Hey there. My wife and I recently got married. We are both financially frugal people with decent paying jobs. We save our money religiously and use it to meet our financial goals, especially ones in the future for when we have kids.
My wife is DEEP in college debt. To the tune of about $200,000. She is starting her residency and we just got a bill in the mail for her private student loans. It’s ALOT.
Here’s the saving grace. When her grandfather passed away, he gave half of his home to my wife, and her sister. Her sister is older, and has been essentially making unilateral decisions regarding the home the moment she inherited her half. She did things like rennovate a kitchen, replace appliances, take over a room downstairs to be a work from home office, claim the master bedroom, and use the frog above the garage as her own personal storage space.
She did most of this while my wife was away in college 3 hours away. When my wife did move in, she was not given 50% or even 20% of the home to use for herself. She was relegated to a child’s bedroom and the shared upstairs bathroom.
When I met my wife, I took notice of this immediately. We discussed finances before getting married, and decided that since she would be moving out to live with me, it would be prudent for her sister to buy her out of the rest of the house’s equity.
We notified her sister last June. We explicitly told her that she had the entire summer to figure out the finances. She said she would need a few months and would update us. Within two months of that conversation, they decided to buy a newish car for her husband… *who had a work truck already*. Sister works from home so they have a car just sitting in the garage.
It’s been six months. And now that the student loan payments are coming in, we reached out to her sister once again, and informed her that she would have to buy her out and we needed to get the process started NOW.
Her sister is now trying to encourage my wife to just have a conversation "Between the two of them" because "It’s their business and not their husbands". I call bullshit. This effects both of us just as much. My wife feels exactly the same. We are a 100% unified front on this.
I won’t go into specifics, but her manner of texting has led us to consider just giving her the 30 days required by our state and then if she doesn’t have her shit together by then, forcing a sale through a partition suit.
If we are forced to do this, we will pursue rental income owed through exclusive use case law regarding shared homes. Which would give us approximately $15-20,000 more in equity. That’s substantial, and would essentially pay off our only car loan on top of wiping out my wife’s private loans entirely.
We aren’t trying to uproot their lives. But we have decided that it is in the cards if they don’t show some real progress towards rectifying this situation.
NTA. Though the title is misleading you aren’t forcing them to move you are asking to no longer subsidize their lifestyle
This. I would note though, that if SIL put money into renovations, that would give them additional equity as well. So you’ll need to have an evaluation done to see how much their renovations and your exclusive use payment changes the split. You may still end up 50/50 at that point. I would problably offer that first.
It may not give them equity if the decisions were made unilaterally without the approval of my wife. And if the sister cannot prove that the kitchen remodel was necessary or would even create more value for the home.
She also replaced appliances that worked perfectly fine with new appliances. Just to make it look nice. That doesn’t raise a home’s value past the cost of the new appliances.
But if they draw this out to the point where we need to hire a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars… we’re getting our money’s worth and will nickle and dime the everloving shit out of this entire process.
Get a lawyer, force the sale of the house.
If SIL wants to own the house 100%, they can get a mortgage to buy your half of the house from your wife at its current market value