Ungrateful Siblings Want To Sell Our Family Ranch

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. My husband and I were gifted one-fourth of the ownership of a 680-acre ranch in Colorado, and the other three people who are his parents, or like parties, who are his parents. His uncle and his little brother would really like to sell it, and we would like to possibly keep it, but we do not have the ability to buy them out. How do we navigate this situation peacefully so that feelings are, I don't know if they're never going to be heard, but just there's peace in our family? Okay, so the land is worth what? How much is it worth? I am actually not sure, but it is on prime hunting land. I'm thinking over a million, but it's also part of a land trust or like, and so it's got a cabin on it, but it's also has hunting, it's like prime hunting. I can almost guarantee you it's worth way, way, way, way more than a million dollars. Well, if it's in a land trust, you're saying it can't be built on. It's in a wildlife trust. Yes. Okay, okay. It can't be developed. A conservation. Yeah, a conservation trust. Yeah, it's a conservation trust. So it's worth more than a million, but not much. Okay. And Grandpa is still alive. And he's already deeded it to everybody. Yes, and he did it that way, I think, to make it very difficult to sell. Um. My husband is really fundamental, and so he wants to keep it. But there's a cabin and... The question you asked was, how do we navigate this and keep the peace? Yeah. Well, to start with, the first thing you do is you and your husband write a letter to his grandfather of gratitude. For a one-fourth ownership and a beautiful piece of ground, okay? And then the second thing is, is that you respect other people's right to sell what they own. It's not yours. Okay, right. Let's pretend it was the next-door neighbor that put up a piece of ground for sale. 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. NMLS ID 1591. NMLS consumeraccess.org. Equal housing lender. You have no entitlement to that whatsoever. It's not yours. You can be sad that someone's going to build on it, but you could be sad the next door neighbor is selling it, but they don't have to sell it to you and they don't have to not sell it because you want it. So is there any problem with parceling this out and you guys take 150 acres or 175 acres? Truthfully, I am not sure. Sure. We keep having the idea, and it just goes around and around. I'm like, well, we could sell it and use the money for a vacation. So I don't know. That's a great question, though, that I can ask. If your husband wants to keep his fourth, parcel it out into fourths and deed that to your husband and let them sell off their other portion. Okay. Because you don't have the money to buy it, right? Yeah. Definitely not. Okay. And unless I'm wrong here, Dave, the other three can't sell without your husband's signature. Yeah, well, they can go to court, though, and they have the three quarters. I assume this is equal shares, right? Mm-hmm. So you have 25% of the vote. Okay. The 75% can outvote you, and if you don't go along with it, they'll go to court, and the court judge will make you sign it. Yeah, because you're in a partnership, and you're in a minority interest in a partnership. I'm sure there is no partnership documents. Grandpa wasn't that bright. I don't know. He might. He's been fairly successful business-wise. When did you learn about this? I'm only 26, and my husband is 27. We learned about it, I think, when he was probably 21, like in college. When was it dated? I'm unsure. Do you know what it was deeded to? Was it deeded to an LLC, a corporation, a partnership name, or to four individuals? I think probably four individuals is my guess. Well, by definition, her grandfather is not sophisticated then. Okay. Okay, so we can table that idea, because that's a mess. And unless those four individuals have written documentation on how... How this partnership is governed according to voting and so forth. And I'm guessing that partnership documentation is not in place because it doesn't sound like we're dealing with that. So anyway, the first thing is gratitude. The second thing is don't have entitlement. And then you can't be mad at the other parties for doing what they want to do with their stuff when you have gratitude and no entitlement. Yeah. It's sad. It's not what you would like to have happen, but you just hit the DNA lotteries, the only reason you got the 175 acres. You didn't do anything to earn it. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, what that does, when I put that in my heart, if I'm you, is it gives me a lot of peace towards the other people. The reason you get mad at the other people is if you feel entitled. I think there's not. Like in anger, I like the idea of if they could sell it and we could keep it, but I think my husband and I are willing to part if it was the point where everybody else outvoted us and we didn't want to be the one again. You're not holding them up if they sell 400 acres and you keep 175 or 180. You're one-fourth number of acres, and then they sell the other part. You just have a different neighbor than you had, and you've got 150 acres to hunt on. That's a lot. Or sell the whole thing, take some money, go do with it what you want to do with it. But either one's okay with me, but you ask a really good question. It's a great question. When you started this and it was, how can we do this? How can we navigate this and not cause problems? Okay. And so the not cause problems thing is we respect your right to sell. We don't want to sell. So let's talk about parceling it off. and how we can design the property line in such a way that you end up with some property you can actually sell. I don't want to take all the road frontage or something. We'll take our little share of the road frontage and we'll take, you know, let a surveyor go out there and divide 680 by four and we can lay this out and we'll keep our acreage and you guys sell the rest of it. And we understand, we wish it would stay in the family. We're kind of romantic about it. And they'll probably say, By parceling it out, we're all going to make less money because we're going to have less of a bigger chunk of land to sell. And you can say, yeah. And so I think the question underneath it is how do we do this and not have hard feelings? I don't know that you can do this because y'all want different things and hard feelings are okay, but let's keep them in their proper place. And like you said, let's treat each other with respect and kindness. They need to respect the fact that y'all don't want to sell and you respect the fact that they do want to sell. Well, if they feel grateful and not entitled, then they shouldn't have an issue with parceling it off. Sure. And if you feel grateful and not entitled, then you shouldn't have an issue with them selling their portion. You got 175 free acres of prime hunting land. I would take that today. Right? I would take it today. You don't want it? Sign me up. That's right. I'll go through the hassle of parceling it out. I promise you. Yeah. So, and I think also it's probably a good idea to put a valuation on this that's accurate. Yeah, get real numbers. Instead of this vague thing of, because what we do know from this conversation is 680 acres is not making it one more generation. Your kids, your brother-in-law's kids are not going to end up with 680 acres because somebody in this bunch is going to break this up. Yeah. So we're pretty sure this is not going to hang on since you don't have the money to buy them out and you don't. Then there you are, but you stuck your finger in the, in the air and you came up with a million dollars. Maybe it's only worth 600,000. Maybe it's worth 5 million. Who knows? Get some real numbers. They all know what you're dealing with here. Yeah. And it's really interesting to sit down, look at a piece of ground and start parsing it out. It's kind of interesting. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.