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.

What Aspargar said.

I don’t see how your adult children don’t know you are looking at houses

Do you keep adult children in the dark over your plans to move.

From what has been described I think the place they bought was probably under priced / a good deal for the money and ds thought he could help them out and it had space for him to move in and he could save money on rent and living expenses

Except illness occurred and the family are one salary down. And he probably has just realised that this loan that might pay off in the long term, in the short term he has tied himself down to years of loan repayments.

Now the gf is putting pressure on him to buy her a house but as I presume he has no savings (otherwise he wouldn’t have taken out a £20k loan for the £20k shortfall) and now has only debt and she hasn’t a pot to piss in then I don’t see how promising her a house in a short time frame is going to magically appear.

Even without the loan.

I am wondering where his salary is actually going and wondering if there are other things going on because if you are earning £4k + per month and are only paying out £400 for a loan and a car’s running costs, where is the rest going

I wonder if this guy has a gambling habit to cover (that would hint at why he promised a house in the ridiculously short time frame.) probably thought he was only one big win away from a deposit

And that is why he is screaming at his terminally ill mum and making up spreadsheets about how much someone else owes him

Wonder what the spreadsheet would look like if he made one that showed where he spent his money

He and his sister inherit her pension. @Mirabai the update says the below.

“Yes my DH is entitled to half my house and pension if he wanted to divorce me. Why would he do that if he gets the lot when I die?”

I agree!

OP, you owe your son £20k, you fantastic pay it back, and he's the bad guy?! I'm not surprised he's furious!! I'd never dream of lending my parents that much money, but if I did, and then found they couldn't pay it back, I'd be as angry as he is.

I wonder if this guy has a gambling habit to cover (that would hint at why he promised a house in the ridiculously short time frame.) probably thought he was only one big win away from a deposit

And this is why people think MNs is full of crazies, they love to leap!

@Tiredtrudy out of interest, how much does the younger DC who lives at home whilst at Uni pay per month to live there?

Will the DH then leave it to the children? OP has been vague with where her husband is in all of this. Apparently the house is hers? Is the DH not contributing?

Wonder what the spreadsheet would look like if he made one that showed where he spent his money

Even if he spends it all on drugs it’s not relevant to the loan agreement.

Ok I understand him being angry but his behaviour isn't on.

He was meant to pay you £300 per month, you were meant to pay him £400 per month. Therefore there is £100 per month outstanding from you to him. Can you/DH afford to pay him this £100 per month? It sounds to me as though he was never intending to pay the £300 to you but still accept the £400.

You need to sit down with him and from the start, tell him you won't listen to abuse. Outline the £100 per month surplus. Suggest that he can give you the £300 per month as agreed on the 1st of every month and you and DH will give him the £400 per month on the 2nd of every month. That way, you only need to find £100.

I have read the thread but I was distracted. If you haven't already, see about DLA/PIP. Citizens advice can help.

A gambling habit? That's a ginormous unsubstantiated leap.
He isn't the one losing large sums of money to "fraudulent companies" and buying houses he can't afford is he?

He is abusing you and your husband, you need to kick him out ASAP for your own health. Do not sell your house and don’t let him bully you in to it.
It’s his problem if he doesn’t want to join in the parties, he’s the one that misses out. He promised his GF a house well again that’s his problem. I get you borrowed money off him but he has had more than enough from you to cover what was borrowed.
Our son is 20 and is doing an apprenticeship and pays us £350 a month which is a quarter of his wages which is what I was told was the going rate. Your son is getting away with acting like a brat and you need to stand up for yourself.

I am really sorry that you are so ill.

Stepping back from this for a moment though, before you were ill, you asked your 23 year old son to sub you £20k to buy a house which you couldn’t afford and couldn’t raise the mortgage for because your husband is in his 60’s (and I assume you are at least in your 50’s given the age of your children). That was an extraordinary burden to put on someone who was just starting out in adult life.

It’s not your fault that as the high earner you became catastrophically ill but it’s not for your son to financially support you through this. That’s on your husband, your insurance arrangements/pensions and if you can’t afford to pay all your outgoings (which include the repayment of your loan to your son) then you need to be making arrangements to solve this - whether that’s by your husband working extra hours or getting a better paid job, or by selling up and moving to a house you can afford after all debts are settled.

Your son is putting you under tremendous pressure at the moment for sure. How long has this situation been drifting with him telling you what he needs and you fobbing him off before it got to this point?

From your son’s perspective, he wants to start his own independent life (and potentially have a family of his own) with his long term partner in her 30’s. He had structured his finances to be able to buy his own property next year and your circumstances are blocking that. And if you don’t resolve the situation relatively quickly may mean he loses his partner or they lose the opportunity to start a family together. That’s not a price he should be paying for your illness sadly.

Colourbluecolourpurple - that's not sensible. On Op's record he wouldn't get that money back the next day

That your son's girlfriend expected a house at Christmas.
I've told you why it couldn't be possible.
You may have corrected it later, too bad it wasn't in your OP. Too many add ons according to poster opinions.

Seems I was right that your son had his eye on his inheritance already. Hope none of you lied on the mortgage application.

Why didn't you tell the whole, true story in your opening post? Don't expect others to guess.
I haven't read your further posts as they were too long coming, but see from others that your son is in finance.
Doubly hopeful he didn't lie on an application then or he won't have a job either.

He is abusing you and your husband, you need to kick him out ASAP for your own health. Do not sell your house and don’t let him bully you in to it.
It’s his problem if he doesn’t want to join in the parties, he’s the one that misses out. He promised his GF a house well again that’s his problem. I get you borrowed money off him but he has had more than enough from you to cover what was borrowed.

So you are saying the son shouldn’t be paid back for the loan?

If he’s done them the astronomical favour of taking out tens of thousands in credit to enable them to buy the house after they came up short (presumably from the sale of a previous property for those querying how much equity they would have on this newly purchased house), then it hardly seems batshit to me. Things have changed with OP’s illness, but when they were financially stable, the only way this situation would have been fair to the son would have been if they were agreeing to absorb his costs so he got substantive benefit out of the arrangement.

He took out the loan after persuading OP and her DH to buy the house. OP said they would settle for something cheaper but he talked them into it - or did you miss that bit ? Did you also miss that he agreed to pay £300 a month rent, and has never paid it ?

There will be a loan repayment period, and given that DS won’t be able to get a mortgage of his own until the loan is paid I can only assume that the agreement was for him to live with OP for the duration of that agreement.

So after OP gets a cancer diagnosis, things go awry because she is unable to earn. Instead of DS realising the gravity of the situation with his mum’s health, and recognising that the situation can easily be redressed by him paying the rent he’s so far avoided in the form of the £400 loan payment until such time as the loan is paid off, or OP gets her payout and repays it, he throws a strop and forces the sale of the house.

The reason for this is clear, when you discover that he and GF were planning to buy a house of their own in the spring. Why were they planning for that when DS still had the loan to pay off ? He was in finance - he must have known the impact of the loan on his own credit rating. GF has likely given him an ultimatum - find a way out of the loan agreement or I’ll walk.

So OP’s illness and subsequent inability to pay have presented the opportunity they were looking for. If DS had the slightest concern for his mothers’ situation he wouldn’t be forcing her to sell her home while she’s going through chemotherapy and trying to come to terms with a terminal diagnosis. He would realise there’s a viable alternative - paying the rent he agreed to in the form of the loan payment. But this isn’t what he wants. He now wants his own home and he can’t have that until the loan is paid, so he strops his way into forcing the house sale and continues to abuse his parents. That’s what’s going to do irreparable damage to the future relationship with their son. His priorities have changed and he doesn’t want to be honest about that because he knows how it will look.

That will.taje akmiat 10 years to pay back, I can see why your mum's annoyed at you.

He took out the loan after persuading OP and her DH to buy the house.

Why does the OP and DH not have an agency in being forced to accept the loan? I find it bizarre that so many want to absolve her of any responsibility, is it just because she now has cancer?

I agree with this. It’s a really horrible thing that you have fallen unexpectedly ill. However, you are also minimising the burden you have put on your child. You must immediately do what it takes to pay off his loan and ask him to leave the house.

Did you also miss that he agreed to pay £300 a month rent, and has never paid it ?

Did you miss the bit where the OP agreed to pay the monthly repayments and stoped after about 3k?

"trapped" by paying £400 a month instead of rent and lodging, when earning over 4k a month at 25? I think he'll survive.

He is an entitled brat.

@bugaloo77 you comment is stupid. He's in his early 20s and has a debt of 20,000 GBP in his name because of his parents. Why in the world would he pay his parents rent when he's also now lumped with paying the loan??? He was never meant to pay that off that was OPs responsibility as per THEIR agreement. He's now paying 100 GBP more per month. Really wish people used some critical thinking..

No - why wouldn’t he ? But why the need to sell the house to cover it ? He could simply have seen the £400 repayment as the rent he should have been paying all along, and nothing would change. He continues paying and living rent free until such time as the loan is paid or OP gets her payout. The problem is he promised his GF a house in the spring, which is impossible because he still has the loan. So now he has new priorities. That’s why he’s forcing the house sale - nothing to do with OP’s inability to repay - there was a viable alternative to that, but the realisation that he wouldn’t get a mortgage while he had the loan changed all that.

@Rosscameasdoody there are other viable alternatives such as equity release or lifetime mortgage not one that ties him down to living with them and putting his life on hold.

it is sad that the situation has changed but the option to keep him tied to the loan for me isn’t a viable option either

no one should have been persuaded or try to persuade into a situation that keeps him tied to them and the house life changes