When it comes to dealing with family, money issues can quickly cause fighting.
What happens when one sibling agrees to pay off their parent’s home and fix it up, but then the others accuse him of taking their inheritance?
That is what the couple in this story are facing, and it is ripping their family apart.
Read on for details.
AITAH to take over the family house and refusing to pay other siblings?
We lived as expats abroad where I met my husband , and a few years ago we decided to relocate to his home country in Europe.
He has a mother and three other siblings.
They had a family house where nobody lived for the last 2 years, prior to that one of his youngest siblings lived there rent free for 8 years.
His mother lives with her partner now, so everyone has their own houses now.
The house in question was the property of their father who passed away 10 years ago.
That is a tough situation.
They could not register heritage because the house and land accumulated a huge debt for not paying taxes for years, it was equal pretty much to the value of the house.
Nobody was interested to pay and save this house, so upon the death of the mother the house would be just gone to auction.
That’s great!
Now when we came, my husband with the lawyers found a way to reduce the debt by refusing the heritage.
So all the siblings including my husband refused legally the heritage, their mother became a sole heir.
Due to her being an old woman with low income, the debts were reduced to just the principal amount without the accumulated interest, and now the debts were about 20% of the market value of the house.
Again my husband asked the siblings who wanted to share the cost of saving the house by paying the debts and registration fees.
Nobody wanted or didn’t have money for it.
Sounds like it worked out for everyone.
So, then we decided instead of buying a random house, we can pay the debts and renovate the family one.
It needed complete renovation.
The mother was over the moon that one of the children actually wants the house and it would not be gone to auction after her death.
When we paid the debts and the lawyers, the mother signed the papers to handover the ownership of the house to us.
Oh, of course they did.
Now when we renovated the house and it all looks nice and not falling apart any more, the family drama started as if we forced the mother to give the house to us for free.
All siblings are asking us to pay them “their share”.
We are at the breaking point of telling them that if they want, they can first compensate us what we spent for paying debts and lawyers, and then we put the house on sale and walk away.
Nope, they just want us to pay them.
That is not fair at all.
I guess they hoped we would pay the debts for the house to be registered under their mother’s name, and then everyone would receive heritage upon her death.
All three siblings went no contact with us, trash talking to the extended family how we robbed them.
We are still in contact with his mother but she is heartbroken that the family is broken now, before we always had sweet family reunions.
They all made her feeling guilty and accuse of favouritism.
Were we wrong for taking over the house and refusing to pay other siblings?
AITA?
That is such a difficult situation, I would not want to have to deal with it.
Let’s see what the people in the comments think.
Exactly, no reason to fight about this!
It is sad for the mom, I’m sure.
This is a non-issue legally, even if it is difficult.
This comment says the siblings are just trying to get something they don’t deserve.
Yup, document everything!
These kids need to grow up and move on.
Nothing is free!
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.