Argument over a £1

[ForGentleBeaker]

Years ago my best friend and her husband ran into severe financial difficulties and were going to lose their home. I was pregnant, hormonal, emotional, my head was all over the place, and I desperately wanted to help them.
At that time I had no money but we owned a property in an absolute rundown part of London - my husband purchased it with a gift from his parents and I was added to the deeds after we were married.
Long story short, my attempt to help my friend went awry, and my husband had to sell the property. The property is worth an absolute fortune now. The whole area has undergone gentrification, and we missed out on the crazy London property boom.

My husband doesn't ever want to discuss and I had thought we had put it behind us. I have immense guilt.

Last week, whilst grocery shopping with him, I exchange a premium product for a store brand, and he went ballistic. He started mumbling about why I was saving pennies when I happlynlissed away so much trying to help my friend.

In the car, I was called a jumped up bitch, and he spent the journey home ranting at me for making him sell the property; being a SAHM when the children were younger; spending money; and diminishing his role and magnifying mine.

He is refusing to speak to me because he doesnt want to listen to the verbal diarrhea coming out of my mouth - his words.

I don't know where we go from here. We have 3 children, and he is an excellent father, and husband, till now. It seems he has been harbouring this resent towards me but there is nothing I can do.

Not even comparable- that was inheritance, earned money likely by his parents/gparents who had to earn and save every single penny of it and pay tax on it- it was already realized inheritance, what the potential was- for him to grow it for his children. Even now the property could be rented out so every month the family would have a bit of side income.

This scenario would make more sense than the selling off of a property to pay off an unsecured personal loan.

Be honest, do you believe if your H was more empathetic of your friends situations that you and he could have come up with a solution that wasn’t so drastic as the one you took? Reading between the Ines of your posts, I think neither you or your H truly believes that the other sees the struggles of the other. Of course your argument wasn’t over a £1, it was over a unilateral decision that you took against his advice that cost him a lot of money. The ‘baby brain’ dismissiveness of your action, also suggests a distancing of your responsibility.

Can this be fixed, god only knows but you can’t continue like this. Resentment left unchecked leads to toxicity and that’s where you are now. You said you had individual therapy, did you ever have couples counselling?

In your shoes, I would say to your H that if he can’t forgive you then you understand because what you did was incredibly stupid and hurtful. However, you can’t change the past and all you can do is to make more responsible choices moving forward. Staying in a relationship that has become toxic is in nobody’s best interest especially children’s. You want your marriage to succeed but it can’t continue like this.

OP hasn’t really given much detail of the family’s wider financial situation at the time nor has she stated how much she borrowed, so what would have happened is speculative, really. If it was a debt of tens of thousands, and they had no leeway in the family budget to pay a reasonable monthly payment, a lender is unlikely to accept a token £50 a month on such a high debt while there’s a saleable asset available. Taking a decision to avoid that process may well have been the most sensible one at the time.

The bank couldn't go straight for the house as it was an unsecured loan. This is how I have seen things pan out:

a: Bank takes court action after failure to make monthly payments on loan/interest (after possibly using a collection agency first);

b: Court grants judgment in favour of bank. Orders OP to repay the judgment sum, comprising principal debt, accruing interest, penalty fees and court costs;

c: OP defaults on court ordered payments;

d: Bank then has to serve a Statutory Demand, which is the first step in bankruptcy proceedings. Failure to respond to the statutory demand triggers bankruptcy action. Bankruptcy granted.

e: Trustee in Bankruptcy now in charge of all the OP's assets. Trustee can apply to sever the tenancies of any jointly owned property and get an order for sale over them to pay off the OP's debt (the DH will retain his share of the proceeds of sale, but lose the real estate). Here's the kicker. The OP and the DH not only jointly own the London property but also a family home with a mortgage on it. The OP's bankruptcy has triggered the default clause in the mortgage (even if the DH had been paying it, it's still a breach of the mortgage terms by the OP resulting in the termination of the mortgage). The mortgagee is the secure creditor in this scenario, so as a secure creditor, they will get first dibs on any monies received by the Trustee in Bankruptcy by the sale of the joint assets. The bank that gave the loan to OP might actually get nothing. But OP and DH lose both their properties and any other joint owned assets the Trustee can convert to pay of OP's debtors.

In the face of potential bankruptcy triggering the loss of the family home, the OP and DH simply decide, prior to the matter getting to court (point a), to do a quick "fire sale" of the London property to pay off the debt and put an end to the problem as quickly as possible.

But he also underestimated how much the property value would go up. That’s his mistake as well. Especially as it was his property to begin with, he should have considered it more thoroughly before selling. There might have been another option at the time to deal with the loan rather than sell the house. Are you sure he is not using this misfortune as an excuse to blame you for something and have that power over you?

If he didn't go along with your magnanimous gesture at the time then I'm not surprised he's angry and I would almost be 100% sure that the verbals are two way! Essentially, you gave his money to your feckless friend.

You don’t take out such a huge loan on behalf of friends who are facing financial issues which means their credit and finances are already so bad that they can’t get the loans themselves.

Exactly. It was incredibly foolish, and you went against your DH's very sensible advice. Yet he's the one who's had to pay the price.

Honestly, in his place I'd have left you.

Your DH is an fool a) for not divorcing you at the time b) for not going after your friend to try and reclaim the money c) for allowing his resentment to build and not telling you to get a job.
I think you are lucky he only called you a fucking bitch, I would have gone further.
The only way you sercured a personal loan that he then he had to sell - HIS childrens home -to bail you out was that you secrued that loan against a house that on paper was 50% yours BUT morally was not yours to gamble with.
What are you doing to fix this, being a SAHM is in no way paying back this huge mistake,is bullshit, a lazy excuse and fucking rude to us woman who didn't get a choice and had to put our children in day care, nursery or other paid care.
I also hope you apaid for your own therapy. You were pregnant not brain dead when you completly disregarded his choice and lent HIS money to your grifter of a friend.

TBF to you DH he didn’t want you take out the loan and give your friends, he is right that given the level of difficulties they were in, they were unlikely to pay it back.
He came to your rescue when you couldn’t afford to pay the bank either, despite you going against his wishes.
He is now worried about money/job because of pressures in the last 6 months and it sounds like this has built up and he has unleashed all his resentment etc that he is feeling ‘but for the fact you did this years ago, I wouldn’t have to be so worried now’
I think it would take a borderline saint to forgive and forget especially after he expressly asked you not to take out the loan for your friends.
That being said if he has said he has forgiven you in the past then he needs to truly forgive you and not mention it again.
Many people would have left you to sort out the mess on your own when it happened, especially if the loan wasn’t secured on anything and he didn’t consent to it.
I can see why he’s harbouring such ill feeling and sometimes being sorry just doesn’t make everything right again.

Still not East London

Entirely possible! I responded like this to another similar thread recently.

The trouble is that I once came across a thread by someone I soon realised I knew. (Thread now long deleted.) The things she was describing were blood-curdlingly tragic and new twists were cropping up with every new update from her. It all sounded completely fake and made up, just really unreal. But it wasn’t. And that’s the trouble with MN. You just never know.

You presume wrong, I’m a working mum. I have the upmost respect for SAHM’s though. I couldn’t do it! They are often under appreciated.

Glad you aren’t abusing your husband (yet!)

There must have been some money left over after the selling of the house though, which could have been reinvested.

Well while I don’t always agree with this
your husband was correct in with your friend

sounds like he’s held a lot of resentment to the fact that your desire to help a friend cost him a huge amount of money

to be honest I don’t blame him and I would have probably called you a damm site worse
i think I would have divorced you
you lent a friend money and you had to sell his house / inheritance to pay back what you borrowed

Okay, so… from this info, I’m guessing you’ve cost your husband upwards of a million pounds. Other than trying to win an Omaze house or the Euromillions or something, I really don’t know how you’d ever be able to rectify this. This kind of thing can drive you crazy in and of itself; never mind when you have money worries in the midst of a cost of living crisis and kids to support.

It’s a terrible situation and there isn’t really anything anyone can say to make you feel any better. Don’t beat yourself up about it anymore, though. What’s done is done and it can’t be changed.Your husband’s clearly not over it but he needs to let it go and move on, with or without you, before it starts to negatively impact his health.

Oh I totally agree.
By my own admission, I’m often a bit naive and too trusting but unfortunately, MN has made me way more wary these days!
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Like I said, I’m procrastinating right now because I can’t be arsed to do my weekly menu planning but it wouldn’t occur to me to start a bogus thread to entertain myself! I appreciate though that some people are just literally stuck in an absolute shit storm of a situation and it’s sad that bogus threads make people doubt the genuine people.

Nah it’s a lot of bollocks or there’s a massive amount of info missing.
Who walks into a bank and gets a massive unsecured loan equal to the value of a property?
Even if they did sell, what happened to the rest of the proceeds?

I don’t think you have understood or accepted the full extent of what you did OP. This was a gift from his parents, and you made him sacrifice it for nothing. And you seem to have done nothing to restore the loss.

I really hope the friend is not in your life now. Because if they are, and you aren’t actively pursuing the debt, you have made them more important than your DH. No wonder he’s lashing out.

I can’t believe your husband is still with you @ForGentleBeaker , he must be a saint after he was forced to sell his London property to mop up your mistakes.

Did you have any plans to repay the loan yourself if your friend defaulted ? Or did you expect your friend in financial difficulty to pay you back ?

She didn’t say the loan was equal to the value of the property.

OP I want to divorce you and I'm not even married to you.

Your vagueness and passive attitude is infuriating.

This was an investment property / BTL property that he had purchased, and I was added to the deeds. He sold it he didnt have any savings as he'd invested everything in this BTL.

Neither did I.
How much unsecured loan do you think she would be able to attain?
How much do you think a property, even in a rundown part of London would have been valued at the time?
If the property had to be sold what happened to the remainder?

Same!