Our Family Wants To Gift Us A House (With Strings Attached)

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I have concerns about a potential money gift for a down payment from my father-in-law and I feel that there are strings attached. Okay, how long y'all been married? We've been married about three years. And how much is the gift? Two hundred thousand dollars. And what are the strings? Well, it's for a house and initially I heard through secondary conversation that my father-in-law wanted to have only his name on the title and my wife and I would be paying the mortgage and he would put the home in a trust. That was the initial plan. Now the plan is to, after the purchase, work out adding his name to the title so he can, again, put this in a trust. I'll pass. Thank you for your offer. We love you. No, absolutely not. I don't have concerns. I have warning flags and pyrotechnics going off. Is he using you guys as tenants to pay his mortgage on a new property? No, this guy's a control freak and he's going to be in the investment real estate business. That's not a gift. He's wanting to partner with you. Yeah, here's some more details to it. So my wife and I, we have one child from my previous relationship. We have a two-year-old son together and we have another one coming by the end of this year. My wife is very eager to get into a place with more space for the family because we are in a condo that she owns. Don't be eager enough to be stupid. This is stupid. Don't do it. I'm dead serious. You're going to regret this. You know, I hear you and I try to have talks with this family and a lot of the conversations happen without my presence. Well, I'm not signing. Okay, you guys don't get to do a deal without me. I'm the daddy. This is my kid, my wife. Y'all got confused about boundaries here. You enter and sit at my kitchen table. You talk to me. This guy's dangerous, man. He doesn't mean to be probably. He's probably actually a fairly calm person, but he's manipulative as hell. Does your wife find this strange too? No, it's her daddy. She's like, this is great. She grew up with this crap. She just sees the shiny house. So she's going, hey, get us into a house. Who cares? Daddy's going to get me a house. That's all she heard. Right? Basically. Yeah. I'm sorry, honey. You got it. The first thing I'm going to do if I'm in your shoes is that you guys need to get the wheels back on your marriage to where the two of you are planning your life. Not her daddy's I agree. And so I think that may be the, I'm going to start the conversation with my wife and say, all right, the first thing is, is we have to be in agreement about who we're going to be as a couple and how we're going to handle, um, discussions about things that matter in our lives. And that isn't you go over and have these discussions with your dad, and then you come back and tell me what I'm going to do. That's not going to work. I'm not going to do that. Don't wait for the interest rate to be perfect before buying or refinancing a home. Talk to Churchill mortgage, smart buyers, buy the home they can afford now, and then refinance later. If rates improve, Churchill helps you make decisions with confidence instead of guessing. And Churchill mortgage has a webpage with special offers just for our audience. Go to churchillmortgage.com slash Ramsey offer. This is a paid advertisement in MLS ID 1 5 9 1 in the MLS consumer access.org equal housing lender. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to operate my marriage that way. And I'm not signing up for this deal. So we're just going to have to tell your dad, no. And you and I probably need to sit down after three years and a new baby on the way and have a reset, uh, with a good marriage counselor. And it doesn't mean our marriage is in trouble, but when you go to a marriage counselor, it's like going to a coach teaching you how to do marriage. It's a teacher. You're hiring an outside personal trainer for your, for your marriage. And you guys got a little work to do on that because your bound, her boundaries are screwed up. Okay. So let me back up and tell you how I got there. Cause this is I'm being pretty in your face, but, um, I'm scared for you. That's why I'm doing that. It's bothering. So, um, the first thing that bothers me more than anything else is the side discussions that don't involve you. And then these things are decided and they have, uh, she, she wants something. She wants a new home and she's seeing a way to get it. So what's going to end up happening is if we don't get back on the same page, you're going to be the evil person that kept her from getting a home while her daddy tried to help her. And this is a wedge that I do not want driven into your marriage. That's what's coming. I'm afraid we're there. Yeah. As soon as you say no. Yeah. And then the second thing that's bad is everything this guy's describing, they called it a gift and this is no more gift than fly to the moon. He wants to own some real estate that his kid lives in and his grandkid lives in. So he can control the situation. That's not a gift. It's like if he had a rental house and y'all moved into it, that's what he's proposing. You've got no control in this scenario and know your name is not going to be on the title of my home period. Even if he's the sweetest guy in the world and he's not. And even if he promises, well, one day it'll be yours. I'm sorry. Go ahead, David. Yeah. I was just asking about the legalities because he's already written a letter that says this is a gift. Well, but it's not because of the way he's structuring it. I want my name on the title and I want it into a trust and I want it transferred to my name after so time. And no, but the mortgage is not going to be on anything. A gift is you give us $200,000 and we buy a house. That's a gift. This is that is not what he's proposing. So he is confused about the definition of the word. And I'm telling you, man, the fact that he went to your daughter and left you out of the discussion is bad chemistry. That tells me that if you get in this deal, it's going to be bad to be really bad. That's what this tells me. It's not just a little bad. The fact that he's doing this end run thing and man. So, so the best advice we ever got when, as parents of grown children was that, uh, especially with two daughters, the first two going out the door, Daniel was fairly low drama still is. Yeah. And Rachel and Denise, I mean, when they left home, Daniel was still home. We thought we were empty nesters. We didn't even know he was there because the drama dropped like 98% when the two girls left. Right. So the best advice I ever got as a dad of a daughter, which is where this guy is, is this father trying to give this money is that when you walk her down the aisle, you're done. You got to step back because you have been the man in her life, her whole life. And you've got to step back or her husband can never take the position of being the primary man in her life as long as she can run to daddy. And so like when Rachel got married, I told Winston, I said, this one's your problem. Oh man. I literally said that and his dad was sitting there. His dad busted out laughing. This one, this problem is now yours. My man, I'm going to be cheering for you. I'll be, I'll throw food over the fence. I'll be cheering for you, but this one's your problem. That's quite the opposite of I'm going to stay involved. And without my son-in-law's involvement on how I want to end up owning the house that they live in. It's a lack of respect. It's undermining the husband, this triangulation and making him the bad guy. Hey babe, I wanted to get you that home you wanted, but you know, your husband, David, he just wouldn't do it. So I don't like any, any, it's like if you bought me a car, but it's in your name and I have to make the payment and I go, thanks Dave. That's crazy. You don't, you don't feel gifted. I do not feel gifted out. I'm just driving Dave's car while I'm paying his payment. I don't love the good news is it'd be a real car. No batteries involved. I got to go to a gas station. That's a whole thing. No, thank you. You don't have to plug this one in George. I want to like an easy bake oven situation. I don't want to be out here trying to make my own. See, that's what happens when you violate boundaries. You don't get to make choices anymore. That's how it works. See? Well, forget it. I was going to get you a nice Christmas gift. You lost your power. No pun intended. Barbie Jeep for Christmas for you. You can charge it up. David, please, honey, sit down with a good marriage coach and you guys work on how to deal with things in your marriage. And that coach can teach you how to gently set your father-in-law to the side. And he's not going to like it because he's not used to not, he's not used to being told he's not important. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.