Loan outstanding to our son is causing weekly abuse

[Tiredtrudy]

I'm not sure if I'm being the unreasonable one here. We moved two years ago. Our adult son (now 25) was living in London. Our mortgage offer came up £20k short and he covered the shortfall with a loan (we had maxed out on the house due to our ages). Payments to be paid by us, and his terms were he wanted to move in to save for a house deposit. That was eighteen months ago. During that time I became seriously ill and will not recover. I'm the high earner. I'm waiting to be medically retired. These things are never quick as insurance doesn't want to pay.
He has paid nearly all the monthly payments as I've been unwaged but never given us any keep. He might buy the odd takeaway. Anything he pays for is recorded on a spreadsheet which I didn't know existed until recently.
The monthly payment is £400 the same as many friends charge their adult DC. He eats a lot. He earns more than his father who is in his 60s and still working to keep a roof over our heads. We also have a younger DC at home who is at a local University.
Things have come to head as he wants to buy this spring. I haven't been able to confirm if I can give him this money back then. He is now forcing us to sell our home (which we do need to due for mobility reasons). We have equity in the house to repay him and move to a smaller property.
I'm now expected to give full weekly updates on our finances and any accessible work options I might be applying for. If I don't give him this information he flys into a rage screaming at me and telling me I've ruined his life.
The payments he has made are less than 10% of his take home pay.
He had mostly a private education and I paid off his sports car finance two years ago. He's never offered to take that off 'the bill'.
My DH has told him I'm ill and when the house is sold he can have his money. It doesn't seem to be enough. My husband things he's a privileged brat.
To punish us he refused to attend a family party at the weekend. Yesterday he shouted at me for an hour. I was crying. It turns out he had promised his GF a house last year. She was going to leave him as this hasn't happened.
Due to my health I am barely able to walk. I can't just go and work in a shop or warehouse. He does stay with his GF a couple of days a week and we all breathe a sigh of relief. I'm not frightened of him but he is so nasty to me. I don't know what to do.

He doesn't seem to have any idea about real life in general. He's not coping with having to pay 400 a month in life, god help him when reality hits and he has to pay bills and buy food on top of his mortgage.

I’m confused, you say your children will inherit “immediately” but then you say your DH will inherit the house. Presumably you have life insurance on the mortgage, have you made provision for your son to get his money back as well? Funeral and probate costs can swallow up an awful lot of money.

If your son is at risk of ending up homeless and in debt due to your poor financial planning then I can understand why he’s feeling stressed out.

@Gabitule I was responding to posters who have said he should be paying the £300 & the debt repayment, I thought that was clear…

’I pay £400 pcm towards the loan, but I don’t pay anything to live and eat in their house. This would cost me more than £400 pcm and I therefore have a financial advantage, I better shut up and stop shouting at my parents’’

Hr shouldn’t be shouting but I assume he’s panicking or maybe he’s horrible. £300 was the agreed rent so it doesn’t matter if it’s a good deal, that’s the agreed amount 🤦‍♀️

He’s NEVER paid the £300. OP paid the £400 loan repayment until she became ill, so he’s essentially been living there for free until then. Maybe a better solution would be that he pays the loan and OP/DH pay him £100 a month if you’re going to be really mercenary about a rent agreement made 18 months ago, before a massive cost of living increases and before one of his parents is terminally ill and unable to work.

Why did he want to buy a house in the spring when he knew he would be unable to get a mortgage until the loan was paid off ? This is nothing to do with OP being unable to pay him back. If that was the real reason, there’s a simple solution - he pays the loan in lieu of the rent he should have been paying all along, until either it’s paid off or OP gets her insurance payout and pays him back. But instead he’s forcing the sale of OP’s home despite the fact that she’s terminally ill and undergoing chemo. That’s because the real reason is that OP’s illness has presented him with an opportunity to extricate himself from the agreement early. Because it’s just dawned on him and GF that their own home is not a possibility in the spring because the loan won’t be paid off by then.

The issue is he’s clearly now on the hook for the £400 loan repayment for his parents large house for the duration of the loan which could be upwards of 5 years making it incredibly difficult for him to get a reasonable mortgage, or plan for children and a future life.
It’s not that he “isn’t coping” with actually paying £400.

And if someone dies inheritance from house sales/pensions is not immediate.

It was at the ds’s insistence that they bought this house as opposed to a cheaper one
It was him who took out the loan to provide him with the amount they would need

I also think the relationship between mother and ds is broken and cannot be fixed and it was the sons behaviour that broke it

For all his private school education and finance qualifications he doesn’t seem that bright or that mature

He can’t see that screaming and shouting at his terminally ill mother is only going to have one result and that is being written out of the mothers will and yes he might get his £20k back but he will lose probably 10 times that amount as df will most likely not be able to forgive him and write him out of his will as well

Also he can’t see what everyone else would immediately pick up on and that is he has a gold digger gf

I agree with this.
You've given him too much power over you, he is immature and irresponsible and he is now exploiting this power.
I think your best option is to find some way to pay him off in full and then get him out and distant yourself for a while until things calm down- if you can ever forgive him to his appalling behavior😬

I don’t think most lenders, on seeing that a relatively high-earning couple in their 50s who have previously paid for private education and helped with university and whose children are now financially independent, would investigate too deeply on seeing a sum like that enter their account. Many people of that age have assets they can sell, investments they can check in, or just money in savings accounts. If they queried why it came from their son, it would be completely believable that he paid back a previous loan given to him by his parents, and unfortunately it seems like that’s how his mother is viewing this massive favour her son did for her.

I see that the son “defaulted” on his agreement to pay for his keep after his parents made him responsible for the repayments on the loan, however I think the fact that OP ever extracted an agreement for her son to pay room and board after he did her said massive favour is insane. His parents were meant to be repaying the loan, and letting him live there rent-free so he could aggressively save his whole income would be a reasonable amount of “interest” for his parents to pay for that in my opinion. There’s no excuse however, for treating your seriously ill mum so poorly, assuming all of what you’ve said is the truth and you promised from the beginning of your serious illness that as soon as your insurance money arrived/the house was sold he would be reimbursed, and he didn’t have to argue and fight with you to get a promise of repayment. If there have been constant struggles over this money, where you did the same things you’ve done on this thread, like bringing up how much food he eats and what you’ve spent on him as dependent child, I can see why he’s at the end of his tether with you and your husband.

@Completelyjo i find some of these responses baffling!

But it was the son who insisted they bought it

It was at the ds’s insistence that they bought this house as opposed to a cheaper one

The parents could have said no, mine would have

Any spare room to take in a lodge to cover the loan?

I suspect he is not the DS father and he is also a net recipent of the high earning younger wife, the £20k loan from the step son - which goes to the house he will soley inherit.....but I may be mistaken?

Why did the 22 year old son even know details of all the houses his parents were looking at?! Why were they saying “oh look at this house we are £20k short for. We’ve seen it and love it but don’t worry we’ll buy something cheaper.”

I can’t picture any reasonable parent accepting a loan from their barely adult child even if the child offered. It’s fucked up behaviour.

Yes the one the DS can vacate....

Ah, sorry @Strikeoutnow, I misunderstood your post, I get it now. I guess we all got a bit overheated with this thread :).

@batt3nb3rg agreed

I know it’s a horrible phrase but he’s being pussy-whipped.

I think fear of losing the girlfriend is where this nastiness is stemming from. He sounds desperate to keep her happy and she’s threatening to end the relationship if she doesn’t get her house. Maybe try explaining to him that this isn’t a healthy relationship? She doesn’t sound like a nice person at all, and he’s projecting her nasty demands onto you.

OP and her husband committed mortgage fraud, not the son, unless he was also in the room making declarations and signing agreements.

Either that or he’s trying to drive you to an early grave to inherit.

You could of course offer to disinherit him as a bargaining tool to get him to lay off. In that circumstance presumably he would stand to lose far more in the long term than he would gain from this in the short term. That might focus his mind.

@Yalta a 22 year old cannot insist that 2 people in their 50s/60s buy a particular house. They are far more experienced than him and they should have said no. They didn't, and that was their own decision.

For all his private school education and finance qualifications he doesn’t seem that bright or that mature

I don’t think many 23 yr olds are mature enough to preempt the financial implications of lending money to family. I mean the OP wasn’t.

I think at the point where the OP wasn’t ill though and she could manage the loan

tje fact that the husband isn’t on the deeds yet stands to inherit it all is also a factor - yet weirdly the OP is very judgmental of the older girlfriend who is doing the same to her son

either way the situation has changed so the house needs selling or some kind of lifetime mortgage taken out to protect the OP now and then the house gets sold when she no longer needs to live there due to needing care or dies

In fact OP why cant you do some kind of lifetime mortgage equity release

You could of course offer to disinherit him as a bargaining tool to get him to lay off. In that circumstance presumably he would stand to lose far more in the long term than he would gain from this in the short term. That might focus his mind.

Yes great advice 🤔