Published on Realtor.com
By Julie Taylor, September 14th, 2024
If you and your siblings are on track to one day inherit your parents’ home, take heed of this cautionary tale.
In a Reddit thread, a poster recounts how when his mom died in 2018, she left him and his two siblings her house. “My siblings wanted to sell the house and split the money,” the anonymous poster says. “I wanted to keep the house. I asked them if I could buy them out.” They agreed. So the siblings got the property appraised, and he paid them both a third of the home’s current value. His brother spent his share on sports cars, nights out, and exotic vacations; his sister splurged on a boat.
In 2023, the man and his wife decided to move to be closer to her family, and they sold the house. By then, the price of the home had tripled. “Now, both of my siblings think that I owe it to them to split the profit I made,” he writes. “This has become really toxic and most of my family is on their side. My mom’s sister says it would have broken her heart to see her kids fight like this and I should split the money with my siblings. My dad’s sister thinks I should buy them off so they shut up.”
Does this man owe his siblings anything more? We asked the experts for their take on the situation.
Unfortunately, this type of dispute is not uncommon. Parents can help their children in advance by drawing up a will and addressing this issue within their estate-planning documents. They can even state in their will that if one of their children buys another out —at fair market value— that transaction is final and the other siblings cannot go after future gains, after the fact.
