought about the inheritance issues (if only for the fact that they would be able to charge an additional fee for redrafting the wills!)

We bought our property with my Mum, she's only in her 50's so I'm hoping we have plenty of time before we have to think about death etc... we have no mortgage and it works for all of us, large property and the bills are split, it makes financial sense.

We have several options for the future, we either buy Mums share gradually over time or we buy her out using a mortgage. We have an agreement that if the worse does happen then we will have a period of 2 years to either sell or find the money to give my brother his share.

I'm not sure but I think this may be a way of avoiding having to pay nursing home fees if required. (because the house is the main home of the rest if the family and therefore can't be sold.

I am not saying this is the reason why anyone does it, by the way. I do know that my dad suggested something like this to my brother for that reason.

we thought of doing exactly this with my dad but dropped the idea because of fears of sibling resentment. We were happy to agree to sell the house should my dad die and divide the money up, but that would have been hard, have that in one's mind. It was the only way of us being able to buy a house, and my dad would hav e liked the company, and we look after him whereas the other siblings don't, but there you go.