Joan is a grown-ass woman. It’s real nice if your parents can and do pay for your college but sometimes it doesn’t shake out that way. Someone she loves is suffering financially on her behalf. Removing that suffering would be a tremendous relief for the person she loves and, presumably, give her a good feeling.
And…goddamn, woman. Apparently ending this suffering for someone she loves WOULD NOT EVEN BE A BURDEN TO HER since she plans on refusing the money.
Too proud to accept $30k/year bequeathed to her but not too proud to help her father who had the best of intentions? Shouldn’t even be a question.
Fucking hell…having money sure does fuck up a family. Wow.
Since the thread title asked what I would do, I would let my dad off the hook and pay off the rest off my loan.
I would do this even if my dad was an absolute jerk. Maybe paying off the loan would get him to shut up about money and help him to move on with his life.
It would just feel weird not to do something like this.
They should have enough saved in 6 months to put a 10% DP on a $150,000 home. However the baby was just born, and their cars are 2001 and 2009, so that projection may or may not be accurate. To be clear, they’re not rolling in the dough, though they ironically don’t seem stressed about it at.
They ARE stressed over the dad, who seems to be getting more bitter as time goes by. I was hoping that this windfall might assuage this one sore spot should they just assume the loan. But to be honest, he has plenty of other complaints so who knows. He recently told the kids that they shouldn’t invite him to anything that his ex spouse is invited to as he’s suffering from PTSD. It’s been 10 years since the divorce. Sigh.
However, I have to admit that her Mom may not like if her gift goes back to a man who’s been accusing her of child abuse, and she may stop gifting the money if they do pay off dad. I hadn’t thought of that.
$15k to Joan and $15k to Joan’s husband. Max the mother can gift without tax implications.
FTR, Joan’s in laws recentky offered to gift them $30k towards a DP, which they also declined to accept. They reluctantly did acccept their used 2009 car, however.
Based on your updates, I’ll amend my opinion to Joan is not under a moral obligation to pay it off, but it still is the right thing to do. It’s a nice thing to do for someone she loves and is struggling, and it would remove one significant barrier in their relationship, even if it doesn’t fix everything.
And she should DEFINITELY not tell her mom if she does this.
As a guy who started college with the understanding that parents were paying and eventually had to shoulder the load myself, this is where I stand too.
As a thought experiment, let’s reverse the roles of mother and father. Joan’s father earns more money than her mother, her father cheats, the divorce happens, etc.
I say the less affluent parent should get a break… and the more affluent parent shouldn’t be told about it.
He took $5k out of her account to buy a plane ticket, then tried to claim it was okay, that she was the “greedy one”, because she had gotten so much cash from wedding gifts. Does he have $30k in debt under “student loans” for her because he took out $60k ten years ago and has been steadily paying it off, or does he have a ton of debt because he continues to make terrible financial decisions, rob Peter to pay Paul, etc.? How many times has he restructured, consolidated, and so on? He’s calling his debt “her fault”, but is it really? Or does he now just consider all his debt to be her student loan debt?
I don’t believe anything from someone who’d steal from their own kid.
Was the original debt 30k or a lot more than 30? Because if hes had a decade to pay off 30k and he’s never even started chipping away at the principal, that’s on him, not her.
How in the name of common sense can it be the “right” thing to do if there is no moral obligation? “Rightness” inherently stems from morality. Without morality–however that is defined–there is no conceivable basis whatsoever for deciding what is right and what is wrong.
Of course it can be the right thing to do without a moral imperative. Take a simple benefit - it will remove a point of friction in their relationship. You don’t need morals to say that a situation is better because of action you took.
Maybe it’s just a semantic difference, but I think many things can be the right thing to do without a moral obligation. An obligation to me suggests something much stronger than the “right thing to do.”
If I was Joan I would relieve Dad of his debt. I could not live with myself if I didn’t. That said, I wouldn’t judge Jane for not doing that, you gotta make your own decisions.
Dad sounds kinda bad with money. If I was Joan I’d pay the debt down (directly, not through Dad!) $15k the first year and again the second. Don’t mention it to Mom. If asked, the answer should only be, ‘we used it to pay down some loans.’
Young couple still gets a $15k windfall each year, Dad’s debt gets covered, Mom feels good about helping young couple. Everybody wins.
With an added $30k coming in every year, the young couple’s position, (even with new baby, and just getting out of school etc), is now secured it would seem.
I would lose a great deal of respect for anyone who would leave their Dad struggling in debt, and choose to use their windfall to give themselves a better launch into life. By all accounts their future looks bright, both are educated and secure enough in their futures to be contemplating a baby and a new house, just as they are graduating university. I don’t think I could prioritize a larger down payment on a house, over assisting my Dad with debt he’s struggling under, that was taken on to pay for my education.
I’m not comfortable with the idea that there’s any kind of moral obligation on the part of a child to pay off their parent’s divorce bills just because the fact of their birth made those bills larger. The fact that some parents choose to structure their divorce settlement with reference to their child’s education does not, IMO, loop the child into moral responsibility for the costs of the divorce. Joan’s father could presumably have made some other financial concession to his ex-wife in exchange for not being on the hook for Joan’s education as an adult, but he made a bet that it was in his interest to not do that. His regret is not Joan’s obligation.
If she chooses to give her father a very generous gift because she has the ability and he has a need, that would be very kind of her, but I hope that she would be doing so purely for herself, and that she’s not trying to buy a better relationship with her father. She can afford to give her father a very nice gift but she can’t afford to make him into a different person.
What the absolute fuck does this mean? If you’re talking about the parents paying for her college, then that was part of the divorce and offspring have exactly zero fuck-all to do with how the lawyers drew that part up.
Or were you referring to her father helping himself to several grand from his joint account with his daughter without saying anything?
Not to defend the dad for taking money, but to be clear, he only took $500, not $5000. Still, enough for them to be alarmed when they saw the withdrawal. They thought that they’d been a victim of identity theft, and were really embarrassed when the bank produced the check with the father’s name on it made out to “cash.”
The more I hear about Joan the more I dislike her. Refusing the money because of pride? It’s a fucking inheritance. (Yes, being passed through, but whatever.)
I agree that she isn’t under the obligation to pay off the loan, but it would be the right thing to do. And the arrangement should be solely between Joan and her father, and he should STFU about it.
Plus, my feeling is that even if Joan does the right thing, she should not expect her father to suddenly become a better person. People don’t just change that way. But it is decent of her to relieve him of the debt that he has struggled to keep up his end of the bargain on… but she shouldn’t expect a lot of gratitude.
Others have offered enough opinions about what she should do. I’ll just mention that no matter what she does with the money, it’s foolish to imagine that dad won’t find out that she got it, or that mom won’t find out if she gives some to dad. Secrets like that do not stay secret for long.
Yeah it seems like these people are all very much up in each others’ money business. I don’t think “pay off some loans” is going to make it very far with mom. More like “I paid off MY student loan debts with MY money because I’m almost 30 and I was sick of the whole thing.”