Dh wants to give away entire 6 figure inheritance...

[Drizl]

We've been together for 22 years and married for 16. Until now everything was great but this latest issue might just break us apart. My mil moved in next door to us 10yrs ago so we could help her out. My dh was round there every day tending to her and she was frequently here at ours. She has since died and dh is the sole heir to her substantial estate. He (we?) will inherit a large 6 figure sum. Dh announced earlier tonight that it's his intention to give away the entire sum to charity as we are moderately well off and there are people out there who really need it. I'm so unhappy he has taken this decision unilaterally. There is so much work needs doing on our house and I have to make do with his Heath Robinson repairs. We could pay our mortgage off and still have spare change but he won't hear of it. I'm furious the subject is not even up for discussion. He believes it's his sole decision what happens as only he is named in the will. I feel really hurt about his lack of willingness to even have a discussion about it and it's making me question our whole relationship. We're supposed to be a partnership. What do you think?

kath Ah OK, sorry. It's a long time since I applied for student finance, and I'm a long way off having children old enough to apply!

My stbxh was give money when his df retired £10k, each grandchild had £1k. I was given £0 and they were told to spend it on themselves.
Stbxh spent his on guitars iPads etc, nothing for me, desire the fact we had mortgage arrears. Money can make people very selfish & cause resentment

They wouldn't need the benefits or any sort of grant with that much money.

.....

I don't think we can say here 'Some people are so cold [re the possibility of divorce]' and 'legally it's his money' in the one post.

For him to stand on his legal rights here would be actually really, really cold, to the point of callousness.

The OP is a housewife who may live to one hundred, if trends are anything to go by. That's a lot of years to spend in a sub standard nursing home that might be her lot if they don't have terrific insurance and if their house doesn't sell for what they hope it will a few decades down the road.

"They wouldn't need the benefits or any sort of grant with that much money."

They would if he gave all the money away, and then lost his job due to unforeseen circumstances such as redundancy or serious illness.

Those people saying he should give it away if he wants and sod his children, seriously, have you never been skint? Do you know what it's like to have to take a dead-end job that you don't want for years and years just to keep money coming in? Do you know what it's like to be evicted out of rental accommodation? What about when the NHS collapses? And when state pensions mean fuck-all? That's all fine?

I am actually staggered that people don't seem to want to even try to keep their own children out of poverty.

Helmet yes I do know what it's like to be on the breadline. I've been a single parent for 6 years.

But this family are 'moderately well off'. They are not keeping their children out of poverty with this inheritance.

Not the same situation remotely

Anyone who is "moderately well off" can find that their circumstances change and they are in poverty. Especially if they don't pay off their mortgage, get life/income insurance, and invest in savings and pensions, all as a safety net for harder times.

It IS the same situation- 'moderately well off' right now tells us nothing- it certainly doesn't tell us how the children are faring. (Let's hope they don't have disabled kids/lose their jobs/have a messy divorce)

This is a dad who (at present/maybe/hopefully this is a grief thing) doesn't want to help his kids. If it were dh I would be...flabbergasted.

That's all based on hypothetical 'what ifs?' though. As it stands now, the situation isn't the same at all.

Parents who've got no interest in their kids future...

Ok. They exist, I get it.

Is your DH aware that only 13% of money donated to a charity must go to the actual cause? The rest can very legally be used on 'admin' costs.

Hence why all these charity bosses drive round in flash cars

I worked for a charity and found this out. Certainly changed the way I donate that's for sure.

Estelle that is such a crick of shit that I don't even know where to start. Do you realise staff salaries are part of those "admin" costs? Staff can be quite an important part of delivering the charity's objectives. Hospices, for example, tend to provide a better service if they employ nurses and carers and cleaners. And actually have a building in which to accommodate people, one that's heated and has running water and maybe even wifi. All these things are "admin" costs.

I imagine the admin in arranging international aid in the form of qualified doctors and relief workers, getting goods, esp food, exported and transported, visas, legal issues, diplomatic issues etc, is also quite expensive. The cost of getting clean water and baby milk to a disaster zone may well be hundreds and hundreds of times the cost of the milk in the sachet.

Charities are required to disclose the salaries of senior staff in their accounts. I am glad that certain charity endeavours are in the hands of experienced, qualified, staff.

It's weird how some people on this thread are making such sweeping generalisations about charities. Some are corrupt, some are inefficient, some could be better run but still have a fantastic postive impact (and represent "value for money") in terms of donations, some are amazingly well run. I suspect there are very few at the extreme ends of the spectrum, and in my experience (I've worked at a few) most are in the middle somewhere.

I still wouldn't give a 6-figure sum to charities in the latter category, not unless I had millions.

My last post was deleted for some reason, but i still don't get why people are saying 'think of the children' when the OP doesn't work. If she isn't helping to pay off the mortgage and house repairs etc when her children are grown up then how can she complain?

Unless there is a massive dripfeed about being unable to work for some reason.

there are so many what if's that have remained unanswered on this one; it may well be that this inheritance amounts to no more than a year's salary and "comfortably off" but with a mortgage could cover a very broad scope of situations. It could be that OP and all four children are profoundly disabled and still struggled through with taking daily care of the MIL's every tiny need over a decade of infirmity or it could just be that someone made assumptions and had mentally allocated funds that aren't now coming their way. The responses are however really fascinating and I rather hope that OP comes back to clarify some of the points (including that she will not LTB over this)

I think it suits some people very well to assert that all charities are corrupt or at best grossly inefficient. More comfortable than addressing the real reasons why they are unwilling to give more, despite being vastly better off than the majority of the world's population.

And yes, I'm guilty too.

A link that might be of interest: www.givingwhatwecan.org/

Estella

Oh. Puh-leeeeease!

HaPPyB

Well said.

This thread is nuts.

Couple of things:

1. He will have to pay inheritance tax, possibly up to 40%. If his mother had wanted the money to go to charity, she could have donated a much larger amount if she'd done it when she was alive.

1. Settling the estate will take time. Perhaps enough time for him to think this all through.

1. There are small charities which don't have the overheads of larger ones whose work could be transformed by even £50k. Perhaps the op could research something local and suggest that to him as a compromise.

[hmmm] at the people saying it is half yours. Its not, it was left solely to him and you have no right to any of it. That said id be fucking livid and couldnt live with my dp if he inherited that amount of money and put charity before the welfare/security of all of our own family (like your dp, my dp is also a stepdad), so in a way YANBU. Hopefully it is just grief speaking and he will come to see the light eventually.

Poor chaps mother just passed away and you want to divorce him because he's grieving and wants to play hot potato with the inheritance?

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, if you fell on hard times in the future and needed to claim benefits for any reason I believe this may count as deprivation of assets.

Most people assume they will never need government help but one car accident could change everything.

I imagine the admin in arranging international aid in the form of qualified doctors and relief workers, getting goods, esp food, exported and transported, visas, legal issues, diplomatic issues etc, is also quite expensive. The cost of getting clean water and baby milk to a disaster zone may well be hundreds and hundreds of times the cost of the milk in the sachet.

Charities are required to disclose the salaries of senior staff in their accounts. I am glad that certain charity endeavours are in the hands of experienced, qualified, staff.

Couldn't agree more. Demonising admin costs is stupidity. Fetishising unpaid volunteers and pretending this is the ideal is harmful.

The reality is that although lots of charities make use of volunteers doing quite basic stuff, others require specialised expertise that isn't just out there waiting to be plucked for free. Sometimes it's hard to get even when you're paying for it. The charity I work for finds it hard to recruit for caseworker positions even with a salary that is very competitive within the sector (admittedly not especially well paid compared to other industries) because it's a niche skillset. I hardly think we'd do better if we were to make it unpaid. And no, we don't have a boss driving around in a flash car we might be better run if we were offering that kind of wage for the job.

Well thank god for informed people understanding that charity admin costs pay for vital services - and that if you're working with vulnerable people you need staff to be professionally skilled and trained and supervised. (Presumably its not okay for charities to kill, injure or expose clients to abuse because they were well-meaning amateurs?) Would you want a volunteer surgeon? With his heart in the right place? 100% of Samaritans costs are admin - the phone lines are staffed by volunteers so all the rest of their costs are on buildings, IT, equipment, training, recruitment, management of volunteers, advertising, lighting, heating... Which bit of that would you not want to pay for? Or what about a hospice for your dying parent, would you like the care delivered solely by volunteers? No nurses, no managers, no equipment, no medicine, no furniture - just donated second hand goods...

Anyway. His inheritance is his inheritance. I honestly dont think OP you have a legal right to it. But I would be very very pissed off in your shoes and I think your DH should be prudent and keep a nest egg for the future, as others have said, you just cant know what the future holds, illness, loss of job, disability, alongside education etc. Your DC may want to do further education, start a business or a social enterprise themselves - how great to support those endeavours. And I do agree that 40 percent will go in inheritance tax so the sum may not be as great as imagined.

I think your DH's heart is sort of in the right place, he is still in grief and shock afterall and may not be thinking straight. The grief of losing a mother is so awful. So OP if you can I think you should encourage him to set aside a family nest egg, pay off the mortgage etc, even go on some really educational holidays to give you shared experiences and adventures and open your DCs eyes to the world. But at the same time maybe you could try to think of ways to support his desire to be charitable. You could encourage him to think about not giving money away in all in one lump but crowdfunding new social enterprises, regular donations etc. and get some real pleasure out of giving, even get to see results. Good luck!