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It’s interesting how much money influences familial relationships.

Every family dynamic is different, of course, but we sure do seem to see a lot of stories about how things get complicated between family members when money is involved.

In today’s story, a woman explained how things have become a bit testy because of some financial decisions she has to make in regard to her parents.

Read on and see what you think about her situation.

AITA for offering to buy my parents a home instead of just giving them the money?

“My husband and I live in the Great Lakes region.

We are both professionals, and we have children in high-school/college. We’ve done reasonably well and have built up significant savings, but we’re definitely not wealthy enough that $300,000 is money we can just give away.

My parents are in a bad financial situation. They own a house but are heavily in debt on it, so they live in the basement and rent out the main floor.

She’s not buying it…

They believe they have about $400,000 in equity. We think they’re being wildly optimistic. They have a large mortgage with significant penalties, a HELOC, and property values have fallen. We think they’d be lucky to walk away with $200,000, possibly much less.

Earlier this year they found an apartment they liked for around $300,000 and asked us to co-sign a loan to buy it. We refused because of their financial history.

This sounds like a good idea.

Instead, we offered to buy the apartment ourselves and let them live there for a fraction of market rent. They loved the idea. We just needed several months to arrange our finances.

This is still a major commitment for us. We have children and our own retirement to fund. The reason we can justify spending $300,000 is that we’d own the property.

We’d essentially be moving part of our retirement savings into real estate while giving my parents secure, affordable housing. Eventually we could sell it to fund our retirement.

We finally got everything arranged and told them we were ready.

Oh, boy…

Now they’ve decided the apartment they wanted six months ago is too small and they “couldn’t possibly live there.” Instead, they’ve found a much more expensive condo they like. The condo fees alone are over $1,100/month.

They insist they can afford it because they’re counting on getting $400,000 from their house.

The problem is that they now seem to think the money we were prepared to spend buying an apartment is essentially their $300,000.

Their position is that if we’re willing to spend that much helping them, why not just give them the money so they can combine it with their equity and buy what they actually want?

I can see how our position might seem controlling: “We’ll spend $300,000 helping you, but only if we own the property.”

Bingo!

But to us there’s an enormous difference between investing $300,000 in an asset we own and simply giving away $300,000 of our family’s savings.

Our offer still stands: we’ll buy a reasonable apartment around the original price, own it, and let them live there very cheaply. If they want the expensive condo instead, that’s their choice, but we’re not giving them the $300,000.

AITA for offering to buy my parents a home but refusing to just give them the money?”

Let’s see what readers had to say about this.

This individual weighed in.

This reader said she’s NTA.

Another individual agreed.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a sister who feels badly about unknowingly encouraging her younger brother to play with bullies.

And this reader spoke up.

I personally don’t think she’s doing anything wrong…

At all!

In fact, I think her parents are being a bit pushy…

Her parents seem like a real handful…